"Please say burro," I pleaded. "It gives a better atmosphere. Besides it is not a mule, it's an ass."
"Those are the Old Dad Mountains over there, those big rosy ones. That's where he is going, up the long path of sand. He will camp there. Perhaps he is not a prospector, he may have a mine already."
"Of course he has one," I assented. "All the prospectors are dead. They died of thirst in Death Valley."
"My prospector did not. He is going to his mine. He tries to work it himself but it does not pay very well because he can't get enough out, and he can't sell it because too many booms have failed, and nobody will invest. So he goes up and down in the sun and has a good time."
Perhaps you could have a good time going up and down in the sun through those empty spaces that stretched so endlessly on either side of the track. I wondered if we might not go to the Imperial Valley and see that strange thing, the new Salton Sea, a lake in the desert; but Charlotte objected because that part of the white blank was partially under irrigation, too near the coast, and would be too civilized and full of ranches. I doubted much if the tired east went there for I thought that it was the desert like this, only hotter, worse. She declared that the tired east went everywhere that it could get to. Evidently it could not reach Mojave, for certainly it was not rushing around in automobiles trying to be happy, nor pouring the savings for its short holiday into the money bags of conscienceless hotel companies. Mojave was indeed a blank, a wild and lonely place.
"I think," Charlotte remarked after a time, "that we will go to Death Valley."
"Why?"
"Because I am tired of looking at the Twenty Mule Team Borax boxes and wondering what kind of place they came from that could have a name like that."
I thought it was not a sufficient reason for me to risk my life.