They struck the floor of the furnace. Details began to emerge. One was a fat man, another was a gaunt man, a third was a little man--all smooth of face. Then there was a man with a scrubby beard. And there was another smooth-faced man, riding a little apart from the others, a little more alert, perhaps, his garments not their garments, his horse a little rounder of outline, a little more graceful of movement. They might have been in conversation, these riders out of the solitude. But all were heavily armed. And all rode slowly, leisurely, taking their own good time, as if this in itself was duty, with orders uncertain, or with no orders at all. They rode on across the desert within the desert, presenting three-quarter profile, then, with an hour passing, full profile, then, with another hour passing, quarter profile, and now, with yet another hour passing, five agreeable backs--broad, most of them, all topped with sombreros, and all motionless save for the movement of their mounts. On and on they rode into the south, underneath a blistering sun at full zenith. They became mere dots again upon the pulsating horizon, mere specks, and disappeared in the shimmering haze. Solitude, the voice of solitude, the death-stillness, throbbing silence, reigned once more. Not an animal, not an insect, not a tree, struck the eye. The arid and level floor was again clean of movement. The sun glared, revealing here and there out of the drifts a bleached skeleton, in this speechless thing mutely proclaiming its own sway. Beneath the sun the horizon, an immense girdle, swept round in unbroken line, pulsating. The turquoise sky hung low, spotless and shimmering, brooding, dipping smoothly down to the horizon and to the long sand-dune running to northeast and southwest. Skirting this dune, reaching to it out of the east, then swerving off to the south beyond, lay the almost unbroken expanse, the desert within the desert, its dead, flat, monotonous brown relieved here and there with alternating sagebrush and cactus and _amole_, stretching back a distance of a hundred miles to the shack. CHAPTER XV CHANGE OF MASTERS The interior of the shack was comparatively bare. On the floor, which was of adobe, and therefore hard and smooth as cement, were five three-legged stools and a table, all crude and evidently shaped out of saplings from the grove. There was but a single window, high up, tiny and square, containing neither glass nor frame, which looked out upon the south. Built against the walls were some shelves, upon which lay a scant supply of tinware, and in the opposite wall was a tier of bunks, just now littered with soiled blankets. Evidently this place had sheltered these men frequently, for each moved about it with easy familiarity, and obviously it was a retreat, a rendezvous, a hiding-place against the range police.