ilent-running car on the market would have made some noise in traveling
through that sand and up and down the washes that seamed the mountain
side. Casey would have heard it--he had remarkably keen hearing.

"And that's darn funny," he muttered, when he was perfectly sure that
there was no car, that there could never have been a car on that trackless
ridge. "That's mighty damn funny! You can ask anybody."

CHAPTER XIV

Other things, however, were not so funny to Casey as he stood staring down
over the vast emptiness. There was no sign of his pack train, and without
it he would be in sorry case indeed. He thought of the manner in which the
tornado had whirled him round and round. Caught in a different set of
gyrations and then borne out from the center--flung out would come nearer
it--the burros and William might have been carried in any direction save
his own. Into that gruesome Crevice, for instance. They had not been more
than a mile from the Crevice when the storm struck.

He glanced across to Barren Butte, rising steeply from the farther end of
the lake. But he did not think of going to the mine up there, except to
tell himself that he'd rot on the desert before he ever asked there for
help. He had his reasons, you remember. A man like Casey can face
humiliation from men much easier than he can face a woman who had
misjudged him and scorned him. Unless, of course, he has a million dollars
in his pocket and knows that she knows it.

Having discarded Barren Butte from his plans--rather, having declined to
consider it at all--he knew that he must find his supplies, or he must
find water somewhere in the Crazy Woman hills. The prospect was not
bright, for he had never heard any one mention water there.

He rested where he was for awhile and watched the slope for the pack
animals; more particularly for William and the water cans. He could shoot
rabbits and live for days, if he had a little water, but he had once tried
living on rabbit meat broiled without salt, and he called it dry eating,
even with water to wash it down. Without water he would as soon fast and
let the rabbits live.

A dark speck moving in the sage far down the slope caught his eyes, and he
got up and peered that way eagerly. He started down to meet it hopefully,
feeling certain that his present plight would soon merge into a mere
incident of the trail. Sure enough, when he had walked for half an hour he
saw that it was William, browsing to