The man permitted them to drink their fill, after which they fell to
grazing on the short grass which grew in the draw. While he realized
the necessity for haste if he was to succeed in levanting with the
gold, the tenderfoot had been too long a slave to his creature comforts
to face another day without breakfast. He abstracted some grub from one
of the packs and stayed the pangs of hunger. Then he bathed his
blistered feet, filled the water kegs, rounded up his pack train and
departed up the draw. After traveling a mile the draw broadened out
into the desert, and the man from Boston turned south and headed for
the Rio Colorado. He was walking now and appeared to have forgotten
about his blistered heel, for at times he broke into a run, beating the
burros, screaming curses at them with all the venom of his wolfish
soul, for he was pursued now by the fragments of his conscience. His
attack upon the Desert Rat had been the outgrowth of a sudden murderous
impulse, actuated fully as much by his hatred and fear of the man as by
his desire to possess the gold. One moment he would shudder at the
thought that he had committed murder; the next he was appalled at the
thought that after all he had only stunned the man--that even now the
Desert Rat and his Indian retainer were tracking him through the waste,
bent on wreaking summary vengeance.

He need not have worried so prematurely. A low range of black malpais
buttes stretched between him and the man he had despoiled, and as yet
the direction of his flight could not be observed. He drifted rapidly
south and presently disappeared into one of those long swales which
slope gradually to the river.

Here, weaving his way among the ironwood that grow thickly in this
section of the desert, for the first time since the commission of his