ding gold.

That evening the strongest of their number reached the summit of the
Panamints and looked down the western side where they had thought to
find that fertile valley which the Williams map had promised leading
to the north. They saw dead mountain ranges and dried lake floors like
those through which they had been traveling for months. The Mohave
Desert lay in front of them.

When they were crossing those arid reaches William Isham, who had
fiddled so blithely for them every evening in the Utah hills, sank
down beside the trail; and the others passed him with empty canteens,
unable to give him any help. Some of the stragglers buried his body a
few days later on.

During the next day or two a Frenchman, whose name none of the
survivors remember, went insane from thirst and wandered off into the
sand-hills. No one ever saw him afterward.

So one after another of their number lay down and died or went mad and
ran off toward some of the mirages which were perpetually torturing
all of them with visions of cool lakes, until thirteen had perished.
The others struggled on and on into the southwest; for they knew that
Los Angeles lay somewhere in that direction and it offered them their
only hope.

Meantime the Bennett party went southward along the western edge of
the sink where the sands lie as loose and fine as ashes between the
mud flats and the mountains, until they found a little spring with a
few patches of coarse grass among the mesquite thickets which
surrounded it. From this point they tried escape by one route and then
another, only to reach a blind wall in each case and retrace their
steps to the water-hole.

In later years the mule-drivers of the borax company enlarged the well
which Asahel Bennett and J. B. Arcane dug here in the sand. Otherwise
the place remains unchanged, a patch of mesquite in a burning plain
where heat devils dance all day long from year's end to year's end.
The plain reaches on and on between black mountain walls, and even the
mirage which springs from its surface under that hot sun throws off
the guise of a cool lake almost on the moment of its assumption to
become a repellant specter that leaps and twists like a flame. The
Paiute Indians called the spot Tomesha, which means "Ground Afire."

The party held a council when they had retreated here after the last
unsuccessful attempt to escape. It was clear that they could not take
the women and children out of the sink unless so