oss the Bad Lands. The preparations were simple; at
the store he bought a small pack of provisions, enough to last him
three or four days at a pinch and in case of accidents; he filled his
canteen; he spent half an hour with the grizzled old storekeeper, who
in his time had been a prospector and who knew the country hereabouts
as only an old prospector could know it. On a bit of wrapping-paper
the old fellow sketched a trail map that indicated the start through
the Pass, the general direction and the chief landmarks, the
approximate mileage and--here he was very exact and accompanied his
sketch with full verbal instructions--the few water-holes.

'You can make it all right, Al,' he said when Howard slipped the paper
into his vest pocket. 'It's no trick for a man like you. But I
wouldn't send a tenderfoot in there, not unless I wanted to make him
over into a dead tenderfoot. And, mind you, every year some of them
water-holes dries up; the only ones you can count on for sure are the
ones I've marked with a double ring that way. So long.'

'So long,' said Alan, and went for his horse.

The forenoon was well advanced when he rode into the mouth of the
narrow pass which gives access, above the mines, into the Lava
Mountains and through them into the Bad Lands. In twenty minutes he
had entered a country entirely new to him. He looked about him with
interested eyes. Never, he thought as he pushed forward, had he known
until now the look of utter desolation. The mountain flanks were
strewn with black blocks and boulders of broken lava and were already
incredibly hot; underfoot was parched earth upon which it seemed that
not even the hardiest of desert grasses cared to grow; yonder the Bad
Lands stretched endlessly before him, blistering mounds of rock,
wind-drifted stretches of burning sand, dry gulches and gorges which
one's wildest imagining could not fill with rushing waters. Here and
there were growing things, but they were grey with desert dust and
looked dead, greasewood dwarfed and wind-twisted, iron-fanged cacti
snarling at the clear hot sky and casting no more shade than lean poles.

'A man won't find his trail all cluttered up with folks in here,'
thought Howard. 'Wonder who was the last man to poke his fool nose
into this bake-oven. Whew, it's hot.'

Hotter it grew and drier and, though such a thing had not seemed
possible, altogether more repellent and hostile to life. He climbed a
ridge to get hi