His reading was of a highly specialized nature. He studied
everything that he could find about the oil fields of America.

The stigma of his disgrace continued to raise its head. One of the
concrete workers was married to the sister of the woman from whom he
rented his room. The quiet, upstanding man who never complained or asked
any privileges had been a favorite of hers, but she was a timid,
conventional soul. Visions of her roomers departing in a flock when they
found out about the man in the second floor back began to haunt her
dreams. Perhaps he might rob them all at night. In a moment of nerve
tension, summoning all her courage, she asked the killer from the cattle
country if he would mind leaving.

He smiled grimly and began to pack. For several days he had seen it
coming. When he left, the expressman took his trunk to the station. The
ticket which Sanders bought showed Malapi as his destination.

CHAPTER XVI

DAVE MEETS TWO FRIENDS AND A FOE

In the early morning Dave turned to rest his cramped limbs. He was in a
day coach, and his sleep through the night had been broken. The light
coming from the window woke him. He looked out on the opalescent dawn
of the desert, and his blood quickened at sight of the enchanted mesa.
To him came that joyous thrill of one who comes home to his own after
years of exile.

Presently he saw the silvery sheen of the mesquite when the sun is
streaming westward. Dust eddies whirled across the barranca. The prickly
pear and the palo verde flashed past, green splashes against a background
of drab. The pudgy creosote, the buffalo grass, the undulation of sand
hills were an old story, but to-day his eyes devoured them hungrily. The
wonderful effect of space and light, the cloud skeins drawn out as by
some invisible hand, the brown ribbon of road that wandered over the
hill: they brought to him an emotion poignant and surprising.

The train slid into a narrow valley bounded by hills freakishly eroded to
fantastic shapes. Pinon trees fled to the rear. A sheep corral fenced
with brush and twisted roots, in which were long, shallow feed troughs
and flat-roofed sheds, leaped out of nowhere, was for a few moments, and
vanished like a scene in a moving picture. A dim, gray mass of color on a
hillside was agitated like a sea wave. It was a flock of sheep moving
toward the corral. For an instant Dave caught a glimpse of a dog circling
the huddled pack; then dog and sheep were out