ub with a passer-by on the desert.
There's water in my little tank. Burros don't drink much, you know. A
taste's enough till we get to a camp to-morrow. Handy, those camps,
for prospectors needin' a grubstake. Let's camp over there by that
lonesome yucca palm. He looks as if he wanted company. Maybe he'll
whisper where they's gold to-night--if we keep on ear awake. He-he!
Oh, they whisper lots--lots--lots! But they always lie like sin!"

When the "ole jack" had paid the final price of his lack of
watchfulness, Hiram Hooker and the crazy prospector leaned back and
looked up at the cold stars that smiled cruelly down on the arid waste.
The wind whispered mysteriously through the bayonets of the yucca palm
above them. Not long would one be obliged to live and move and have
his being alone on this desert before strange messages would begin to
formulate in the wind's eerie whispering in the yuccas.

The burros ranged about, browsing off the desert growth. There had
been barley for Babe, and Hiram had watered her at the last camp. A
rinse-out of her mouth and she would do very well till morning.

And there under the scornful stars Hiram and the old man lounged on
packbags and talked, with their tiny camp fire of greasewood roots
between them. And gradually as Hiram told what he knew and convinced
the gray old rat of his honesty, an uncanny tale of the barren lands
began unfolding, a tale revolving about a little girl baby left by
prospectors in a yucca-trunk corral--the tale of Jean Prince, daughter
of Leonard Prince, whose bones had been gnawed by coyotes and covered
by the shifting sands for over twenty years. And the baby girl, Jean
Prince, was none other than the magnetic, dark-haired woman who now
drove jerkline to Ragtown and numbered her admirers by the
thousand--Jerkline Jo, Queen of the Outland Camps.

"They was three of us at first," narrated Filer in a shaky voice.
"Three of us and Baby Jean. Baby Jean and me and Len Prince and 'The
Chink.' And that makes four. But Baby Jean was only two years old.

"Hong Duo was the chink--a grinnin' yenshee hound from up beyond the
Tehachapi--way up--up toward the Sierra Nevadas, in the placer country.
White prospectors ner white miners don't often work with chinks.
Chinks is only good for workin' tailin's when it comes to mines. But
Len he'd saved Hong Duo's life in trouble in a dump in Placerville--ol'
Hangtown--and the chink had clung to um like a burro to