No word, no cry from her clenched lips. She cranked, climbed again into the car, and closed the door that would hold Murray in place. Then she drove, with an occasional frantic glance at the lurching, senseless man beside her.
She drove as fast as she dared set the car through the loose sands. When she had driven that road first, it was trackless. Now there lay faint markings to guide her--the tracks of her own and of Murray's car, the shuffled traces of hooves and feet.
No wind ever lifted in this basin, no flurry of sand ever drove across the burning surface, down below the level of the surrounding desert. Until the rains or a storm came, the tracks would be there undisturbed, as the dust-marks within a pyramid of ancient Rameses.
Soon, so soon that she scarce realized it, the blue and brown mountains that had been trembling over the horizon were drawn into sharper and richer colorings, and the long walls of the valley were opening out ahead. The Dead Mountains, those--bare of men or beasts or devils!
Morongo Valley at last--the sharp turn, with the Box Cañon opening out ahead, rich and sweetly splendid in its touch of vivid greens!
It was only two hundred yards in length, after that turn; yet to the tortured girl, those two hundred yards seemed endless. She did not pause at the shack, but drove on, toward the right-hand wall. Still within her mind dwelt the last words uttered by Murray--"no cold water!"
The trickle of the creek was icy cold; out of the ground and in again. But she knew where there was a seepage of warmer water--water unfit for drinking. She had found it while she was here with Tom Lee; it was a little up the hillside, above and facing that natural amphitheatre which Tom Lee had staked out as a building site. About it there was shade, for the water had provoked green growths on the hillside--a clump of green there against the brown.
She knew that this was the spot, and she headed for it. Recklessly, she drove the car at the steep hill, rocking and lurching across gullies and rocks, until the engine died down; then in low again, climbing a mad course, until at last a boulder blocked the wheel and the engine died on the crash.
There was but a little way to go. She got Murray out of the car, somehow, and dragged him, spurred by fear that she had been too late in getting here. Yet he still lived.