With the sky yellow-green from the gathering sand-storm, night coming on fast and her warning in our ears we struck out into our first desert with a sense of uneasiness, exhilarated a little by the warm beauty of the evening. We seemed to have left all civilization behind, although after passing the last hamlet about nightfall, we had only forty-odd miles more to go. Never shall I forget the eerie charm of that drive. We saw not a soul. Occasionally a jack rabbit, startled as ourselves, leaped athwart the gleam of our lamps. Sometimes we wandered, in the pitchy black, from the guiding Southern Pacific into a maze of twisting trails. Sometimes we dived into a sudden arroyo, wrenching the car about just in time to stay with the road as it serpentined out again. When, now and again, a lonely light far off suggested a lurking bandit, we remembered with a homesick twinge the last words of Toby’s mother, and wondered when we should get a chance to obey them. At four cross roads, the only guide post lay flat midway between the roads. We were obliged to guess at the most likely route. At last we came on the lights of Deming, five miles away, in the valley. We sighed with relief and moved toward them rapidly. And then a figure stepped out from a truck blocked beside the road, and a deep voice called “Stop a moment, please!” At that moment we sincerely wished ourselves back in Mrs. Flanagan’s road house. Then, before Toby could get out the monkey wrench which was our sole weapon of defense, the voice changed shrilly on a high note, and we saw our bandit was a fourteen year old boy. He hopped aboard, never dreaming of the panic he had caused our bandit-beset minds, explaining that his batteries were out of order, and he must return to Deming. He added, naïvely, that his father owned the second best hotel in town, which he recommended if we failed to find a room in the best hotel. Then he swung off the car, and we went on to the Mecca of all Western voyagers,--a clean room, a hot bath, and a Harvey eating house. Like all of the Southwest, Deming was in the midst of an oil boom. Beneath the arid sand and cactus of long unwanted acreage, rich sluggish pools were in hiding, arousing the old gambling spirit of the West. It was a timid soul indeed who had not invested in at least one well. In newspaper offices we saw the day’s quotations chalked on blackboards, and in the windows of real estate agents were greeted by imposing sketches of Deming Twenty Years from Now; no longer half a dozen streets completely surrounded by whirling sand, but a city of oil shafts and sky scrapers. We dropped into a hairdresser’s to be rid of the desert dust, and found a group of ladies as busily discussing oil as were their husbands at the barber’s.