“Say, Crib, ye'd best take a wagon train with ye to bring your dust back.”
Cribbens resented their humor, and after they had passed, chewed fiercely on his mustache.
“I'd like to make a strike, b'God! if it was only to get the laugh on them joshers.”
By noon they were climbing the eastern slope of the Panamint Range. Long since they had abandoned the road; vegetation ceased; not a tree was in sight. They followed faint cattle trails that led from one water hole to another. By degrees these water holes grew dryer and dryer, and at three o'clock Cribbens halted and filled their canteens.
“There ain't any TOO much water on the other side,” he observed grimly.
“It's pretty hot,” muttered the dentist, wiping his streaming forehead with the back of his hand.
“Huh!” snorted the other more grimly than ever. The motionless air was like the mouth of a furnace. Cribbens's pony lathered and panted. McTeague's mule began to droop his long ears. Only the little burro plodded resolutely on, picking the trail where McTeague could see but trackless sand and stunted sage. Towards evening Cribbens, who was in the lead, drew rein on the summit of the hills.
Behind them was the beautiful green Panamint Valley, but before and below them for miles and miles, as far as the eye could reach, a flat, white desert, empty even of sage-brush, unrolled toward the horizon. In the immediate foreground a broken system of arroyos, and little cañóns tumbled down to meet it. To the north faint blue hills shouldered themselves above the horizon.
“Well,” observed Cribbens, “we're on the top of the Panamint Range now. It's along this eastern slope, right below us here, that we're going to prospect. Gold Gulch”—he pointed with the butt of his quirt—“is about eighteen or nineteen miles along here to the north of us. Those hills way over yonder to the northeast are the Telescope hills.”
“What do you call the desert out yonder?” McTeague's eyes wandered over the illimitable stretch of alkali that stretched out forever and forever to the east, to the north, and to the south.