e in washing and I'll show you a dead village. The joints
here have big signs on the wall, '_Gambling Positively Prohibited_,'
and underneath the games are running high, wide, and fancy. Refined
humor, I call it.... There were nine killings one day, but that's above
the average. The last time I was in town a couple of tool dressers got
into a row with a laundryman--claimed they'd been overcharged six
cents. It came to a shooting, and we buried all three of them. Two
cents apiece! That was their closing price. The cost of living is high
enough, but it isn't expensive to die here."

In this vein ran Mallow's talk. From the first he had laid himself out
to be entertaining and helpful, and Gray obligingly permitted him to
have his way. When they had finished breakfast, he even allowed his
companion to hire an automobile and driver for him. They shook hands
finally, the best of friends. Mallow wished him good luck and gravely
voiced the hope that he would have fewer diamonds when he returned.
Gray warmly thanked his companion for his many courtesies and declared
they would soon meet again.

Thus far the trip had worked out much as Gray had expected. Now, as his
service car left the town and joined the dusty procession of vehicles
moving country-ward, he covertly studied its driver and was gratified
to note that the fellow bore all the ear-marks of a thorough scoundrel.
What conversation the man indulged in strengthened that impression.

The Briskow farm, it appeared, lay about twenty miles out, but twenty
miles over oil-field roads proved to be quite a journey. During the
muddy season the driver declared, it might well take a whole day to
make that distance; now that the roads were dry, they could probably
cover it in two or three hours, if the car held together. Traffic near
Ranger was terrific, and how it managed to move, even at a snail's
pace, was a mystery, for to sit a car was like riding a bucking horse.
If there had been the slightest attempts at road building they were now
invisible, and the vehicular streams followed meandering wagon trails
laid down by the original inhabitants of pre-petroleum days, which had
not been bettered by the ceaseless pounding of the past twelve months.
Up and down, over armored ridges and into sandy arroyos, along leaning
hillsides and across 'dobe flats, baked brick hard by the sun, the
current of travel roared and pounded with reckless disregard of tire
and bolt and axle. In the main