ashes. The spiteful crack of a rifle shot followed close. Casey
ducked behind a nose of rock, and big Barney Oakes scuttled for
cover, spilling bacon out of the frying pan as he went.

For a week the two had been camped in this particular gulch,
which drew in to a mere wrinkle on the southwestern slope of the
black-topped butte, toward which the Joshua tree in the pass had
directed them. Nearly a week they had spent toiling across the
hilly, waterless waste, with two harrowing days when their
canteens flopped empty on the burros and big Barney stumbled
oftener than Casey liked to see. Casey himself had gone doggedly
ahead, his body bent forward, his square shoulders sagging a bit,
but with never a thought of doing anything but go on.

A red splotch high up on the side of this gulch promised "water
formation" as prospectors have a way of putting it. They had
found the water, else adventure would have turned to tragedy.
Near the water they had also found a promising outcropping of
silver-bearing quartz. Barney's blowpipe had this very day shown
them silver in castle-building quantities.

Just at this moment, however, they were not thinking of mines.
They were eyeing a round hole in the coffeepot from which a brown
rivulet ran spitting into the blackening coals.

Casey was the more venturesome. He raised himself to see if he
could discover where the bullet had come from, and very nearly
met the fate of the coffeepot. He felt the wind of a second
bullet that spatted against a boulder near Barney. Barney
burrowed deeper into his covert.