and he gets scared, I guess, and thinks he's gonna cash his chips.
They's a queer look in his eyes, and in camp he just sets and sets with
Baby Jean in his arms, and the hophead lookin' at 'em from across the
fire with his glitterin' little eyes. And sometimes Len he just sets
and sets and watches Baby Jean asleep, and his eyes are worried like a
horse's eyes when he knows he's starvin'; and the yenshee hound he just
sets and looks at Len, and Heaven only knows what he's thinkin'!

"Then we make it up along in where the Salt Lake road was buildin'
then--up Barstow way--all wild them days. And one day Len and me and
the chink goes out into the buttes, and leaves Baby Jean in a
yucca-stump corral so's the c'yotes can't get at her, like we did
sometimes. She wasn't never a yellin' kid. Give her a bottle o'
canned cow, and she'd suck herself to sleep with varmints prowlin'
about and sandstorms blowin'. Sometimes she'd sob if things was goin'
wrong in her little world--low and heartbroken, like a woman cries.
But yell--never!

"So we leaves her suckin' at her bottle, for Len he'd never broke her
of it, and out we goes to scratch around some more up in Turkey Buttes.

"It was lookin' to storm and we hadn't oughta gone maybe; but we didn't
aim to make it far, and could come back any time. But when she broke
she broke sudden; and only once before had I seen such a blow as that.
We got plumb lost five miles from camp; and all that day and all that
night and all next day we wandered about in the whirlin' sand, outa
water, and goin' crazier every minute. The chink he gives up, and so
does Len; and I'm too crazy to make 'em keep on fightin'. I dragged
out two days later, way north o' the buttes--plumb bughouse, my tongue
all black and stiff as rubber. I've never been the same man since, I
guess. I dream about them days and nights.

"The folks that found me they go huntin' for Len and the chink and Baby
Jean t'other side o' the buttes. They find Len and the chink, both
dead, their faces and tongues---- But I don't like to remember that!
Sometimes the yuccas they whisper about it; but I always plug my ears
and begin to sing, or talk to the asses about the fun we'll have when
we find Jean Prince and get the gold Len knew about up there Death
Valley way.

"They turned Len's things over to me. The baby they couldn't find; but
after weeks they stumbled onto the camp where we'd left her and found
everything almost buri