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142 any good unless I pull through. Hate me both of you, don't you, but you've got to look after me. Presently you'll have to give up your drinking water to bathe my arm. Give me two rations to one to keep my fever down. Ha-ha-ha!" he laughed, suddenly. "It's a hell of a good joke on you two, I'll say. A hell of a good joke! And it's going to be funnier presently when you'll have to carry me on your own tottering legs. "Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

The laughter was hysterical and Healy's eyes were glazed with fever. Stone checked Larkin's angry stride forward.

"He's out of his head. Lefty. Don't pay any attention to him. Let's be getting on."

High noon found them on the level tableland, plodding westward along the verge of its southern cliffs that overlooked the cañon of the Tonto Fork, the Tonto Basin and, far to the south, the tumbled peaks of the Apache Mountains from whence they had emerged at Miami. To the northwest mounted one great lonesome butte, red in the pitiless sunlight, so sheerly eroded that its walls showed only faint streaks of shadow. To the north the land melted off into hazy slopes save where a faint dazzle of snow showed on San Francisco, O'Leary, and Kendrick peaks, their vast bulks reduced to mounds on this vast expanse. Cloudless sky above them, arid soil under foot, nothing in sight but desert, the water already warm in their canteens, with practically no food; they were in evil case.

As in the Basin, the only living things they sighted