PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY[Transcriber's Notes]

CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
[PROLOGUE]1
I[WHAT HAPPENED ON THE LIMITED]17
II[A GIRL NAMED BENICIA]25
III[DOC STOODER]36
IV[COLONEL URGO REPAYS]51
V[THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE]65
VI[JUSTICE]76
VII[THE CHAIN GANG]85
VIII[THE HEART OF BENICIA]98
IX[GOLD AND PEARLS]108
X[AT THE CASA O’DONOJU]112
XI[THE MARK OF EL ROJO]129
XII[DESERT SECRETS]145
XIII[CROSSCURRENTS]159
XIV[REVELATION]168
XV[WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT]178
XVI[ACCUSATION]184
XVII[THE ORDEAL]195
XVIII[THE DESERT INTERVENES]211
XIX[THIRST]219
XX[THE COMING OF EL DOCTOR]232
XXI[TREASURE QUEST]247
XXII[ALTAR TAKES ITS TOLL]257
XXIII[INTO THE FURNACE]266
XXIV[STORM]279
XXV[TREASURE TROVE]293

DUST OF THE DESERT

[PROLOGUE]

Roads of men thread the world. They thunder with a life flood. They are vibrant with a pulse of affairs. By land and water and air they link to-day to to-morrow. But El Camino de los Muertos (the Road of the Dead Men) is a dim highway leading nowhere but back and back to forgotten yesterdays. Its faint sign-posts once were vivid in lettering of tears and blood. Its stages were measured by the sum of all human hardihood. Faith, valour, reckless adventuring, thirst for gold, love o’ women—these the links in the measuring chain that marked its course through a dead land. And black crosses formed of lava stones laid down in the sand; these abide over all the length of the Road of the Dead Men from Caborca to Yuma to cry to the white-hot sky of slain hopes and faith betrayed in those buried years gone.

The priest-adventurers of New Spain first blazed this trail through an unknown wilderness. Restless pioneers of the Society of Jesus and the Order of St. Francis, men with the zeal to dare, pushed out from the northernmost limits of the Spanish settlements in a new world with their soldier guards and their Indian guides. They fought death in a land of thirst northward, ever northward. The cross fell from the hands of spent zealots at some waterhole where water was not, and other hands followed to snatch up the sacred emblem and push it deeper into Papagueria. North and west through El Infiernillo to the red waters of the Colorado where the Yumas had their reed huts. Thence on to the west through a land that stank of death until at last the end of the trail was smothered in the soft green of Californian valleys—good ground for the seed of Faith.