w what
I'm looking for--pretty dumb: got a lot to learn!--but it'll be a job
that needs to take a good licking!"

"'Too damn soft!'" Dean was thinking. "And he tackled the desert
alone!" There was a lot here he did not understand. But the look in
the eyes of Smithy that met his own searching gaze and returned it
squarely if a bit whimsically--that was something he _could_
understand. Dean Rawson was a judge of men. The sudden impulse that
moved him was founded upon certainty.

"You've found that job," he said. "The desert almost got you a little
while ago--now it's due to take that licking you were talking about.
I'm going to teach it to lie down and roll over and jump through
hoops. Fact is, my job is to get it into harness and put it to work.
I'll be working right out there in the Basin where I found you. It
will be only about two degrees cooler than hell. If that sounds good
to you, Smithy, stick around."

He warmed oddly to the look in the younger man's deep-set, dark eyes,
as Smithy replied:

"Try to put me out, Rawson--just try to put me out!"

CHAPTER II

_Gold!_

"Ten miles down, drillers!
Hell-bound, and proud of it!
Ten miles down, drillers!
Hark to what I say:
You're pokin' through the crust of hell
And braggin' too damn loud of it,
For, when you get to hell, you'll find
The devil there to pay."

From the black, night-wrapped valley, far below, the singer's voice
went silent with the slamming of a door in one of the bunkhouses. The
song was popular; some rimester in the Tonah Basin camp had written
the parody for the tormenting of the drill crews. And, high on the
mountainside, Dean Rawson hummed a few bars of the lilting air after
the singer's voice had ceased.

"Ten miles down!" he said at last to his assistant, sprawled out on
the stone beside him. "That's about right, Smithy. And maybe the rest
of the doggerel isn't so far off either. 'Pokin' through the crust of
hell'--well, there was hell popping around here once, and I am
gambling that the furnaces aren't all out."

They were on the outthrust shoulder of rock where the mountain road
hung high above the valley floor. Below, where, months before, Rawson
had rescued a man from desert death, was blackness punctured by points
of light--bunkhouse windows, the drilling-floor lights at the foot of
a big derrick, a single warning light at the derrick's top. But the
buildings and the towering steelwork of