nose of rock, and big Barney Oakes scuttled for
cover, spilling bacon out of the frying pan as he went.

For a week the two had been camped in this particular gulch, which drew
in to a mere wrinkle on the southwestern slope of the black-topped
butte, toward which the Joshua tree in the pass had directed them.
Nearly a week they had spent toiling across the hilly, waterless waste,
with two harrowing days when their canteens flopped empty on the burros
and big Barney stumbled oftener than Casey liked to see. Casey himself
had gone doggedly ahead, his body bent forward, his square shoulders
sagging a bit, but with never a thought of doing anything but go on.

A red splotch high up on the side of this gulch promised "water
formation" as prospectors have a way of putting it. They had found the
water, else adventure would have turned to tragedy. Near the water they
had also found a promising outcropping of silver-bearing quartz.
Barney's blowpipe had this very day shown them silver in
castle-building quantities.

Just at this moment, however, they were not thinking of mines. They
were eyeing a round hole in the coffeepot from which a brown rivulet
ran spitting into the blackening coals.

Casey was the more venturesome. He raised himself to see if he could
discover where the bullet had come from, and very nearly met the fate
of the coffeepot. He felt the wind of a second bullet that spatted
against a boulder near Barney. Barney burrowed deeper into his covert.

Casey went down on all fours and crawled laboriously toward a
concealing bank covered thick with brush. A third bullet clipped a
twig of sage just about three inches above the middle of his back, and
Casey flattened on his stomach and swore. Some one on the peak of the
hill had good eyesight, he decided. Neither spoke, other than to swear
in undertones; for voices carried far in that clear atmosphere, and
nothing could be gained by conversation.

Darkness never had poured so slowly into that gulch since the world was
young. The campfire had died to black embers before Casey ventured
from his covert, and Barney Oakes seemed to have holed up for the
season. Unless you have lived for a long while in a land altogether
empty of any human life save your own, you cannot realize the effect of
having mysterious bullets zip past your ears and ruin your supper for
you.

"Somebody's gunnin' fer us, looks like t' me," Barney observed
belatedly in a hoarse whisper,