trail wagon full of water barrels. Hot days the mules would go so mad
for drink that the clank of the water bucket set them into an uproar of
hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of harness chains, while Salty
would sit on the high seat with the sun glare heavy in his eyes, dealing
out curses of pacification in a level, uninterested voice until the
clamor fell off from sheer exhaustion. There was a line of shallow
graves' along that road; they used to count on dropping a man or two of
every new gang of coolies brought out in the hot season. But when he
lost his swamper, smitten without warning at the noon halt, Salty quit
his job; he said it was "too durn hot." The swamper he buried by the way
with stones upon him to keep the coyotes from digging him up, and seven
years later I read the penciled lines on the pine headboard, still
bright and unweathered.

But before that, driving up on the Mojave stage, I met Salty again
crossing Indian Wells, his face from the high seat, tanned and ruddy as
a harvest moon, looming through the golden dust above his eighteen
mules. The land had called him.

The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly
of lost treasure. Somewhere within its stark borders, if one believes
report, is a hill strewn with nuggets; one seamed with virgin silver; an
old clayey water-bed where Indians scooped up earth to make cooking pots
and shaped them reeking with grains of pure gold. Old miners drifting
about the desert edges, weathered into the semblance of the tawny hills,
will tell you tales like these convincingly. After a little sojourn in
that land you will believe them on their own account. It is a question
whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the
desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the
tradition of a lost mine.