me back to the fiery pit, the Tonah Basin, a vast cauldron of sand
and ash--great sweeps of yellow and gray and darker brown into which
the sun was pouring its rays with burning-glass fierceness.

But to Rawson, there was more than the eye could see. He was picturing
a great powerhouse, steel derricks, capped pipes that led off to
whirring turbines, generators, strings of cables stretching out on
steel supports into the distance, a wireless transmitter--and all of
this the result of his own vision, of the stream he would bring from
deep in the earth!

Then, abruptly, the pictures faded. Far below him on the yellow,
sun-blasted floor, a fleck of shadow had moved. It appeared suddenly
from the sand, moved erratically, staggeringly, for a hundred feet,
then vanished as if something had blotted it out--and Dean Rawson
knew that it was the shadow of a man.

* * * * *

The road widened beyond the turn. He had intended to swing around; he
had wanted only to take a clear picture of the place with him. But now
the big car's gears wailed as he took the downgrade in second, and the
brakes, jammed on at the sharp curves, added their voice to the chorus
of haste.

"Confounded desert rats!" Rawson was saying under his breath. "They'll
chance anything--but imagine crossing country like that! And he hasn't
a burro--he's got only the water he can carry in a canteen!"

But even the canteen was empty, he found, when he stopped the car in a
whirl of loose sand beside a prone figure whose khaki clothes were
almost indistinguishable against the desert soil.

Before Rawson could get his own lanky six feet of wiry length from the
car, the man had struggled to his feet. Again the little blot of
shadow began its wavering, uncertain, forward movement.

He was a little shorter than Rawson, a little heavier of build, and
younger by a year or two, although his flushed face and a two days'
stubble of black beard might have been misleading. Rawson caught the
staggering man and half carried him to the shadow of the car, the only
shelter in that whole vast cauldron of the sun.

From a mouth where a swollen tongue protruded thickly came an agonized
sound that was a cry for, "Water--water!" Rawson gave it to him as
rapidly as he dared, until he allowed the man to drink from the desert
bag at the last. And his keen eyes were taking in all the significant
details as he worked.

The khaki clothes earned a nod of sil