Cash got up and went to the doorway, looking out over Bud's shoulder at the spiritless donkeys trailing in to water. Beyond them the desert baked in its rim of hot, treeless hills. Above them the sky glared a brassy blue with never a could. Over a low ridge came Monte and Pete, walking with heads drooping. Their hip bones lifted above their ridged paunches, their backbones, peaked sharp above, their withers were lean and pinched looking. In August the desert herbage has lost what little succulence it ever possessed, and the gleanings are scarce worth the walking after. “They're pretty thin,” Cash observed speculatively, as though he was measuring them mentally for some particular need. “We'd have to grain 'em heavy till we struck better feed. And pack light.” Bud answered his thought. “The question is, where shall we head for, Bud? Have you any particular idea?” Cash looked slightingly down at the assayer's report. “Such as she is, we've done all we can do to the Burro Lode, for a year at least,” he said. “The assessment work is all done--or will be when we muck out after that last shot. The claim is filed--I don't know what more we can do right away. Do you?” “Sure thing,” grinned Bud. “We can get outa here and go some place where it's green.” “Yeah.” Cash meditated, absently eyeing the burros. “Where it's green.” He looked at the near hills, and at the desert, and at the dreary march of the starved animals. “It's a long way to green country,” he said. They looked at the burros. “They're tough little devils,” Bud observed hopefully. “We could take it easy, traveling when it's coolest. And by packing light, and graining the whole bunch--” “Yeah. We can ease 'em through, I guess. It does seem as though it would be foolish to hang on here any longer.” Carefully as he made his tests, Cash weighed the question of their going. “This last report kills any chance of interesting capital to the extent of developing the claim on a large enough scale to make it profitable. It's too long a haul to take the ore out, and it's too spotted to justify any great investment in machinery to handle it on the ground. And,” he added with an undernote of fierceness, “it's a terrible place for man or beast to stay in, unless the object to be attained is great enough to justify enduring the hardships.” “You said a mouthful, Cash. Well, can you leave your seven radishes and three hunches of lettuce and pull out--say at daybreak?” Bud turned to him with some eagerness. Cash grinned sourly. “When it's time to go, seven radishes can't stop me. No, nor a whole row of 'em--if there was a whole row.”