and throat felt dry and cottony; he seemed to have been wandering in a
weary land for a long time, for no definite reason, and he was thirsty.

He glanced around him for the water-hole beside which he had lain down
to sleep and await the mozo and the burros. On all sides the vast
undulating sea of sand and sage stretched to the horizon, and then the
Desert Rat understood. He had been delirious. With the fever from his
wound and the thought of the fortune of which he had been despoiled,
uppermost even in his subconscious brain, he had left Chuckwalla Tanks
and started in pursuit. How far or in what direction he had wandered he
knew not. He only knew that he was lost, that he was weak and thirsty,
that the pain and fever had gone out of his head, and that the Night
Watchman walked beside him in the silent waste.

It came into his brain to light three fires--to flash the S. O. S. call
of the desert in letters of smoke against the sky--and he fumbled in
his pocket for matches. There were none; and with a sigh, that was
almost a sob the dauntless Argonaut turned his faltering footsteps to
the south and lurched away toward the Rio Colorado.

Throughout the long cruel day he staggered on. Night found him close to
the mouth of a long black canyon between two ranges of black hills,
whose crests marked them as a line of ancient extinct volcanoes.

"I'll camp here to-night," he decided, "and early tomorrow morning I'll
go up that canyon and hunt for water. I might find a 'tank.'"

He lay down in the sand, pillowed his sore head on his arm, and, God
being merciful and the Desert Rat's luck still holding, he slept.