He scowled and looked about with a frowning stare. His gaze again shifted downward. Suddenly he shrugged and put the wrong end of his unlighted cigar in his mouth. "That's the queerest cigar I ever had," he growled, as he made his way to his horse. "It won't stay lit because it wants to be swallowed." He mounted and rode slowly back toward the far-reaching stretches of desert. Once he halted and turned in his saddle for a backward look. "He had the makings of the worst bad man this country ever saw," he muttered aloud. "Now, if that woman and another country--but first they've got to get across." * * * * * On the western edge of a great, ghastly plain of white, in which a deceiving, distant glow was mirrored in the desert dawn, two figures, a man and a girl, stood hand in hand. Three shaggy burros, heavily laden, stood behind them. The burros saw not the Death Flat ahead, for they were asleep. And the man and the girl saw not the frightful white, as of powdered skulls, bare, sinister, sunbaked, but a vision of a little house in a fragrant green meadow, with golden fields on either side of a peaceful river, and forests ranging up to distant hills. THE END TO THE READER If you have enjoyed this book, you will be glad to know that there are many others just as well written, just as interesting, to be had in the Chelsea House Popular Copyright Novels. The stories which we will publish in this line have never appeared in book form before, and they are without question the best value in the way of cloth-bound books that has been offered to the reading public in many years. CHELSEA HOUSE 79 Seventh Avenue--New York City