never anything went wrong that his vocabulary and a monkey wrench could
not mend, Casey sat down on the shadiest running board and conned the
Instruction Book which Bill handed him at the last minute. Other times he
treated the Ford exactly as he would treat a burro, with satisfactory
results.

CHAPTER III

Away out on the high mesas that are much like the desert below, except
that the nights are cool and the wind is not fanned out of a furnace,
Casey fought sand and brush and rocks and found a trail now and then which
he followed thankfully, and so came at last to a short range of mountains
whose name matched well their inhospitable stare. The Starvation Mountains
had always been reputed rich in mineral and malevolent in their attitude
toward man and beast. Even the Joshua trees stood afar off and lifted
grotesque arms defensively against them. But Casey was not easily daunted,
and eerie places held for him no meaning save the purely material one. If
he could find water and the rich vein of ore some one had told him was
there, then Casey would be happy in spite of snakes, tarantulas and
sinister stories of the place.

Water he found, not too far up a gulch. So he pitched his tent within
carrying distance from the spring, thanked the god of mechanics that an
automobile neither eats nor drinks when it does not work, and set out to
find his fortune.

Casey knew there was a mining camp on the high slope of Barren Butte. He
knew the name of the camp, which was Lucky Lode, and he knew the foreman
there--knew him from long ago in the days when Casey was what he himself
confessed to be wild. In reaching Starvation Mountains, Casey had driven
for fifteen miles within plain sight of Lucky Lode. But gas is precious
when you are a hundred miles from a garage, and since business did not
take him there Casey did not drive up the five-mile hill to the Lucky Lode
just to shake hands with the foreman and swap a yarn or two. Instead, he
headed down on to the bleached, bleak oval of Furnace Lake and forged
across it as straight as he could drive toward Starvation Mountains.

But the next time Casey made the trip--needing supplies, powder, fuse,
caps and so on--Fate took him by the ear and led him to a lady. This is
how Fate did it,--and I will say it was an original idea:

Casey had a gallon syrup can in the car which he used for extra oil for
the engine. Having an appetite for sour-dough biscuits and syrup, he had
also a g