Pete held up his mutilated hands. "They'll heal but bigod--that pair of brand new double-stitched overalls won't."
"Well," Bill chuckled, "you know where the powder is. Go in and get it."
Bill and Blackie remained to see me off, each with a friendly word of advice. "Just follow the wheel tracks," Bill said, as I climbed into my car and Blackie added: "Keep your eyes peeled for the cracker box signs along the edge of the road. You'll see 'em nailed to a stake and stuck in the ground."
A moment later I was headed into a silence broken only by the whip of sage against the car. Ahead was the glimmer of a dry lake and in the distance a great mass of jumbled mountains that notched the pale skies. Beyond--what?
I never dreamed then that for twenty-five years I would be poking around in those deceiving hills.
When you travel through the desolation of Death Valley along the Funeral Range, you may find it difficult to believe that several thousand feet above the top of your car was once a cool, inviting land with rivers and forests and lakes, and that hundreds of feet below you are the dry beds of seas that washed its shores.
Scientists assert that all life--both animal and vegetable began in these buried seas--probably two and one-half billion years ago.
It is certain that no life could have existed on the thin crust of earth covered as it was with deadly gases. Therefore, your remotest ancestors must have been sea creatures until they crawled out or were washed ashore in one of Nature's convulsions to become land dwellers.
Since sea water contains more gold than has ever been found on the earth, it may be said that man on his way up from the lowest form of life was born in a solution of gold.
That he survived, is due to two urges--the sex urge and the urge for food. Without either all life would cease.
Note. The author's book, _Life's Grand Stairway_ soon to be published, contains a fast moving, factual story of man and his eternal quest for gold from the beginning of recorded time.
Camping one night at Mesquite Spring, I heard a prospector cursing his burro. It wasn't a casual cursing, but a classic revelation of one who knew burros--the soul of them, from inquisitive eyes to deadly heels. A moment later he was feeding lumps of sugar to the beast and the feud ended on a pleasant note.