apparently alone. Jefferson Worth was not with his outfit.

By sending the heavy wagon on ahead and following later with a
faster team and a light buckboard, Mr. Worth could join his outfit
in camp that night, saving thus at least another half day for
business in San Felipe. Jefferson Worth, as he himself would have
put it, "figured on the value of time." Indeed Jefferson Worth
figured on the value of nearly everything.

Now San Felipe, you must know, is where the big ships come in and
the air tingles with the electricity of commerce as men from all
lands, driven by the master passion of human kind--Good Business--
seek each his own.

But Rubio City, though born of that same master passion of the race,
is where the thin edge of civilization is thinnest, on the Colorado
River, miles beyond the Coast Range Mountains, on the farther side
of that dreadful land where the thirsty atmosphere is charged with
the awful silence of uncounted ages.

Between these two scenes of man's activity, so different and yet so
like, and crossing thus the land of my story, there was only a rude
trail--two hundred and more hard and lonely miles of it--the only
mark of man in all that desolate waste and itself marked every mile
by the graves of men and by the bleached bones of their cattle.

All that forenoon, on every side of the outfit, the beautiful life
of the coast country throbbed and exulted. It called from the
heaving ocean with its many gleaming sails and dark drifting steamer
smoke under the wide sky; it sang from the harbor where the laden