The land is empty of men, emptier still of habitations.  There are not many animals, even.  A few coyotes, all of them under suspicion of having rabies; venomous things such as tarantulas and centipedes, scorpions, rattlers, hydrophobia skunks.  Not so many of them that they are a constant menace, but occasionally to be reckoned with.  Great sprawling dry lakes ominous in their very placidity; dust dry, with little whirlwinds scurrying over them and mirages that lie to you most convincingly, painting water where there is only clay dust.  Water that is hidden deep in forbidding canyons, water that you must hunt for blindly unless you have been told where it comes stealthily out from some crevice in the rocks.  Indians know the water holes, and have told the white men with whom they made friends after a fashion—­for Casey tells me he never knew a red man who was essentially noble—­and these have told others; and men have named the springs and have indicated their location on maps.  Otherwise the land is dry, parched and deadly and beautiful, and men have died terrible, picturesque deaths within its borders.

I was thinking of that, and it seemed not too incongruous that the devil should now and then walk abroad with a lantern of his own devising to make men shrink from his path.  But Casey says, and I think he means it, that the light is a lure.  He told me a weird adventure of his own to back his argument, but I thought he was inventing most of it as he went along.  Until I saw that light on Tippipah I had determined to let his romancing go in at one ear if it must, and stop there without running out at the tips of my fingers.  Casey has enough ungodly adventures that are true.  I didn’t feel called upon to repeat his Irish inventions.

But now I’m going to tell you.  If you can’t believe it I shall not blame you; but Casey swears that it is all true.  It’s worth beginning where Casey did, at the beginning.  And that goes back to when he was driving stage in the Yellowstone.

Casey was making the trip out, one time, and he had just one passenger because it was at the end of the season and there had been a week of nasty weather that had driven out most of the sightseers and no new ones were coming in.  This man was a peevish, egotistical sort, I imagine; at any rate he did a lot of talking about himself and his ill luck, and he told Casey of his misfortunes by the hour.

Casey did not mind that much.  He says he didn’t listen half the time.  But finally the fellow began talking of the wealth that is wasted on folks who can’t use it properly or even appreciate the good fortune.