ten, sunburned car, Dean Rawson
squinted his eyes against the glare. His lean, tanned face was almost
as brown as his hair. The sun had done its work there; it had set
crinkly lines about the man's eyes of darker brown. But the deeper
lines in that young face had been etched by responsibility; they made
the man seem older than his twenty-three years, until the steady eyes,
flashing into quick amusement, gave them the lie.

And now Rawson's lips twisted into a little grin at his own
discomfort--but he knew the desert driver's trick.

"A hundred plus in the shade," he reasoned silently. "That's hot any
way you take it. But taking it in the face at forty-five an hour is
too much like looking into a Bessemer converter!"

He closed the windows of his old coupe to within an inch of the top,
then opened the windshield a scant half inch. The blast that had been
drawing the moisture from his body became a gently circulating current
of hot air.

He had gone only another ten miles after these preparations for fast
driving, when he eased the big weatherbeaten car to a stop.

* * * * *

On his right, reaching up to the cool heights under a cloudless blue
sky, the gray peaks of the Sierras gave promise of relief from the
furnace breath of the desert floor. There were even valleys of snow
glistening whitely where the mountains held them high. A watcher, had
there been one to observe in the empty land, might have understood
another traveler's pausing to admire the serene majesty of those
heights--but he would have wondered could he have seen Rawson's eyes
turned in longing away from the mountains while he stared across the
forbidding sands.

There were other mountains, lavender and gray, in the distance. And
nearer by, a matter of twenty or thirty elusive miles through the
dancing waves of hot air, were other barren slopes. Across the rolling
sand-hills wheel marks, faint and wind-blown, led straight from the
highway toward the parched peaks.

"Tonah Basin!" Rawson was thinking. "It's there inside these hills.
It's hotter than this is by twenty degrees right this minute--but I
wish I could see it. I'd like to have one more look before I face that
hard-boiled bunch in the city!"

He looked at his watch and shook his head. "Not a chance," he
admitted. "I'm due up in Erickson's office in five hours. I wonder if
I've got a chance with them...."

* * * * *

Five ho