road at the bottom which led
to Mexicali. The machine was not there.

"What do you suppose is the matter?" Bob's voice sounded surprisingly
cool but a little flat, even to himself. Although the hot winds struck
them here, his skin felt clammily cold.

"He'll be here by and by." The secretary lighted a cigarette. He did
not share Bob's anxiety and felt no undue fret over a little delay. "I
telegraphed the _comandante_ to send driver and car here about
midnight. He'll be here before long," he reassured. For an hour Bob
walked back and forth peering at every turn far into the desert,
listening until his ears ached. But no sight of car, no sound of
puffing engine. Another hour passed, and another. His anxiety
increased until the delay seemed unbearable.

They waited nine hours. At last they saw the black bug of a machine
crawling snortingly across the twenty-mile strip of sand between them
and the pass through the Cocopa Mountains.

At nine-thirty the car arrived, a powerful machine of expensive make.
The chauffeur was a slender, yellowish young Mexican who delighted in
taking dangerous curves at fifty miles an hour and who savagely
thrilled at the terrific punishment his car could take and still go.

Through the secretary Bob told him of the plan to skirt the Laguna
Salada and go south round the Cocopas instead of going through the
pass. This way they would follow the ancient bed of the Gulf of
California and forty miles south turn across the desert of the Lower
Colorado, thence northeastward until they struck the trail along the
river. By this route they could reach the Red Butte, the head of the
Dillenbeck canal, almost as quickly as through the pass and by
Mexicali, while at the same time they would follow for thirty miles up
the river trail down which Jenkins' trucks must pass on the way to the
head of the Gulf.

"Do you think we can do it?" Bob asked the chauffeur.

The chap lighted a cigarette, shrugged, and replied they could do any
damn thing.

"Let's be doing it then," urged Bob, jumping into the luxurious car.

The Laguna Salada is a dead lake made from the overflow of the Colorado
River and salted by the ancient bed of the sea. There is no vegetation
round it, no life upon it. Along the salty, sandy shore that glitters
in the sun there is no road, no broken trail. But the reckless
chauffeur hit the sand with the exultant fierceness of a bull fighter.
And at every lunge Bob clung to th