's, for Hackett
agreed to sell them food to the sum of two hundred dollars. He didn't
see how a mortgage could be given but he was willing to take Roger's
personal note for ninety days. This Roger gave with some misgivings but
with a sigh of relief that the day of starvation had been put off once
more. Then he gave his whole mind to his engine problem.

He was planning some changes in his engine that were fundamental and
that were really the outcome of his early trip through the ranges in the
search for window glass. He worked at his redesigning with a single
minded passion that set him apart from the others. All of them except
Felicia found him tense and at times irritable.

As August came in, the beauty of the desert seemed to increase daily.
The heat, whilst it added to one's sense of the desert's cruelty, added
at the same time to the unreality and to the mystery of silence and of
distances that are so large a part of the desert's fascination.

The sand was alive with an uncanny, tiny life. Horned toads flopped
unexpectedly across the trail. Lizards were everywhere, running over and
under the tent floors and along the thatching of the condenser and the
engine house. There were many rattlesnakes too, particularly dangerous
at this time of year because, Dick said, they were shedding their skins
and were blind, striking at any sound. There were Gila monsters now and
again. There were many scorpions and centipedes, with once in a while a
tarantula.

Dick and Charley laid down certain laws of the summer desert. No one was
to go to bed without examining the bedding for tarantulas or centipedes.
No one was to dress without subjecting every article of apparel to the
same scrutiny. No one was to go out at night without a "bug" for fear of
the blind striking of a rattler. Every one must learn to kill a snake
with a snake stick. And every one, even Felicia, must learn to treat
snake bites.

Elsa, clear-headed and matter of fact, was very little annoyed by all
this gliding venomous summer life. But little Felicia's horror of it was
difficult to control. It seemed to Roger that the child's nerves had
been uneven ever since the "cologne affair," as Ernest called it. But he
could not be sure of this, for Charley insisted that the little girl's
fears of all that uncanny fraternity of the sand was exactly what hers
had been four years before.

August was slipping by, quietly enough when Gustav, returning one day
from Archer's