The road over the mountains was not completed, said the secretary, but they could have another machine from the valley to meet them, and in that machine make the circuit as proposed. At ten o'clock that night Rogeen, the captain, and the secretary left the machine and the chauffeur at the top of the mountain grade, and began the two-mile descent to the ancient bed of the sea--the desert round the Laguna Salada. Bob's satisfaction at winning the governor was more than overbalanced by the torturing fear that it would all be too late. He believed they would be in time to stop Reedy from getting away with his four hundred thousand dollars' worth of cotton. Jenkins would not start until he had lost hope of getting that $150,000 from the ranchers for water. But Bob feared he was already too late to save his own cotton and Chandler's. The point on the mountain where they left the machine was almost a mile high. The descent to the valley was by a steep and precarious trail. The captain who was familiar with it took the lead. It was twelve-thirty when they reached the road at the bottom which led to Mexicali. The machine was not there. "What do you suppose is the matter?" Bob's voice sounded surprisingly cool but a little flat, even to himself. Although the hot winds struck them here, his skin felt clammily cold. "He'll be here by and by." The secretary lighted a cigarette. He did not share Bob's anxiety and felt no undue fret over a little delay. "I telegraphed the _comandante_ to send driver and car here about midnight. He'll be here before long," he reassured. For an hour Bob walked back and forth peering at every turn far into the desert, listening until his ears ached. But no sight of car, no sound of puffing engine. Another hour passed, and another. His anxiety increased until the delay seemed unbearable. They waited nine hours. At last they saw the black bug of a machine crawling snortingly across the twenty-mile strip of sand between them and the pass through the Cocopa Mountains. At nine-thirty the car arrived, a powerful machine of expensive make. The chauffeur was a slender, yellowish young Mexican who delighted in taking dangerous curves at fifty miles an hour and who savagely thrilled at the terrific punishment his car could take and still go. Through the secretary Bob told him of the plan to skirt the Laguna Salada and go south round the Cocopas instead of going through the pass. This way they would follow the ancient bed of the Gulf of California and forty miles south turn across the desert of the Lower Colorado, thence northeastward until they struck the trail along the river. By this route they could reach the Red Butte, the head of the Dillenbeck canal, almost as quickly as through the pass and by Mexicali, while at the same time they would follow for thirty miles up the river trail down which Jenkins' trucks must pass on the way to the head of the Gulf. "Do you think we can do it?" Bob asked the chauffeur.