Bim and the Indian had made perhaps five miles along the eastward-bearing road beyond the point of the meeting with Urgo’s ruffians when the Papago turned off the single wheel track and into the sparse scrub. A low range separated them from the rurales; the crumbling of that range into desert flatness lay a good ten miles to southward. Once around that, the little car could be tooled behind a screen of hillocks back onto the Road of the Dead Men and ahead of the rurales, but only by exercise of the most delicate driving judgment. “Smack through the country--without roads?” whiffles the incredulous driver of limousines along sedate highways in Pennsylvania and New York. Exactly that. It is done in Arizona and Sonora--thirty or fifty miles of unfenced desert; compass to pick up direction and shovel to dig out of arroyos. Johnny Cameron, of Ajo, even herds wild horses on a motorcycle. Quelele stopped to let air out of his tires that they might better grip the sand and pad through soft places. Then began a jackrabbit skittering and twisting ’cross country, with every hundred yards offering the hazard of a broken axle and the little desert skimmer standing on its nose at the brink of a dry wash while its passengers flattened the descent by hasty shovel work. Like a rowboat in mid-Atlantic the puny contraption of tin and steel took the long waves, snarling and grumbling over sand-traps, boggling through thickets of _cholla_ which rigged its tires with festoons of prickly stubs. Quelele’s hands possessed magic. They knew just when to give a twist to the wheel, when to shoot the spark ahead. Every hummock and pitfall was read by them surely and swiftly. The little car rounded the end of the mountain range and shot back on a tangent for the road where Urgo and his rurales were travelling. With a grunt Quelele suddenly let the car trundle to a halt; he clambered out and knelt by the radiator. Drip-drip of precious water from some stab of brush through the honeycomb of cells there. Bim sacrificed his tobacco in the emergency. The flaky mass was poured into the radiator with fresh water from a canteen; the stuff found the leak and, swelling, stopped it. Then on and on, around the flanks of the little hills and across wide flats where the brush was scattered. Always Quelele was sure to keep a height of land between the car and the Road of the Dead Men until finally he brought his gas mustang to a stop on the crest of a lava ridge and pointed back. Against the eastern horizon showed a crawling inch-worm in the desert’s immensity--Urgo and the rurales. Below the lava crest and near at hand was the objective of their detour, the road that led to the Casa O’Donoju and those who must be warned.