Adam gave Jinny a drink before he unpacked her. There was a desirable camp site, except that it lacked dead firewood close at hand. Adam removed the pack, being careful to put boxes and bags together and to cover them with the canvas. Then he started out to look for some dead ironwood or mesquite to burn. All the desert growths, mostly greasewood and mesquite, were young and green. Adam searched in one direction and then in another, without so much as finding a stick. Next he walked west along the rocky wall, and had no better success until he came to a deep recession in the wall, full of brush; and here with considerable labor he collected a bundle of dry sticks. With this he trudged back toward camp. Before long he imagined he saw smoke. “Queer how those smoke trees fool a fellow,” he said. And even after he thought he smelled smoke, he was sure of deception. But upon nearing the green thicket that hid his camp he actually did see thin blue smoke low down against the background of rocky wall. The sight alarmed him. The only explanation which offered itself to his perplexity was the possibility that a prospector had arrived at the spring during his absence and had started a fire. Adam began to hurry. His alarm increased to dread. When he ran around the corner of thicket to his camp site he did see a fire. It was about burned out. There was no prospector, no signs of packs or burros. And Jinny was gone! “What--what?” stammered Adam, dropping his bundle of sticks. He was bewildered. A sense of calamity beset him. He ran forward. “Where--where’s my pack?” he cried. The dying fire was but the smoldering remains of his pack. It had been burned. Blankets, boxes, bags had been consumed. Some blackened utensils lay on the ground near the charred remains of his canvas. Only then did the truth of this catastrophe burst upon him. All his food had been burned. CHAPTER X Some moments elapsed before the stunning effects of this loss had worn off enough to permit Adam’s mind to connect the cause of it with the disappearance of Jinny. After careful scrutiny of tracks near where the pack had lain, Adam became convinced that Jinny was to blame for his destitution. His proofs cumulated in a handful of unburnt matches that manifestly had been flung and scattered away from the pack. The tricky burro, taking advantage of Adam’s absence, had pulled the canvas off the pack, and in tearing around in the boxes for morsels to eat she had bitten into the box of matches and set them on fire. “I didn’t think--I didn’t think!” cried Adam, remembering the advice of Dismukes. Overcome by the shock, he sank upon the ground and fell prey to gloomy and hopeless forebodings.