THE LONG CHANCE




CHAPTER I


It was sunrise on the Colorado desert.

As the advance guard of dawn emerged from behind the serrated peaks to
the east and paused on their snow-encrusted summits before charging
down the slopes into the open desert to rout the lingering shadows of
the night, a coyote came out of his den in the tumbled _malpais_
at the foot of the range, pointed his nose skyward and voiced his
matutinal salute to the Hosts of Light.

Presently, far in the distant waste, seven dark objects detached
themselves from the shadows and crawled toward the mountains. Like
motes swimming in a beam of light, they came out of the Land of
Nowhere, in the dim shimmering vistas over west, where the gray line of
grease-wood met the blue of the horizon. Slowly they assumed definite
shape; and the coyote ceased his orisons to speculate upon the ultimate
possibility of breakfast and this motley trio of "desert rats" with
their burro train, who dared invade his desolate waterless kingdom.

For, with the exception of the four burros, the three men who followed
in their wake did, indeed, offer the rare spectacle of variety in this
land of superlative monotony. One of the men wore a peaked Mexican
straw hat, a dirty white cotton undershirt, faded blue denim overalls