the perspiration burst from every pore, as if his very skin cried out
for moisture. Yet his canteen was getting light and, until he could
find water, he put it resolutely away.

The road swung down at last into a broad, flat dry-wash, where the
gravel lay packed hard as iron, and as his racer took hold and began to
leap and frolic, he tore down the valley like the wind. The sun was
sinking low and the unknown lay before him, a land he had never seen;
yet before the night came on he must map out his course and stake his
life on the venture. Other automobiles might follow and snatch him back
if he delayed but an hour in his flight; but, once across Death Valley
and lost in those far mountains, he would leave the law behind. The men
he met would be fugitives like himself, or prospectors, or wandering
Shoshones; and, live or die, he would be away from it all--where he
would never see Virginia again.

The deep wash pinched in, as the other had done, before it gave out into
the plain; and, then, as he whirled around a point, he glided out into
the open. The foothills lay behind him and, straight athwart his way,
stretched a sea of motionless sand-waves. As far north as he could see,
the ocean of sand tossed and tumbled, the crests of its rollers crowned
with brush and grotesque drift-wood, the gnarled trunks and roots of
mesquite trees. To the east and west the high mountains still rose up,
black and barren, shutting in the sea of sand; but across the valley a
pass led smoothly up to a gap through the wall of the Panamints. It was
Emigrant Wash, up which the hardy Mormons had toiled in their western
pilgrimage, leaving at Lost Wagons and Salt Creek the bones of whole
caravans as a tribute to the power of the desert.

A smooth, steep slope led swiftly down to the edge of the Valley of
Death and as Wiley looked across he saw as in a vision a massive gateway
of stone. It was flung boldly out from the base of a blue mountain,
enclosing a dark valley behind; and from between its lofty walls a white
river of sand spread out like a flower down the slope. It was the
gateway to the Ube-Hebes, just as Charley had described it, and it was
only a few miles away. It lay just across the sand-flat, where the
great, even waves seemed marching in a phalanx towards the south; and
then up a little slope, all painted blue and purple, to the mysterious
valley beyond. The sun, swinging low, touched the summits of distant
sand-hills with a gleam