sure, son. You're not any too popular here. There's such
a thing as being held up and carried over the border. It's been done
before now."

"I'm sick of this hole, anyhow," Rudolph muttered, and moved away in the
crowd. The mechanical piano was banging in the dance-hall as he slipped
out into the darkness, under the clear starlight of the Mexican night,
and the gate of the compound stood open. He passed it with an oath.

Long before, he had provided for such a contingency. By the same agency
which had got him to the border, he could now be sent further on. At
something after midnight, clad in old clothes and carrying on his back a
rough outfit of a blanket and his remaining wardrobe, he knocked at the
door of a small adobe house on the border of the town. An elderly German
with a candle admitted him.

"Well, I'm off," Rudolph said roughly.

"And time enough, too," said the German, gruffly.

Rudolph was sullenly silent. He was in this man's power, and he knew it.
But the German was ready enough to do his part. For months he had been
doing this very thing, starting through the desert toward the south
slackers and fugitives of all descriptions. He gathered together the
equipment, a map with water-holes marked, a canteen covered with a dirty
plaid-cloth casing, a small supply of condensed foods, in tins mostly,
and a letter to certain Germans in Mexico City who would receive
hospitably any American fugitives and ask no questions.

"How about money?" Rudolph inquired.

The German shrugged his shoulders.

"You will not need money in the desert," he said. "And you haf spent
much money here, on the women. You should have safed it."

"I was told you would give me money."

But the German shook his head.

"You viii find money in Mexico City, if you get there," he said,
cryptically. And Rudolph found neither threats nor entreaties of any
avail.

He started out of the town, turning toward the south and west. Before
him there stretched days of lonely traveling through the sand and cactus
of the desert, of blistering sun and cold nights, of anxious searches
for water-holes. It was because of the water-holes that he headed
southwest, for such as they were they lay in tiny hidden oases in the
canyons. Almost as soon as he left the town he was in the desert; a
detached ranch, a suggestion of a road, a fenced-in cotton-field or two,
an irrigation ditch, and then--sand.

He was soft from months of inaction, from the cactus