Reply Paid by H. F. Heard Page A

knocked into a small bundle of bleeding fur. My left ear was singing as though it had been boxed. I swung round. Kerson was standing a few feet back, his automatic in his hand.
    â€œYou brute!” I exclaimed hotly. I was startled, and shocked, too, at this cool killing. I turned and bent over the poor little corpse, the bread still in its teeth.
    â€œDon’t touch it,” said Mr. Mycroft’s voice; “otherwise its blood may be literally and mortally on your hands. We’re not so far from Tulare County, now sadly famous as the spot where tularemia was first noted, though it’s spread now for thousands of miles. If you have a small cut on your hand and the animal’s blood meets yours you’re in for it.”
    I shrank back. In the desert, the sterile desert, still deadly infection dogging one!
    Kerson added carelessly, “Don’t want those little brutes all over our stuff. Tularemia’s not so bad, for it’s only in the blood. But a ranger told me other day the gophers and ground squirrels have plague now through them. Get bitten by one of their fleas and you’re worse off than if a rattler bit you.”
    I drew back even farther—already I could see with disgust a little procession of brown dots moving off the still gray fur.
    â€œThey won’t settle on you,” said Kerson offhandedly, “unless they have to. But if those fleas were all over the cave, like as not one would bite you casually like, and whatever his notion for doing so, you’d be a casualty.” He chuckled at his unpleasant pun. “No, if one kills ’em at sight and leaves ’em to dry, one’s fairly safe. The mischief would be if ever anthrax got among ’em. A ranger did tell me, not long back, he thought he’d seen a case of that among these damned rodents. But of course he just poured gasoline on the body and cremated it. He wasn’t going to risk a postmortem.”
    We finished our final arrangements and went off in silence. I was upset and sat without speaking a word. We followed the edge of the next dried lake floor and could go at a fair pace, for always, like a neat stitching in the selvage of hard level sand, just before it broke into a fringe of pebbles and rocks, ran a precisely indented pattern. When we first sighted it, Mr. Mycroft and Kerson got down. I followed.
    I heard Kerson say, “They’ll remain sometimes for years.” Mr. Mycroft replied, “In the Bactrian desert Aurel Stein, the explorer, visiting a site he’d gone to a few years before, saw a track of a man and dog going in front of him. It was his own years-old trail.”
    â€œThese are fresh, though; look at the edges. Bet Blue Feather meant this chap.”
    We climbed into the car again and purred along while the tracks went uncoiling ahead of us. Round headland after headland we went, where once, I suppose, tree-crowned knolls had been reflected in still cool water—a painful thought to some pioneer. Then suddenly my reflections and perhaps, I thought, Mr. Mycroft’s hopes were cut short. The lake floor of hard sand ended—we had reached its upper shore.
    â€œThis is the last of the chain,” said Kerson. “It’s no use trailing like this any further. There isn’t any more sand, only rocks and scree.”
    Mr. Mycroft didn’t seem much downcast. “We’ve been lucky, with your aid, to have made such a good start. I think we’ll reconnoiter a little further on foot and look round the countryside. If you will leave some of the provisions here I don’t think we’ll need anything else, and if you come back for us to this spot in the evening we will plan our walk to meet you at this spot.”
    â€œO.K.” was the only answer, and in a few minutes even the sound of the car was lost as it rounded one of the rock promontories. We were sounding a new deep of solitude.
    â€œNow for some real detection,” was,