Nights in the desert along the Line are psychic. They are not of the world of arc lights, elevated trains and the winking jewels of white ways. In that world man has so completely surrounded himself with the tinsels of his own making, the noise of his own multiplied squeakings and chatterings, that he comes to accept the vault above him as under the care of the city parks department. His little tent of night is no higher than the towers of his skyscrapers. But in the desert it is different. Emptiness of day is increased an hundred fold at dark because it leaps up to lose its frontiers behind the stars. Silence of the day is intensified to such a degree that the inner ear catches a humming of supernal machinery in the heavens. The eye measures perspectives between the near and far planets. And the soul of man hearkens to strange voices; sighings from the pale mouths of the desert scrubs, born to a servitude of thirst; whisperings passed from mountain top to mountain top; faint stirrings of the earth relaxed from the torsion of the sun. Doc Stooder, desert familiar as he was, never could blunt his senses to this emptiness of night in the wastes. It awed him, left him itching under half-perceived conceptions of the infinite. Hence the bottle carried handily in his pocket. From time to time as he careered over the road faintly marked by the feeble sparks of his headlights he braked down to have a swig. The more he felt lifted above sombre unrealities about him the greater his impulse to break into song. The iron gate of El Infiernillo heard his roundelay. Miles unreeled behind him. Dim shapes of mountains dissolved to new contours and were left behind. The Doc came to a sharp eastward turning of the road but kept straight ahead out over the untracked flats to southward. He knew his way; the packed sand gave him as good traction as the road. Down and down into the unpeopled wilderness of sandhills and buttes bored the twin sparks of the little car. Another shift of direction and the Doc was teetering up a narrow cañon between high mountain walls. His course was a dry wash, boulder strewn. Only instinct of a desert driver saved him from piling up on some rough block of detritus. Sand traps forced him to shove the engine into low, and the snarling of the exhaust was multiplied from the cañon walls. A light flickered far ahead. A dog barked. The car wallowed and snuffled out of the wash to come to a halt before several silhouettes of huts. People, roused from sleep by the car’s clamour, stood ringed about in curiosity; one held a torch of reeds. “Ho, Guadalupe!” Doc Stooder bellowed. A solid looking Indian with a mat of tousled iron-grey hair stood out under the torch light, grinning a welcome to “El Doctor.”