‘So long,’ said Alan, and went for his horse.

The forenoon was well advanced when he rode into the mouth of the narrow pass which gives access, above the mines, into the Lava Mountains and through them into the Bad Lands.  In twenty minutes he had entered a country entirely new to him.  He looked about him with interested eyes.  Never, he thought as he pushed forward, had he known until now the look of utter desolation.  The mountain flanks were strewn with black blocks and boulders of broken lava and were already incredibly hot; underfoot was parched earth upon which it seemed that not even the hardiest of desert grasses cared to grow; yonder the Bad Lands stretched endlessly before him, blistering mounds of rock, wind-drifted stretches of burning sand, dry gulches and gorges which one’s wildest imagining could not fill with rushing waters.  Here and there were growing things, but they were grey with desert dust and looked dead, greasewood dwarfed and wind-twisted, iron-fanged cacti snarling at the clear hot sky and casting no more shade than lean poles.

‘A man won’t find his trail all cluttered up with folks in here,’ thought Howard.  ’Wonder who was the last man to poke his fool nose into this bake-oven.  Whew, it’s hot.’

Hotter it grew and drier and, though such a thing had not seemed possible, altogether more repellent and hostile to life.  He climbed a ridge to get his bearings and to locate in the grey distance the black peak which the storekeeper had indicated on his map as the first landmark and steering-point.  He found it readily enough, a dozen miles off to the south-west, and jogged down the gentle slope toward it, his hat drawn low to shield his burning eyes.  Within an hour the impression obtruded itself upon his fancies that about him the world was dead.  He did not see a jack-rabbit or a slinking coyote or a bird; not even a buzzard, that all but ubiquitous, heat-defying bundle of dry feathers and bones, hung in the sky.  Why should a rabbit come hither where there was no herbage?  Why a coyote when his prey shunned these wastes?  Why even the winged scavenger when all animal life fled the Bad Lands?  The man’s spirit was oppressed and drooped under the weariness of the weary land.

It was a tedious day, and more than once he regretted that he had taken this trail; for it seemed likely, as is so often the case, that the long way round was the short way home.  But he was in for it, and plugged ahead, longing for the cool of evening.  About noon he found the first water-hole and, what was more, found water in it.  It was ugly, hot stuff, but his horse trotted to it with ears pricked forward and nostrils a-twitch and drank long and thirstily.  Thereafter, though they came to other spots where there should be water, they found none until after sunset.  Howard drew off the saddle, gave his horse a handful of barley and staked it out close to the spring.  Then he made his own dinner, had his smoke and threw himself down for a couple of hours’ rest and dozing.  It was his intention to travel on in the night to the next spring, which was some ten miles farther on and which, because of its location in the centre of a cluster of hills already clear against the skyline, he was sure he could not miss.  It was one of the map’s double-ringed water-holes.