It worried me that those men had come up on me from out of nowhere.  Somebod in the lot of them was a tracker, or a shrewd one at judging what a man had in mind, and it left me uncertain of what to do.  Having a woman with me complicated matters... or would if I let it.

Whatever they'd had in mind to start off with, it was a shooting matter now.  There were three men down, and it was likely all three were dead, or hurting something fierce, and it wasn't likely the others would pull off and forget it.

Until now I'd been lucky - unlucky that they found us at all, but lucky in that I got off scot-free and didn't catch lead myself.  Nor the woman or horses.

There was only one thing I could see to do, and that was to make them so miserable trying to catch us that they'd quit... if they had quit in them, which I doubted.  So far it had cost them, but it was up to me to make it cost them more.

We crossed over the Bristol Mountains and headed due south for a pass in the Sheep Holes, thirty-five or forty miles off, with not a drop of water anywhere between.

On the horizon, not far ahead of us, loomed the black cone of a volcanic crater, and the black of a lava field.  Beyond lay a wide dry lake, and I pointed our horses right at the spot where lava and dry lake joined, and we rode on.

After a while, when we looked back, the notch in the mountains through which we had come was gone, vanished, behind a shoulder of the mountain.  There was no sound, there was no movement but our own, and the tiny puffs of white dust that lifted from the face of the playa as our horses walked.

Behind us were shimmering heat waves, before us and around us the air wavered, and changed the looks of things.  Small rocks seemed to tower above the desert, and the sparse brush seemed to be trees.  Sweat streaked the flanks of our horses, dust rose around us.  We were in a lost world, shut out from all about us by distance and by the shimmering heat.

Far off, something more than twenty miles away, loomed a blue range of hills... the Sheep Hole Mountains.  Beyond them would be more desert and more mountains.

Would they follow us? Or, wiser than we were, mightn't they turn and ride right to Los Angeles, knowing we would come there?

Only, of course, they did not know.  We might go to San Diego, or we might ride back north and go to San Francisco, along the coast road.