and sand dunes completely hid it from sight. But after some skirmishing about canal beds and bridges, we reached the broad shape looming up in the dark, and found that Toby had dug the car out, wrapped an old tire about the spinning back wheel, and driven it on firm ground. Our rescuers put us on the road to our night’s objective, and with mild patience told us we could hardly miss it, it being a straight road all the way. They did not compliment us too highly, for by the time Venus had risen we reached the hotel, kept by a sad, distrustful one-eyed man from Maine, who in spite of twenty years’ residence still abhorred Texas as a desert. He fed us liberally with baked beans and apple pie before showing us to a bare, clean little room furnished with a tin basin and a patchwork quilt. We were nearly dead. We had much with which to reproach luck and each other, but by mutual consent postponed it and sank into peaceful sleep in the lumpy bed. As somebody said, luck is a fickle dame. Having flouted us to her heart’s content, she tagged docilely at our heels as we started for El Paso next morning. Two hundred miles away, the average run was ten hour’s time, but we made it in eight and a half. The garage-man’s wife’s cousin was a dentist on Huntington Avenue, and the extraordinary coincidence drew her to us almost as by the bonds of kinship. She hurried her spouse into mending our tires promptly, and speeding us on our way with valuable directions. It was ten when we left, but moving westward into Rocky Mountain time saved us an hour. Once out of the village we encountered the enveloping desert again. Driving in those sandy tracks became a new sport,--we learned to make the sand skid us around corners without decreasing our speed; we could calculate with nicety when a perceptible drag on the wheels warned us to shift gears. And then they must be shifted instantly, for at a moment’s delay the car sank deep, and mischief was done which only shoveling could undo. Once we found ourselves facing another car blocking the road, and sunk in thick, unpacked sand. We could not turn out, and the instant’s stop put us in a like predicament. They wistfully asked us to pull them out, but as we were heavier than they, and would have made two obstacles instead of one in the road, we had to refuse the only help asked of us, who had so many times been the beneficiaries. We left them to an approaching mule team, after they had returned good for evil by pushing us out of the sand. For twenty miles we had hard going, but by spinning through the sand in low gear we escaped trouble.