Pushing the dusty goggles up from the ridge of his nose, Johnny stared ahead. There never was another such trail. In a land where rain never falls the roads rut, and the ruts fill with dust. Cars sink in to the axles, and skidding, shoot to the other side, to fall into a deeper rut.
“To go faster is suicide,” Johnny groaned. “Guess it’ll have to be a fight!”
“Mighty uneven one, too, probably,” Pant muttered. “Don’t stop till I tell you to; I’m getting into the back seat to have a look at them.”
Gripping the seat he made his way, tossed first this way, then that, to the back of the car. There he remained with eyes fixed on the back trail.
Rapidly Johnny ran over in his mind the circumstances which led up to this moment. He had gone to the manager’s office at the time appointed, and there had been given the car, equipped with the strangely valuable connecting-rods. He had been instructed to draw on the company for expense money when necessary, to report progress once a week, to make his way to the Pacific coast and back.
The outgoing journey had been wonderful. The speeding across broad plains, between waving fields of grain, the climbing of the Rocky mountain and Cascade passes, circling up and up and up, with here a yawning canyon hundreds of feet beneath them, and here, not a hundred feet above them, one of those perpetual banks of snow; all this had given Johnny a new vision of the grandeur and beauty of his native land.
The return trip had been uneventful until they had reached the western edge of the Great American Desert. There in a garage, where they had left their car for a change of tires and to secure a box lunch to take with them in crossing, they had seen a man who roused Johnny’s suspicions.
“Did you see that fellow?” he had asked of Pant, as they left the garage, “the chap standing by the door?”
“Some bird!” Pant had chuckled.
“Looks like a gigantic frog,” Johnny had smiled. “Did you notice what prodigiously long fingers he had, and what spindly legs?”