Lizard Dan, Hurley told the Easterners, had gained his nickname when he was a pocket-hunter in a now far-distant day. He had been lost in the desert at one time and swore when he came out that he had existed by eating _Crotaphytus Wislizeni_ roasted over a fire of dry cacti—the succulence of which saurian is much doubted by the Western white man, although it is a small brother of the South American iguana, there considered a delicacy. However, Dan acquired a nickname and such a fear of the desert thereby that he became the one known specimen of the completely cured desert rat. He never went prospecting again, but instead drove the stage between Crescent City and Canyon Pass. “The boys expecting us at the Pass to-day, Dan?” Joe Hurley had asked early in the journey. “Youbetcha!” “Got your gun loaded?” Dan kicked the heavy double-barreled shotgun at his feet and replied again: “Youbetcha!” “Do—do wild animals infest the road?” Betty had asked stammeringly. “Not much,” said Hurley. “But Dan carries a heap of registered mail in which wild men, rather than wild animals, might be interested.” “Youbetcha!” agreed Dan. Hurley glanced sideways at Betty’s face, caught its expression, and exploded into laughter. “You’ve come to ‘Youbetcha Land,’ Miss Betty,” he said, when he could speak again. “He is a character,” chuckled Hunt on her other side. The suggestion of highwaymen stuck in the girl’s mind. She looked from Lizard Dan’s weapon to the ivory butt of the heavy revolver pouched at Joe Hurley’s waist. These weapons could not be worn exactly for show—an exhibition of the vanity of rather uncouth minds. It fretted her though without frightening her, this phase of Western life. It was not the possibility of gun-fights and brawls and the offices of Judge Lynch that made Betty Hunt shrink from contact with this country and its people. The stagecoach mounted out of the valley—which might, Hunt said, have been fittingly described by Ezekiel—and followed a winding trail through the minor range of hills that divided Crescent City and its purlieus from the Canyon Pass country. The coach pitched and rocked as though it was a sea-going hack. In time they crossed the small divide and came down the watershed into the valley of the East Fork. Borne to their ears on the breeze at last, through the sound of the rumbling coach-wheels and the rattling trace-chains, was another noise. A throbbing rhythm of sound with the dull swish of intermittent streams of water. “The hydraulic pumps at the Eureka Washings,” explained Hurley. “We’ll be in sight of them—and of Canyon Pass—before very long.” The stagecoach lurched around a corner, and the raw, red bench of the riverbank came into view. Steam pumps were noisily at work and men were busy at the sluices into which the gold-bearing earth and gravel were washed down from the high bank.