226 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



a celebrated case were not familiar to me; was con- 

 vinced that the other side still thirsted for his blood, 

 and that emissaries of a certain famous organiza- 

 tion were even now on his trail. He showed the 

 revolver with which, while a deputy sheriff in New 

 Mexico, he had "got his man"; he had lived every- 

 where from the Argentine to Alaska, and made and 

 lost "scads of money " ; he was full of tales of arsenic 

 springs and poisoned desert waters, and of "close 

 calls" in Death Valley, where he guaranteed a tem- 

 perature of a hundred and forty-five in the shade. 

 Yet, oddly, with these feats to his credit McSandy 

 showed a total absence of that sense of location 

 which is all but indispensable to the desert man. He 

 was even hazy on the points of the compass. 



McSandy preferred to sleep in the cabin, while I 

 spread my blankets near by outside. The night being 

 warm and not conducive to sleep, my friend un- 

 folded new leaves of his career. I learned that he 

 had visited Constantinople as seaman on a United 

 States warship: had also been a Michigan lumber- 

 man; and I forget how many other things. In spite 

 of lifelike details, his narrative was an irresponsible 

 farrago that kept me on the edge of an explosion. 

 From Turks we had come to Apaches; when, "I 

 think there's a snake climbing up on the bed," he 

 remarked in the midst of some episode. "Can hear 

 him creeping and creeping, durn his hide. Ain't 

 them rattlers the limit, though? Sure death ev'ry 

 time they get you. Say, d' you think I'd better 

 make a light and look what he's doing?" He struck 

 a match and, no snake being revealed, concluded 



