y iniquitous and malignant.

McTeague had told himself that the heat upon the lower slopes of the
Panamint had been dreadful; here in Death Valley it became a thing of
terror. There was no longer any shadow but his own. He was scorched
and parched from head to heel. It seemed to him that the smart of his
tortured body could not have been keener if he had been flayed.

"If it gets much hotter," he muttered, wringing the sweat from his thick
fell of hair and mustache, "if it gets much hotter, I don' know what
I'll do." He was thirsty, and drank a little from his canteen. "I ain't
got any too much water," he murmured, shaking the canteen. "I got to get
out of this place in a hurry, sure."

By eleven o'clock the heat had increased to such an extent that McTeague
could feel the burning of the ground come pringling and stinging through
the soles of his boots. Every step he took threw up clouds of impalpable
alkali dust, salty and choking, so that he strangled and coughed and
sneezed with it.

"LORD! what a country!" exclaimed the dentist.

An hour later, the mule stopped and lay down, his jaws wide open, his
ears dangling. McTeague washed his mouth with a handful of water and for
a second time since sunrise wetted the flour-sacks around the bird cage.
The air was quivering and palpitating like that in the stoke-hold of a
steamship. The sun, small and contracted, swam molten overhead.

"I can't stand it," said McTeague at length. "I'll have to stop and make
some kinda shade."

The mule was crouched upon the ground, panting rapidly, with half-closed
eyes. The dentist removed the saddle, and unrolling his blanket, propped
it up as best he could between him and the sun. As he stooped down to
crawl beneath it, his palm touched the ground. He snatched it away with
a cry of pain. The surface alkali was oven-hot; he was obliged to scoop
out a trench in it before he dared to lie down.

By degrees the dentist began to doze. He had had little or no sleep
the night before, and the hurry of his flight under the blazing sun had
exhausted him. But his rest was broken; between waking and sleeping, all
manner of troublous images galloped through his brain. He thought he was
back in the Panamint hills again with Cribbens. They had just discovered
the mine and were returning toward camp. McTeague saw himself as another
man, striding along over the sand and sagebrush. At once he saw himself
stop and wheel sharply about, peering back susp