Another hour, and he still was on the _caliche_ outcrop. He stopped to consider. Where in the name of all the angels was that road--the Road of the Dead Men? If he’d driven the car a little south of it during the sand storm, surely Guadalupe must have cut tangent to it by this time. And if the road passed over the _caliche_ flat there’d be wheel marks; that was sure. Miss that road and miss the Papago’s trail both--why then old Doc Stooder’d be a goner! He tried to follow his own back trail by such small signs as the scratch of a hobnail against an embedded rock and a thin print of a sole in a pocket of dust. A while and he had lost even that. He stopped and swabbed his streaming face with a shirtsleeve--he now was carrying his coat. “By the eternal, Stooder, you gotta do something--and do it dam’d pronto!” Once more he turned on his own tracks. Better go back and find that putrid Papago’s trail and let the road go to the devil. Whole half hour wasted a’ready--good half hour, by criminy! with a drink just that much farther off. It was not so easy finding the scored rocks and the stamp of a heel in pools of dust; not so easy as the first essay. For the sun was at meridian now and foreshortened little shadows to nothingness. Plump! he came to the edge of the hardpan and into the sandy soil. No tracks there. Should he bear to right or left in circling the edge of the _caliche_ on his hunt for the footprints? If he guessed wrong where’d he be? “Oh, dear God!” He turned to the left and resumed his tramp. Furnace light refracted from the sand seared into his eyes, which must be always kept downward peering--spying. His mouth now was dry as rotted wood. Something alien there kept bothering him by pressing against the roof of it. He explored with his fingers and discovered the alien object to be his tongue, which was swelling. “But my mind’s clear--clear as a bell. Got a steady mind anyway. Gotta hold onto that or I’m a gone coon.” A slight breeze struck his right arm more penetratingly than it should. Stooder shifted his glance to his arm, held crooked. “Good God! Coat’s gone!” Dropped somewhere--that coat in whose pocket was a prescription book; among its pages the map of the treasure site. The precious map showing where lay the bell and the beam! The man whirled and started on a staggering run along the rim of the _caliche_ he had been travelling. “Must find that coat! Don’t find the coat an’ I lose the pearls an’ the gold--the pearls an’ the gold!” He halted as if shot. Down the wind came to him the faint tolling of a bell. _Dong--dong._ Silvery throb of a swinging bell. Measured, unhurried; like the sounding of a bell for mass of a Sunday morning. The Doc had heard the bell of San Xavier sending its call across the alfalfa fields of a Sunday morning, just like that. Even as he strained his ears to drink in the full miracle of it the sound faded, ceased.