ranch of Jack Merrill's father, and
had entered the dry, almost untravelled solitudes of the Playas.

Jack Merrill consulted a compass that was strapped to his wrist.

"Well, we're keeping steadily in the right direction," he said.
"Nothing for it but to keep on going; eh, Pete?"

"When yer cain't turn back, 'keep on goin's' a good word," assented the
philosophical cow-puncher of the Agua Caliente, stroking his
sun-bleached yellow moustache and untangling a knot in his pony's mane.

"It's up to us to get somewhere where there is water pretty quick," put
in Walt Phelps; "the last time I hit the little drinking canteen I
noticed that there wasn't an awful lot left in the others."

"No, and the stock's feelin' it, too," grunted Pete, digging his big,
blunt-roweled spurs into his buckskin cayuse.

Followed by Jack on his Firewater, the professor on his queer, bony
steed as angular as himself, Ralph on Petticoats--of exciting
memory,--and Walt Phelps on his big gray, they pushed on.

The heat was blistering. In fact, to any one less accustomed to the
arduous intensity of the sun's rays in this part of the country, it
would have proved almost insupportable. But our party was pretty well
seasoned by this time.

All of them wore the broad, leather-banded sombreros of the plainsmen
except Professor Wintergreen, who had invested himself in a gigantic
pith sun-helmet, from beneath which his spectacled countenance peered
out, as Ralph said, "Like a toad peeking out from a mushroom." For the
rest, the boys wore leather "chaps," blue shirts open at the neck, with
loosely knotted red handkerchiefs about their throats. The latter were
both to keep the sun off the back of their necks and to serve as
protection for their mouths and nostrils against the dust in case of
necessity,--as for example, when they struck a patch of burning, biting
alkali. Of this pungent stuff, they had already encountered one or two
stretches, and had been glad to muffle up the lower part of their faces
as they rode through it.

As for Coyote Pete, those who have followed his earlier experiences are
pretty familiar with that redoubtable cow-puncher's appearance; suffice
it to say, therefore, that, as usual, he wore his battered leather
"chaps," faded blue shirt, and his big sombrero with the silver stars
affixed to the stamped leather band. In a holster he carried a rifle,
as did the rest of the party, as well as his well-worn revolver. The
oth