“I’ll tell you what!  Welch knew what he was talking about when he said he saw Whiteman to-day.  I heard horses—­that was the noise.  I am going down to Welch’s, right away.”

They left and I was glad.  I did not care whither they went, so they went.  I was willing they should visit Welch, and the sooner the better.

As soon as they closed their cabin door my comrades emerged from the gloom; they had caught the horses and were waiting for a clear coast again.  We remounted the cargo on the pack horse and got under way, and as day broke we reached the “divide” and joined Van Dorn.  Then we journeyed down into the valley of the Lake, and feeling secure, we halted to cook breakfast, for we were tired and sleepy and hungry.  Three hours later the rest of the population filed over the “divide” in a long procession, and drifted off out of sight around the borders of the Lake!

Whether or not my accident had produced this result we never knew, but at least one thing was certain—­the secret was out and Whiteman would not enter upon a search for the cement mine this time.  We were filled with chagrin.

We held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and enjoy a week’s holiday on the borders of the curious Lake.  Mono, it is sometimes called, and sometimes the “Dead Sea of California.”  It is one of the strangest freaks of Nature to be found in any land, but it is hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited, because it lies away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip.  On the morning of our second day, we traveled around to a remote and particularly wild spot on the borders of the Lake, where a stream of fresh, ice-cold water entered it from the mountain side, and then we went regularly into camp.  We hired a large boat and two shot-guns from a lonely ranchman who lived some ten miles further on, and made ready for comfort and recreation.  We soon got thoroughly acquainted with the Lake and all its peculiarities.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds.  This solemn, silent, sail-less sea—­this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth —­is little graced with the picturesque.  It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.