e iron bar overhead and devoutly
prayed that the machine would live through it.

It did. At one o'clock they swung round the headlands into the main
desert--the worst of its size on the continent, the desert of the Lower
Colorado.

As far as the eye could see stretched the dead waste, so dead that not
a mesquite bush, not a cactus, not a living thing grew or crawled or
flew. And upon it smote the sun so hot it seemed a flame, and over it
boiled a wind like the breath of a volcano.

It staggered even the four men, used as they were to the heat of the
valley. But it was only forty miles to the river.

"Pretty damn bad," the chauffeur muttered in Spanish, and shrugged.
Then he turned the nose of his machine northeast, and straight across
the hard-packed sand shot into the blistering desert.

"Two miles, four miles, six----" Bob counted off, watching the
speedometer. Every mile took him nearer the road, the water gates--and
Reedy Jenkins.

"Eight--nine----" he continued. Then a terrific roar; the machine
staggered; the chauffeur swore and applied the brakes.

They all jumped out. It was the right hind tire--a hole blown through
it ten inches long. The chauffeur kicked it two or three times,
lighted a cigarette, and stood looking at the burst tire. Finally he
shrugged and glanced across the desert. The wind was blowing hard;
there was sand in it. He shrugged and sauntered round to the front of
the car, got out his jack and wrenches, took the wheel off, prowled
round a quarter of an hour, then lighted another cigarette, again stood
looking at the burst tire, and kicked it a few times as though trying
to make it wake up and mend itself.

"What is the matter?" asked Bob. He had been afraid to ask.

"He says," interpreted the secretary, "he has no inner tube. Forgot to
bring any."

"Then he'll have to run on the rim," said Bob, desperately; "we've got
to get out of this."

But the secretary nodded toward the radiator which roared as though
about to blow up.

"Where is his water?" Rogeen felt more than the heat surging through
his head.

The chauffeur sauntered round the car twice as though looking for it.

"Says," explained the secretary, "he had a can but must have lost it."

They tried running on the rim, without water and with the hot wind
blowing the same direction they were going. The machine lasted four
miles, and then quit in the middle of a sand drift, with the most
infernal finality in