[XXII. THE END OF A LONG JOURNEY]
CHAPTER I.—MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES.
The motor boat Rambler lay pulling at her anchor-chain in the muddy waters of the Gulf of California. To the North opened the wide, shallow mouth of the Colorado river, with its many shifting currents and treacherous sandbars.
Eastward stretched a Mexican desert, where flourished cacti and forms of animal life unknown to other parts of the world. Beyond this waste of sand, which had, in times long gone by, formed the bed of a lake, rose the peaks and ridges of the Sierra del Pinacates mountains.
To the South the Montague islands shut out the body of the Gulf, and Westward a patch of desert led out to a mountain range. There are two volcanic elevations running down the peninsula, and beyond them lies the tumbling Pacific ocean, a hundred miles away.
The sun was lifting out of the desert to the East, rising round and red and hot, like the bottom of a great brass kettle, and the chill of the dark hours was changing to the stifling, long-scorching heat which is a thing of the desert the world over.
Those who have followed the adventures of the Rambler and her crew, will remember her last on the Columbia. After a journey through the wild canyons and forest-lined reaches of the great river of the Northwest Territories, the motor boat had been shipped to Guaymas, where she had taken to the water again in the Gulf of California.