little closet, selected a clean shirt, a pair of stockings, a necktie,
and his pajamas, tied them up in a bath-towel, not having such a thing
in his wardrobe as a bandana handkerchief, although he felt that this
was an essential; and after a cautious survey of the premises to make
sure that the children were nowhere near, he crawled out of the window,
carefully shut the screen again, and darted swiftly down the steep,
pathless incline on the west side of the house to the flat below. It
was a hazardous undertaking, and at any other time he would have shrunk
from attempting it, but in his unreasonable anger and desire for
revenge, all else was forgotten; and he arrived at the sandy bottom
breathless, badly scratched by the mesquite, and smarting from the
prick of cactus thorns, but triumphant.

Pausing only long enough to shake his fist defiantly at the house on
the cliff above, he made off across the desert as fast as his legs
would carry him. His first idea had been to follow the railroad, but
on second thought he concluded that he might easily be overtaken and
brought back if he took that course. So after a brief survey of the
pathless landscape, he decided to skirt the mountains in whose hollow
lay the town of Silver Bow, and to strike off to the west, in the
direction of a neighboring mining camp called Crystal City.

"If I _should_ miss that place," he reasoned to himself, "I am sure to
get somewhere. Perhaps to Los Angeles that Mercy goes so crazy about.
Say, that's just the thing! It takes only about twelve hours to get
there by train; I ought to be able to walk it in two days, and I'll
join the navy. I always did want to be a sailor!"

So he trudged sturdily on through the heavy sand of the flats, building
air castles and nursing his wrath, but paying little heed to the course
he was taking, until with a shiver of alarm he discovered that the
afternoon sun had set and the range of white-capped mountains which
sheltered Crystal City was seemingly no nearer than when he had set
out. He began to feel faint with hunger and thirst, and was appalled
to think he had forgotten in his flight to pack any lunch in his small
store of belongings, and was now what seemed miles from civilization,
in the midst of the pathless desert with neither food nor drink, and
night coming on.

Night! He shuddered. How could he have forgotten the night part of
it? Where was he to stay? He was afraid of the desert darkness.
So