Bill was amused, but he was also convinced that Tommy would presently become a bore. He was interested to note that Luella preserved a dignified silence all through the evening. One yellow eye on the latest recruit, she sat humped upon the crotch of a packsaddle with her green feathers ruffled moodily, still sulking over her incarceration with Sister Mitchell.
At Parowan, whither they arrived one sultry afternoon with a smell of rain in the air, Tommy went to work like an old hand on the desert. Bill watched him unobtrusively and decided that the storekeeper had shown pretty good judgment. While they were unpacking the burros, Tommy cocked an eye at the sullen clouds that tore themselves on Parowan Peak only to mend immediately and crowd lower down the slope, and began gathering heavy rocks which he piled in a row on the lower edge of Bill's tent, and to test the guy ropes and drive the pegs deeper.
"She's a cloud-burst comin', er I never seen wan," he observed complainingly, when he was again lugging the supplies into the tent. "Them taties c'd stay outside, but watter will cause the bacon t' mold, Mr. Dale. An' beans is never the same, wancet they've been wrinkled wit' rain watter an' dried agin. I dunno, but that's been my experience wit' grub. I'd git it all under cover, if it was mine, Mr. Dale."
"Does look bad, for a fact," Bill admitted. "I was going up to the workings; but I reckon we'd better make camp snug. Now, Hez, what'll happen if you bust a lung? What's on your fool mind?"
Hez appeared to have a good deal on his mind. Presently his excitement was explained by four loaded burros laboring up the draw, followed by three men who hurried the animals up the uneven slope. Bill frowned when he saw them, wondering if they had followed him.
But the men were strangers to him. If they came from Goldfield, he thought, they must have hurried,—because Bill himself had made the trip in record time. He nodded as they came up, and sent the impolite Hezekiah into the tent with his hindquarters drooping guiltily. Two of the men had the look of mining engineers (for your desert dwellers learn to judge a man's profession by the way he dresses and carries himself on the desert). The third, who evidently had charge of the burros, had "desert rat" written all over him.
"Spring up here still workin', mister?" the burro driver asked in a flat voice raised shrilly by way of attaining some volume. "Used to be a spring up here."
"The spring is still there," Bill replied neutrally.
A pleasant, short man came forward, smiling and holding out his hand, never doubting his welcome.
"Glad to see you, sir. My name is Rayfield; Walter B. Rayfield. My partner, here, is John S. Emmett, a mining expert of whom you may have heard, if you're the mining man you look to be. Working for the government, making a report of the gold, silver and copper possibilities of Nevada. I examine the country for gold and silver, and Emmett, here, takes care of the copper report. We've been allotted what is called the Furnace Creek quadrangle. We're working the northern part first, so as to have cooler weather for the Death Valley neighborhood."