Mosquitoes bred in the sluggish streams, full-fed by recent storms, and when evening fell surrounded us in dense clouds. Their bites are almost as painful to me as bee stings, raising great, red wheals, which itch and burn for days, so that I was nearly wild from the irritation. To add to the general discomfort, my new shoes, which were very heavy for the coming trip across the desert, blistered my feet atrociously, so that when the rear chain broke in crossing a bad gully, I was scarcely able to hobble. And each succeeding day made greater demands on one’s endurance. The country became hilly with stretches of treacherous sand. High bench lands, seamed with narrow ravines, skirted rugged buttes, while to the south and west one caught vistas of barren plains. Small farmhouses perched on the hillsides, and here and there great fields of grain or sprouting corn appeared, with groups of animals grazing in the distance. Dan had managed to mend the damaged chain, but his natural recklessness chafed constantly against my caution, so that each steep descent provoked an argument. At last I flung discretion to the winds and down the hills we flew, bounding from hummock to hummock, swaying, lurching, recovering ourselves by seeming miracles. We had been riding across a jutting arm of bench land, and as we approached a sharp turn in the road, the ground began to fall away abruptly. I endeavoured to slow down, but Dan was of a different mind. Spurred on by his words of ridicule, I permitted the wheel to gain momentum and we spun around the curve at racing speed. A tremendously long and steep declivity lay before us, the strip of road disappearing from our sight in another turn at the bottom of a ravine. My heart leaped convulsively as the wind whistled past my ears, but I had scant time to coddle fear. The strain of handling the heavy tandem at such a speed took all my attention. The pitch increased; we seemed to fly through space. Then the front wheel struck a bed of heavy sand at the curve, and I knew no more. My next sensation was of a shaking, joggling motion and by degrees I discovered that I was lying on my back on the bottom of a farm wagon that was jolting slowly up a rutty hillside. Dan, very pale, was bending over me, and the wheel with twisted handle bars and dangling chain was propped alongside. In answer to his anxious inquiries, I undertook a few investigative movements and soon was able to assure him that I suffered from nothing worse than some severe bruises and slight concussion from alighting on my head. He had received a rather deep scratch in the _mêlée_, but otherwise was uninjured.