no wealth by reason of being so far removed from water and workable
conditions, but men are bewitched by it and tempted to try the
impossible.

You should hear Salty Williams tell how he used to drive
eighteen and twenty-mule teams from the borax marsh to Mojave,
ninety miles, with the 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 head-board, 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