to Zurich that I applied for a loan
and you refused it--not a word more. I'm tellin' you! Put a blab on your
office boy." He rolled his thumb at young Hudson. "And hereafter if you
ever horn in on my affairs so much as the weight of a finger tip--I'm
tellin' you now!--I'll appear to you!"

CHAPTER III

The world was palpably a triangle, baseless to southward; walled out by
iron, radiant ramparts--a black range, gateless, on the east; a gray
range on the west, broken, spiked, and bristling. At the northern limit
of vision the two ranges closed together to what seemed relatively the
sharp apex of the triangle, the mere intersection of two lines. This
point, this seemingly dimensionless dot, was in reality two score weary
miles of sandhills, shapeless, vague, and low; waterless, colorless,
and forlorn. Southward the central desert was uninhabitable; opinions
differed about the edges.

Still in Arizona, the eye wearied; miles and leagues slid together to
indistinguishable inches. Then came a low line of scattered hills that
roughly marked the Mexican border.

The mirage played whimsical pranks with these outpost hills. They became,
in turn, cones, pyramids, boxes, benches, chimney stacks, hourglasses.
Sometimes they soared high in air, like the kites of a baby god; and,
beneath, the unbroken desert stretched afar, wavering, misty, and dim.

Again, on clear, still days, these hills showed crystalline, thin, icy,
cameo-sharp; beyond, between, faint golden splotches of broad Sonoran
plain faded away to nothingness; and, far beyond that nothingness, hazy
Sonoran peaks of dimmest blue rose from illimitable immensities, like
topmasts of a very large ship on a very small globe; and the earth was
really round, as alleged.

It was fitting and proper that the desert, as a whole, had no name: the
spinning earth itself has none. Inconsiderable nooks and corners were
named, indeed--Crow Flat, the Temporal, Moonshine, the Rinconada. It
should rather be said, perhaps, that the desert had no accepted name.
Alma Mater, Lungs called it. But no one minded Lungs.

Mr. Stanley Mitchell woke early in the Blue Bedroom to see the morning
made. He threw back the tarpaulin and sat up, yawning; with every line of
his face crinkled up, ready to laugh for gladness.

The morning was shaping up well. Glints of red snapped and sparkled in
the east; a few late stars loitered along the broad, clean skies. A jerky
clatter of iron on rock ec