THE papers had been signed. Andy Jerome and Dr. Inman Shonto had wired to Los Angeles to explain that they probably would not be home for a month. Smith Morley’s wife had arrived in San Francisco, since the adventurers’ trip to the city had necessitated a change in their route to the Shinbone Country. Several days were spent in outfitting the expedition. And just a week after Dr. Shonto had told Charmian Reemy of the prospectors they set off early in the morning, with Charmian, Andy, and Mr. and Mrs. Morley in the leading car. Two days later, having driven leisurely and stopped at hotels en route, they negotiated a steep, wooded pass and saw the yellow desert stretched out before them, three thousand feet above the sea. Across it continued the road, straight as a carpenter’s chalk-line, until it contracted to a pinpoint in the hazy distance and disappeared with the curvature of the earth. The big cars wallowed into the sandy ruts and continued on. Weird growths were on either side of the road--great flat-palmed cacti, whispering yucca palms, scattering greasewood bushes. The wind was strong, and the sand was driven into the travellers’ faces in waves. Now and then the cars crossed dry lakes, which, before they reached them, had looked deceptively wet. These were smooth, like hardened plaster of Paris, except that now and then the mud, in drying, had cracked and peeled, leaving a sea of shards that extended for many miles. Nothing at all grew on the dark surface of these dry lakes. In the dim distance a hazy line of calico buttes appeared after an hour of fast travel over the desert. As the machines neared them a long line of mountains showed behind the buttes, and the uninitiated of the party were told that between the buttes and the range of wooded mountains lay another stretch of desert as barren as the one they then were crossing. The buttes marked the beginning of the Shinbone Country, which extended into the higher altitudes. In the buttes were the opal claims. They came to an oasis, green with alfalfa. Here for forty years a family had lived because of the artesian water that spurted up from the level land. The cottonwood trees, though they had shed their leaves for the coming winter, looked inviting to the sand-blistered pilgrims. The place was called Diamond H Ranch, and the owner herded his cattle on the desert during winter months, when bunchgrass grew, and drove them to the distant mountains for the summer grazing.