By this time Peggy was willing to start anywhere if she was moderately sure the camp lay in that direction, and Roy's enthusiasm was contagious. Filled with renewed hope the brother and sister struck out for the cone-shaped peak. Its naked base showed violet in the evening shadows, while its sharply rounded top was bathed in a rosy glow of light. Even in her agitation Peggy could not help admiring the wonderful palette of colors into which the dying day transformed the dreary desert sea.
Beyond the range the vast expanse of solitude spread glitteringly. All crimson and violet, with deep purple marking the depressions in its monotonous surface, and here and there the dry bed of one of its spasmodic lakes, showing almost black in its obscurity. These lakes were water-filled only in the early spring, and their moisture had long since died out of them. Under a noon-day sun they showed like shallow bowls filled with scintillating crystals.
But, had they known it, Roy and Peggy were striking out on a course precisely opposite to that which they should have taken. Every step of the advance to the sugar-loaf shaped peak was a step in the wrong direction. Like many other travelers, whose bones whiten on the alkali, they had become confused by the monotonous similarity of one feature of the dreary hills to the other.
The true extent of their blunder did not dawn upon them till they had reached the foot of the queer peak, and even the most minute survey of their surroundings failed to show them any trace of the camp. No cheerful glow of a fire illumined the fast darkening sky. For all the signs of human life they could discover, they might have been alone in a dead world. In fact, the scenery about them did resemble very closely those maps of the moon—the dead planet—which we see in books of astronomy. There were the same jagged, weird peaks, the same dark centers, dead and extinct, and the same brooding hush of mystery which we associate with such scenes.
Somewhere off in the distance a coyote howled dismally as the sun rushed under the horizon and the world was bathed in sudden darkness.
Peggy turned to her brother with a low little moan. She caught her arms about his neck and hung there sobbing. In his solicitude for her, Roy forgot his own dismay and misery, which was perhaps a good thing, for by the time Peggy recovered herself, the boy was already casting about for some means of passing the night as comfortably as possible.
"We'll stick it out till daylight some how, Peg," he promised, "and I'm confident that by that time they'll send up one of the monoplanes, and from up in the air they'll have no difficulty in locating us."
The thought was a comforting one, and Peggy's first flush of passionate grief and fear gave way to calmer feelings. No doubt it would be as Roy had forecast. After all, she argued, it was only one night in the open, and they had their weapons and plenty of ammunition.
By a stroke of good luck, Roy had stuffed his pockets full of the hard round biscuits known as "pilot bread" before they left the camp. He also had matches and a canteen full of water. Poor Peggy still carried the lone jack-rabbit, the trophy of her gun, and Roy at once set about grubbing up sage brush and making a fire with the oleaginous roots as he had seen Mr. Bell do.
Before long a roaring blaze was ready, and then the boy began the task of skinning and preparing the rabbit for cooking. Peggy turned away during this operation, but summoned up fortitude enough to gaze on while her brother spitted the carcass on the cleaning rod of his rifle and broiled it in primitive fashion.