It was not a lucky day. Our scant breakfast, lost waterbag and an unhappy lunch, our locked trunk and all, were but the-precursors of a worse afternoon. The air was thick with yellow dust, and the western sky, sickly green, showed columns of whirling, eddying sand to right or left of us. Though we followed the Southern Pacific with dog-like devotion we lost our way once in a crooked maze of wagon tracks which led us to a swamp, and had to drive back ten miles to the nearest house to ask directions. To make up for lost time, in the bitter, reckless mood every driver knows, when nobody in the car dare speak to him, I raced for two hours at forty-five, through sandy, twisting tracks, with the car rocking like a London bus, and Toby clinging to the side, not daring to remonstrate, for it was she who had lost us our way. Each turn was a gamble, but the curves were just gentle enough to hold us to our course. [Illustration: OUR FIRST CAMP, TEXAS. “I tried to build a fire.”] We had every chance of making our night’s stop before dark, when the air oozed gently out of the rear tire. Behind us a sandstorm rising in a shifting golden haze lifted twisted columns against the vivid green sky, over which dramatic dark clouds drove, while a spectacular sunset lighted the chains of cold dark blue and transparent mauve mountains on both sides. It was a glorious but ominous sight, and the tire meant delay. A flat tire, however, acts on Toby like a bath on a canary. The jack holds no mysteries for her, and tire rims click into place at sound of her voice. And our peculiar luck had halted us within a few yards of the only house we had passed all afternoon. Having learned that frail womanhood need neither toil nor spin in Texas, I was for seeking aid, but Toby scorned help, and so painted the joys of independence that though it was hot and dusty and the sand storm threatened, I bent to her will. And the next moment, the key which locked engine, tool-box and spare tire, broke off in the padlock. As I had with unprecedented prudence bought a duplicate in New York, we were not completely stranded, but that, I mentioned bitterly to Toby, was no fault of hers. Only a cold chisel could release the spare tire, and we found we had none. “I will now go for help,” I said to Toby who was defiantly pretending to do something to the locked tire with a hammer, “as I should have at first but for your foolish pride.” As stately as I might with hair blown by the wind, yellow goggles, leather coat and a purple muffler tied over my hat, I retreated toward the ranch-house. In the kitchen I startled a grizzled old couple sitting near the fire. When I explained our predicament, and begged the loan of a cold chisel the old man asked, “You two girls all alone?” When I admitted we were, he called to his son in the next room, “Horace, go see what you can do for the ladies.”