He began to think seriously of selling his car and going back to horses which, in spite of the high cost of feeding them, had paid their way and his, and left him a pleasant jingle in his pockets.  But then he bumped hard into one of those queer little psychological facts which men never take into account until it is too late.  Casey Ryan, who had driven horses since he could stand on his toes and fling harness on their backs, could not go back to driving horses.  The speed fiend of progress had him by the neck.  Horses were too slow for Casey.  Moreover, when he began to think about it, he knew that the thirty-mile stretch between Pinnacle and Lund had become too tame for him, too monotonous.  He knew in the dark every twist in the road, every sharp turn, and he could tell you offhand what every sharp turn had cost him in the past month, either in repairs to his own car or to the car that had unluckily met him without warning.  For Casey, I must tell you, habitually forgot all about that earsplitting klaxon at his left elbow.  He was always in too much of a hurry to blow it; and anyway, by the time he reached a turn, he was around it; there either was no car in the road or Casey had scraped paint off it or worse and gone on.  So why honk?

Far distances called Casey.  In one day, he meditated, he could cover more desert with his Ford than horses could travel in a week.  An old, half-buried passion stirred, lifted its head and smiled at him seductively,—­a dream he had dreamed of finding some of that wealth which Nature holds so miser-like in her hills.  A gold mine, or perhaps silver or copper,—­what matter which mineral he found, so long as it spelled wealth for him?  Then he would buy a bigger car and a faster car, and he would bore farther and farther into yonder.  In his past were tucked away months on end of tramping across deserts and up mountain defiles with a packed burro nipping patiently along in front of him and this same, seductive dream beckoning him over the next horizon.  Burros had been slow.  While he hurtled down the road from Pinnacle to Lund, Casey pictured himself plodding through sand and sage and over malapai and up dry canyons, hazing a burro before him.

“No, sir, the time for that is gone by.  I could do in a week now what it took me a month to do then.  I could get into country a man’d hate to tackle afoot, not knowing the water holes.  I’ll git me a radiator that don’t boil like a teakettle over a pitch fire, and load up with water and grub and gas, and I’ll find the Injun Jim mine, mebby.  Or some other darn mine that’ll put me in the clear the rest of my life.  Couldn’t before, because I had to travel too slow.  But shucks!  A Ford can go anywhere a mountain goat can go.  You ask anybody.”

So Casey sold his stage line and the hypothetical good will that went with it, and Pinnacle and Lund breathed long and deep and planned trips they had refrained from taking heretofore, and wished Casey luck.  Bill Masters laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and made a suggestion so wise that not even Casey could shut his mind against it.