Whoever would, was doomed to speedy disappointment. Our boulevard seemed to lack continuity; several times we were forced to forsake it and make detours back over the trails. Soon our highway, which was leveled an easy grade above the desert, began to rise in the air, until in the pitch dark it assumed an alarmingly dizzy elevation. About the same time the marks of traffic faded. We passed through a morass of crushed stone, and thence into thick sand, over which we skidded alarmingly toward the edge of the bank. Perhaps we were eighteen or twenty feet above the desert, but when we veered for the edge, it seemed like a hundred. The heavy sand clung to our wheels, making progress hard and skidding easy. We passed through a cut with heavy banks on both sides, and in front a black shadow. “Why, where’s the road?” exclaimed Toby. There was none. We were left high and dry, with a sandhill on both sides, steep banks dropping down among rocks and gullies to the desert, a yawning hole in front with a precipitous drop of twenty feet, and two feet of leeway, in which to turn our car. We backed cautiously down the side, and struck a boulder. We turned forward a few inches, and came upon a heap of sand. Toby got out, and directed our maneuvers, inch by inch. Finally we had the car broadside to the jumping-off place, and there we stuck, tilted at a crazy angle, one headlight almost directly above the other. In the heavy, untracked sand we could not move an inch. “Well,” I said bitterly, “here we spend the night. Twelve miles from nowhere!” At that four men with a lantern sprang up from nowhere. “How kind of you to come,” we said to the men, assuming they were there to rescue, not to rob. “We saw your headlights,” answered the one who held the lantern, “and from the way they were slanted we concluded you was in trouble and we might as well come over. We’re working on the new state road, and this is as far as it’s got. Our camp’s just over there, and Green River’s twelve miles further.” Backing and filling, with their four brawny shoulders to the wheels, we soon got the car out of the sand heap and turned about, but the deep sand was crowned so high that for a stretch we skidded along at so sharp an angle that only the tug of the sand kept us from turning turtle. Our friends put us on our way, going a half mile out of their own to do so. The sleepy clerk at Green River was locking the hotel up for the night as we stopped before his door. “My, you’re in luck,” said he. “If the midnight train hadn’t been late this hotel would have been closed up tight.”