w Buck's shaft might have targeted his
intentions, but climbed into the car and started it. The powerful
machine went lunging through the soft dirt, following the blurry trail
of the buckboard's iron tires, throwing up dust as a fast launch churns
spray.

After leaving the Three Star all semblance of road vanished. The
alkaline soil was almost as fine as flour, and deep. This and the fear
of losing the trail kept the machine down to a limit that would have
been ridiculous on a real road but represented fast work on the desert.
The water boiled in the radiator from the heat of the toiling engine and
Jordan stopped, replenished, reoiled. Reaching the lava strip where the
buckboard had halted for water and the noon meal, they found the trail
skirting the flow toward the south. The main mass of the mesa, broken up
into gorges, gaps, stairway cliffs, marked by purple shadows, scanty in
the early afternoon but gradually widening, was about fifteen miles
away. Jordan braked his car. He ignored the water in the spring. His
spare supply was still ample and was distilled, not alkaline.

He turned to one of his deputies.

"Which way do you figger they're headin', Phil?" he asked. "Is there a
cut or a pass through the mesa?"

"Dam'fino. Mesa's all cut up, but it's sure a Godforsaken country.
Nothin' but rock an' clay an' cactus. No one ever goes there. I reckon I
know as much of this country as most an' I sure never explored the dump.
One thing's sure an' certain. Them fellers from the Three Star usually
know where they are headin'. Trail's plain."

"Sure is." But Jordan scratched his head a trifle doubtfully. If Sandy
Bourke and his chums had been tipped off, this trail was a little too
plain to be true. Presently, as the machine plowed on south, they
struck a patch of desert where the rock surfaced out and showed no trace
of hoof or tire. Jordan stopped the car and the four got out, casting
around, expecting that this outcropping had been used as a device to
throw off the pursuit. Fairly fresh horse droppings showed that the
buckboard had held to its course and, the rock passed, the trail showed
plain again, curving in toward the broken wall of the mesa, leading
toward a cleft that was plainly distinguishable.

"That's Bolsa Boquete," announced the deputy named Phil. "I never went
through it."

"What's it mean--the name?"

"Boquete's gap. Bolsa's money--not jest the same as dinero. It's the
word they have on the bank wi