turned off at the last side street to find his car. There were no lights near, which was the reason he had chosen this dark place to park. Cars had a habit of disappearing around Las Vegas. He walked clear out into the desert without locating the antiquated automobile that he called his own. Turning back he concluded he had missed the street. Perhaps in the darkness he had gotten turned around. He went clear to the electric light which marked the corner where he had turned off. As his brain was a little befogged he could not be sure of direction.
As he nearly reached the corner a big car whirled up and stopped with a roar. Three men leaped out. One ran across under the light to disappear up the side street. The other two halted to peer in Lynn’s direction.
“She went this way.”
“I saw her run under the light. She had a blanket round her.”
“Not down that street,” came a sharp voice from the car. “She went across here. Hurry!”
Lynn had halted under a tree. He knew he could be seen if they looked in his direction, and he did not want to be caught in a suspicious position, so he walked boldly out.
“Wait! Someone comin’,” whispered the nearest of the two men.
“Halt! Who’re you?”
Lynn found himself confronted by two men whose faces he could not see distinctly under their wide-brimmed hats. His quick eye detected the menacing right hand of one thrust into his coat pocket, which protruded ominously. There was a gun there in the grip of a man with murder in his heart.
“What’s this—a holdup?” asked Lynn.
“Oke, you guessed right,” came the rough reply, and the man poked the concealed gun against Lynn’s abdomen. “Look him over, Gip.”
The second ruffian leaned close to scrutinize Lynn’s features.
“Never seen him before,” he said.
“Talk!” ordered the other, punching Lynn with the gun.
“Well, I’m a little—nervous to talk—if I knew anything to say,” replied Lynn. And the fact was that he could scarcely restrain from hitting out with all his might. On the instant, then, the man in the car leaned out, bareheaded, his face in the light. Lynn recognized Ben Sneed.
“Did you see a girl runnin’ along here?”
“No,” replied Lynn.
“We’re losing time,” called Sneed from the car. “Jump in. We’ll follow Ring.”
In another moment Lynn found himself watching the red tail-lights of the car vanishing in the direction the man called Ring had taken.
“Well, what do you know about this?” he muttered. “If I ever meet that bozo again I’ll know him, and will I sock him? I’m telling you. . . . Whew! A gun shoved in your belly doesn’t feel so hot.”
Lynn watched for the car to come back. He heard it for a moment longer. Then the hum ceased. He wondered if Sneed had caught the girl in the blanket.
“A naked girl running away in a blanket!” he muttered, perplexed and wondering. “By gum! That’s the white-slave stuff! But Sneed didn’t strike me as low-down as that.”
He waited there for a little while, watching and conjecturing. Several cars passed, traveling in both directions. At length Lynn decided he had better find his own car if he didn’t want to walk half the night to get home to his cabin. A search down the side street in the direction Sneed had taken failed to locate the car. He began to fear it had been stolen. The loss of the ramshackle vehicle would not concern him, but he wanted to get home. Then he retraced his steps down the street he had first searched, but on the opposite side, and found his car against a background of brush that had made it difficult to distinguish in the dark. Hopping in, he was soon on the move and turned on the road toward Boulder Dam.
Lynn had not noticed the cold until he got going, but with the desert wind whipping in at both sides of his car he became chilled through. He had a comfortable warm sensation, however, where the bulging pocket full of silver dollars sagged heavily against him.
Excitement lingered with him, despite his relief. It had been rather a momentous evening, and no doubt that augmented his thrilling sense of the desert. The bare windiness stretched vague under the stars to the black mountains on the horizon. The dry sweet tang of sage and greasewood stung his cold nose. Far ahead two bright eyes of a car pierced the darkness, and still farther on twinkled a couple of pinpoints. Five miles or more out the red-gold lights of Ben Sneed’s ranch burned against the white-walled hacienda with its dark arches. Lynn had dropped in at the resort several times, but not to stay long. Sneed did not run games of chance.
“I’m curious about that guy,” he mused, as he passed the notorious night club. “Wonder if he got the girl with the blanket? Some life round this Boulder Dam diggings!”
The tremendousness of that engineering project and the magnificence of its setting in the Black Canyon of the Colorado had struck Lynn with staggering force at his very first sight and conception of them. They had changed the direction of his life; they had set him at a man’s job; they had been responsible for the gradual development of his character; they had at length replaced the bitterness of failure and drifting to some vague dream of finding himself on the ladder to success.
It was the desert then that had taken intangible and subtle hold of Lynn Weston. Looking backward he could realize how by imperceptible degrees he had learned to love the lonely and desolate wasteland of rock that the torture of hard labor had blinded him to at first. There seemed to be something permanent for him out here in this Nevada. He conceived the idea right there—why not let this large sum of money he had won be a nucleus to a stake which he could add to during the years Boulder Dam would be in building? Then he could buy a ranch, or start a gold mine, or develop some business on the big inland lake which the dam would flood back into the canyon and basin and which in time would become a sportsman’s paradise. And suddenly he recalled what he had long forgotten—the scorn with which Helen Pritchard had ended their engagement and the more grievous fact of his family evidently having shared her conviction of his hopelessness. But she was wrong, thought Lynn, strangely finding himself free of the old pain; and his family might yet be embarrassingly forced to change their minds, if they did not actually receive help from him.
How this old desert brought home to a man the things that counted—endurance and strength and guts to make life possible and worth living!
Lynn slowed down at the government inspection post, where record was kept of all workers going and coming. He had a cheery word for the guard who passed him.
“Back early, Weston,” was the grinning reply. “Sober an’ broke, I’ll bet.”
“Wrong both ways, Dan. . . . How many cars ahead of me the last hour?”
“Two, I reckon. A truck, an’ a Ford full of micks.”
“So long. I won’t be seeing you for a spell.”
A few miles farther on Lynn clattered up a grade to the pass. That was a gateway to the rough brakes of the canyon country. Back from the road from benches and in coves between the hills gleamed the lights of the camps of the riffraff drawn from all over the United States. It was not a safe place to pass late at night. But Lynn drove slowly because he did not want to hit some murdered
