ll, how do you like her to-night?" came a taunting voice.

Lucy Dalles had stepped beside him and peering in at the revel.

"Some class, eh? Some lady, I'll say! Oh, sure!"

Hiram could have choked her, but without a remark he sped away from her
into the night.

It was then that Lucy Dallas clenched her teeth and hurled invective at
the radiant girl within.

She left the scene and hurried back to her little cabin, where the
crazy prospector, Basil Filer, lay in a heap on the floor, snoring
loudly.

A moment after her entry Al Drummond came in again with another man
following him.

"How much jack did you leave him?" he whispered to the girl.

"I left it all. It's safest. What I copied from the paper will be
worth a thousand times what's in that money bag."

"Just the same, I want money now--to-night," Drummond said, and,
stooping, pulled the poke from the shirt front of the unconscious miner.

"Take only half of it, then," Lucy pleaded. "Then he'll think he spent
that much. Don't be a piker, Al. You've got something big to work
for, and you try to spoil it by rolling a stiff for a few dollars."

Drummond grunted, slipped a wad of bills into his trousers pocket, and
replaced the poke in the desert rat's shirt.

"All right, Stool," he said to the other man. "You take his head; I'll
take his feet."

A little later a train of pack burros moved away from Ragtown into the
desert night.

A mile from town the man Stool halted them and waited, and presently
heard the chug of a motor. Soon Al Drummond drove up in the last of
his five-ton trucks, in the bottom of which, tossed about, lay the
still unconscious form of the old prospector.

The two men worked swiftly, and slanted two twelve-inch planks two
inches thick from the rear end of the truck to the ground. With ropes
about the necks of the desert rat's six burros, they hauled and
hammered and coaxed them one by one aboard the truck. Then on into the
night they drove, over the vast, black desert.

Seventy-five miles from Ragtown they stopped the car, and unloaded the
burros and their snoring master. They rolled the man in his blankets,
then set the burros' packs about in orderly array and loosed the little
animals to crop the bunch grass that was green and succulent in winter.
From one pack bag they took cooking utensils and other articles, and
ranged them about on the ground as the old man himself might have done
upon making camp.

"He'll wak