CHAPTER III

Away out on the high mesas that are much like the desert below, except that the nights are cool and the wind is not fanned out of a furnace, Casey fought sand and brush and rocks and found a trail now and then which he followed thankfully, and so came at last to a short range of mountains whose name matched well their inhospitable stare.  The Starvation Mountains had always been reputed rich in mineral and malevolent in their attitude toward man and beast.  Even the Joshua trees stood afar off and lifted grotesque arms defensively against them.  But Casey was not easily daunted, and eerie places held for him no meaning save the purely material one.  If he could find water and the rich vein of ore some one had told him was there, then Casey would be happy in spite of snakes, tarantulas and sinister stories of the place.

Water he found, not too far up a gulch.  So he pitched his tent within carrying distance from the spring, thanked the god of mechanics that an automobile neither eats nor drinks when it does not work, and set out to find his fortune.

Casey knew there was a mining camp on the high slope of Barren Butte.  He knew the name of the camp, which was Lucky Lode, and he knew the foreman there—­knew him from long ago in the days when Casey was what he himself confessed to be wild.  In reaching Starvation Mountains, Casey had driven for fifteen miles within plain sight of Lucky Lode.  But gas is precious when you are a hundred miles from a garage, and since business did not take him there Casey did not drive up the five-mile hill to the Lucky Lode just to shake hands with the foreman and swap a yarn or two.  Instead, he headed down on to the bleached, bleak oval of Furnace Lake and forged across it as straight as he could drive toward Starvation Mountains.

But the next time Casey made the trip—­needing supplies, powder, fuse, caps and so on—­Fate took him by the ear and led him to a lady.  This is how Fate did it,—­and I will say it was an original idea: 

Casey had a gallon syrup can in the car which he used for extra oil for the engine.  Having an appetite for sour-dough biscuits and syrup, he had also a gallon can of syrup in the car.  It was a terrifically hot day, and the wind that blew full against Casey’s left cheek as he drove burned even his leather skin where it struck.  Casey was afraid he was running short of water, and a Ford’s comfort comes first,—­as every man knows; so that Casey was parched pretty thoroughly, inside and out.  Within a mile of Furnace Lake he stopped, took an unsatisfying sip from his big canteen and emptied the rest of the water into the radiator.  Then he replenished the oil in the motor generously, cranked and went bumping along down the trail worn rough with the trucks from Lucky Lode.