“Friend, you’ve plenty of water. It’s a live well. You can spare enough to save us. We’ll double your pay. Come.”
Adam loosened his right hand and doubled up the enormous malletlike fist and swung it back. The well-owner suddenly changed his front and became animated, and the travelers got all the water they needed. But they did not annoy him further by pitching camp near his place.
This country was crisscrossed by trails, and, arid desert though it was, every few miles showed an abandoned mine, or a prospector working a claim, or a shack containing a desert dweller. Adam and Dismukes were approaching the highway that bisected the Mohave Desert. It grew to be more of a sandy country, and anywhere in sand, water was always scarce. Another of Dismukes’ water holes was dry. It had not been visited for months. The one wanderer who had stopped there lay there half buried in the sand, a shrunken mummy of a man, with a dark and horrible mockery in the eyeless sockets of his skull. His skin was drawn like light-brown parchment over his face. Adam looked, and then again, and gave a sudden start. He turned the sun-dried visage more to the light. He recognized that face, set in its iron mask of death, with its grin that would grin forever until the brown skull went to dust.
“Regan!” he exclaimed.
“You know him?” queried Dismukes.
“Yes. He was an Irishman I knew years ago. A talky, cheerful fellow. Hard drinker. He loved the desert, but drink kept him in the mining camps. The last time I saw him was at Tecopah, after you left.”
“Poor devil! He died of thirst. I know that cast of face.... Let’s give him decent burial.”
“Yes. Poor Regan! He was the man who named me Wansfell. Why he called me that I never knew—never will know.”
Deep in the sand they buried the remains of Regan and erected a rude cross to mark his lonely grave.
Dismukes led Adam off the well-beaten trail one day, up a narrow sandy wash to a closed pocket that smelled old and musty. Here a green spring bubbled from under a bank of sand. Water clear as crystal, slightly green in tinge, sparkled and murmured. A whitish sediment bordered the tiny stream of running water.