The chap lighted a cigarette, shrugged, and replied they could do any damn thing. "Let's be doing it then," urged Bob, jumping into the luxurious car. The Laguna Salada is a dead lake made from the overflow of the Colorado River and salted by the ancient bed of the sea. There is no vegetation round it, no life upon it. Along the salty, sandy shore that glitters in the sun there is no road, no broken trail. But the reckless chauffeur hit the sand with the exultant fierceness of a bull fighter. And at every lunge Bob clung to the iron bar overhead and devoutly prayed that the machine would live through it. It did. At one o'clock they swung round the headlands into the main desert--the worst of its size on the continent, the desert of the Lower Colorado. As far as the eye could see stretched the dead waste, so dead that not a mesquite bush, not a cactus, not a living thing grew or crawled or flew. And upon it smote the sun so hot it seemed a flame, and over it boiled a wind like the breath of a volcano. It staggered even the four men, used as they were to the heat of the valley. But it was only forty miles to the river. "Pretty damn bad," the chauffeur muttered in Spanish, and shrugged. Then he turned the nose of his machine northeast, and straight across the hard-packed sand shot into the blistering desert. "Two miles, four miles, six----" Bob counted off, watching the speedometer. Every mile took him nearer the road, the water gates--and Reedy Jenkins. "Eight--nine----" he continued. Then a terrific roar; the machine staggered; the chauffeur swore and applied the brakes. They all jumped out. It was the right hind tire--a hole blown through it ten inches long. The chauffeur kicked it two or three times, lighted a cigarette, and stood looking at the burst tire. Finally he shrugged and glanced across the desert. The wind was blowing hard; there was sand in it. He shrugged and sauntered round to the front of the car, got out his jack and wrenches, took the wheel off, prowled round a quarter of an hour, then lighted another cigarette, again stood looking at the burst tire, and kicked it a few times as though trying to make it wake up and mend itself. "What is the matter?" asked Bob. He had been afraid to ask. "He says," interpreted the secretary, "he has no inner tube. Forgot to bring any." "Then he'll have to run on the rim," said Bob, desperately; "we've got to get out of this." But the secretary nodded toward the radiator which roared as though about to blow up. "Where is his water?" Rogeen felt more than the heat surging through his head. The chauffeur sauntered round the car twice as though looking for it. "Says," explained the secretary, "he had a can but must have lost it."