The shortest distance between two given points is a straight line, or so the books have it. I followed my early schooling, and headed straight for the tank. The shortest distance between two points in the Desert is not a straight line. I there and then learned this lesson. Between that river-ford and the main road, meandering somewhere to the left, were at least a thousand different obstructions, skillfully concealed by Nature, deceptive in the half dark, and treacherous traps when night came on: sand dunes that were as bogs; wide, shallow arroyos; scrubby slopes cut by wicked little gullies, all flanked and faced by other sand-meshes. In and through all this the team tugged wearily, at times stopping of themselves for breath, at times plunging desperately. A dozen times I lashed the horses to the wheel and went ahead to plot the way; a dozen times I returned to find them wound back on their haunches, in their efforts to free themselves from the overloaded wagon and the fool that had come out of the East. About midnight, after traveling to every point of the modern compass, I tried a last rise, determined, if this failed, to unharness and ride in, trusting to the horses to find their oats. And topping this little ridge was an old, half-hidden road. It angled away from the river toward the place where a real road ought to be. We swung down it, and an hour later, at an easy jog, the axles holding- and groaning-out to the last, we reached the Agency gate. The sleepy barn-man, an Indian, came out to meet me. “Where you been?” he asked, with that innocent curiosity his tribe is noted for. “Have trouble findin’ the road?” “No,” I told him, feeling a confidence born of relieved anxiety. “Nope! just started from town late.” There is nothing like assurance after a distressing evening. And too, had I not landed a cook? I could not spoil such a triumph by admitting that I had been lost. V DESERT LIFE AND LITERATURE The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.—T. B. Macaulay: Johnson