“Now,” he growled, with a certain desperate defiance, as though he expected to be heard, “now, I’m going to lay up and get some sleep.  You can come or not.”

He cleared away the hot surface alkali, spread out his blanket, and slept until the next day’s heat aroused him.  His water was so low that he dared not make coffee now, and so breakfasted without it.  Until ten o’clock he tramped forward, then camped again in the shade of one of the rare rock ledges, and “lay up” during the heat of the day.  By five o’clock he was once more on the march.

He travelled on for the greater part of that night, stopping only once towards three in the morning to water the mule from the canteen.  Again the red-hot day burned up over the horizon.  Even at six o’clock it was hot.

“It’s going to be worse than ever to-day,” he groaned.  “I wish I could find another rock to camp by.  Ain’t I ever going to get out of this place?”

There was no change in the character of the desert.  Always the same measureless leagues of white-hot alkali stretched away toward the horizon on every hand.  Here and there the flat, dazzling surface of the desert broke and raised into long low mounds, from the summit of which McTeague could look for miles and miles over its horrible desolation.  No shade was in sight.  Not a rock, not a stone broke the monotony of the ground.  Again and again he ascended the low unevennesses, looking and searching for a camping place, shading his eyes from the glitter of sand and sky.

He tramped forward a little farther, then paused at length in a hollow between two breaks, resolving to make camp there.

Suddenly there was a shout.

“Hands up.  By damn, I got the drop on you!”

McTeague looked up.

It was Marcus.

CHAPTER 22

Within a month after his departure from San Francisco, Marcus had “gone in on a cattle ranch” in the Panamint Valley with an Englishman, an acquaintance of Mr. Sieppe’s.  His headquarters were at a place called Modoc, at the lower extremity of the valley, about fifty miles by trail to the south of Keeler.

His life was the life of a cowboy.  He realized his former vision of himself, booted, sombreroed, and revolvered, passing his days in the saddle and the better part of his nights around the poker tables in Modoc’s one saloon.  To his intense satisfaction he even involved himself in a gun fight that arose over a disputed brand, with the result that two fingers of his left hand were shot away.

News from the outside world filtered slowly into the Panamint Valley, and the telegraph had never been built beyond Keeler.  At intervals one of the local papers of Independence, the nearest large town, found its way into the cattle camps on the ranges, and occasionally one of the Sunday editions of a Sacramento journal, weeks old, was passed from hand to hand.  Marcus ceased to hear from the Sieppes.  As for San Francisco, it was as far from him as was London or Vienna.