same night, had expressed his determination to be riding by moonrise!
What would he have done with a hotel room?

But slowly the dawn was coming, the ragged shore was revealing itself,
Barlow was calling for help with the small boat.  Kendric shrugged his
shoulders and kept his mouth shut.

A strip of white beach three hundred feet long, a score of paces across
at its widest, with black barren cliffs guarding it and the faint pink
dawn slowly growing a deeper rose over it, such was the port of
adventure into which nosed the rowboat bringing Jim Kendric and Twisty
Barlow treasure seeking.  In the stern crouched Nigger Ben, come ashore
in order to row the boat back to the _New Moon_, his eyes bulging with
wonderment that men should come all the way from San Diego to disembark
upon so solitary a spot.  The dingey shoved its nose into the sand,
Kendric and Barlow carrying their small packs and rifles sprang out,
Nigger Ben shook his head and pushed off again.

"Up the cliffs the easiest way," cried Barlow, his eyes shining with
excitement.  "Up there I'll get my bearin's, and we'll steer a
straight-string line for what's ahead. Headlong, old mate! Step lively
is the word now while it's cool. And by noon, if we're in luck----"

He left the rest to any man's imagination and hastened across the sand
and to the rock wall.  But more forbidding than ever rose the cliffs
against the path of men who did not know their every crevice, and it
was full day, and the sun was up before they came panting to the top.
Down went packs, with two heaving-chested, bright-eyed men atop of
them, while Barlow, compass in hand, got his bearings.

The devil's own he had named this country from afar; the devil's own it
extended itself, naked and dry and desolate before their questing eyes,
a weary land, sun-smitten, broken, looking deserted of God and man.  As
far as they could see, there were no trees, little growth of any kind,
no birds, no grazing beasts.  Just swell after swell of arid lands,
here and there cut by ancient gorges, tumbled over by heaps of black
rocks, swept clean of dust on the high places by racing winds, piled
high with sand and small stones in the depressions.  Where growing
things thrust up their heads, they were the harsh, fanged and envenomed
growth of desert places.  The place had an air of unholiness in the

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