ir dreaming; had
listened, too, while they raved in thirst and heat and madness.
Inscrutably they watched Casey as he hurried by with his twenty-five
thousand dollars and his pleasant pictures of soft ease.

At a dim fork in the trail Casey slowed and stopped. A boiling radiator
will not forever brook neglect, and Casey brought his mind down to
practical things for a space. "I can just as well take the train from
Lund," he mused, while he poured in more water. "Then I can leave this
bleatin' burro with Bill. He oughta give me a coupla hundred for her,
anyway. No use wasting money just because you happen to have a few
thousand in your pants." He filled his pipe at that sensible idea and
turned the nose of his Ford down the dim trail to Lund.

Eighty miles more or less straight away across the mountainous waste lay
Lund, halfway up a canyon that led to higher reaches in the hills, rich in
silver, lead, copper, gold. Silver it was that Casey had found and sold to
the men from Tonopah, and it was a freak of luck, he thought whimsically,
that had led him and his Ford away over to Starvation Mountains to find
their stake when they had probably been driving over millions every day
that they made the stage trip from Pinnacle down to Lund.

The trail was rutted in places where the sluicing rains had driven hard
across the hills; soft with sand in places where the fierce winds had
swept the open. For awhile the thin, wobbly track of a wagon meandered
along ahead of him, then turned off up a flat-bottomed draw and was lost
in the sagebrush. Some prospector not so lucky as he, thought Casey, with
swift, soon forgotten sympathy. A coyote ran up a slope toward him, halted
with forefeet planted on a rock, and stared at him, ears perked like an
inquisitive dog. Casey stopped, eased his rifle out of the crease in the
back of the seat cushion, chanced a shot,--and his luck held. He climbed
out, picked up the limp gray animal, threw it into the tonneau and went
on. Even with twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket, Casey told
himself that coyote hides are not to be scorned. He had seen the time when
the price of a good hide meant flour and bacon and tobacco to him. He
would skin it when he stopped to eat.

Eighty miles with never a soul to call good day to Casey. Nor shack nor
shelter made for man, and only one place where there was water to wet his
lips if they cracked with thirst,--unless, perchance, one of those swift
desert down