“Huh, you mangy bag o’ bones! Think you’re goin’ have a feed off’n me, do you? Well, I’m tellin’ you, you got a mighty long tromp ahead!” On through the desert slogged the man and on trotted the freaky animal whose colour made him outcast even from his own kind. These twain alone under the hot sky: two mites of life in a land of death, each blindly following the call of every life cell in him to live--live! What had been a piled-up cloud of blue and faint rose to the south when the Doc started his hike had unfolded hour by hour into definite form. Little by little pinnacles sharp as ice splinters lifted from a mountain mass and detached mountains with their tops blown off stood against the horizon like truncated columns of an acropolis. Here were the mazes of the Pinacate, raw shards of volcanoes and wilderness of lava flows down by the Gulf sandhills; country so fire-scarred and forbidding that even the Indian nomads give it wide berth. Only the big-horn sheep possess it, living no man knows how. The undeviating trend of the trail southward towards this ragged mass had perplexed Stooder when first he became conscious of it. The auto should be lying somewhere off to eastward if he didn’t miss his guess; those mountains ahead were strange to him. But he could not know how far nor where he had wandered the day before; even though he thought long since he should have come upon a second line of footprints--his own--running along with those of the Papago, yet there was no denying he was following the right trail back to the auto and the cached tomatoes. There sure could not be two lines of footprints here in this least-travelled part of Altar. So ran the mind of him whom the mocking Gog and Magog of the desert’s diarchy had put on a false trail to desolation. Deeper and deeper into a waterless scrap-heap of forgotten ages his steps took him. And the albino coyote was his aloof companion. CHAPTER XXIII INTO THE FURNACE Meanwhile from another direction adventurers were moving through the night upon the slag mountains of Pinacate. Empty space of Altar’s ultimate sweep was become almost populous. A strange company this, which passed ghostily under the great lights of the near stars with only the clink of bridle metal and pack mule’s canteens to give tempo to the march; Benicia O’Donoju, the desert girl, moved to this risky hazard by compulsion of an incubus of fate visited upon her through inheritance down the generations of her people; Grant Hickman, man of cities and crowds, whom destiny had whirled out into a country of the world’s dawn; Bagley the Arizonan, taker of chances, seeker after rainbow ends; and the two Papagoes, Quelele and El Doctor Coyote Belly, on whom was spread thin the veneer of so-called civilization.