The Honest Dealer

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With the Funeral Mountains behind him and the Panamints far ahead, he looked down into Death Valley and wondered if this place would take his life as it had taken so many others.

He had heard about Death Valley all his life. For years he had lived within a day’s travel of it and on a number of occasions he had skirted the edges. Once, even, he had gone through it; in a speeding car, in the late fall of the year.

But now he was afoot and it was July. He was wearing a brown pin-stripe suit that had cost him a hundred and fifty dollars. His shoes, tan oxfords, were utterly inadequate for walking across the hot sands and salt crusts of Death Valley. His shirt, once white, was a dirty gray. He wore a shapeless hat and he carried a canvas sack of the sort that travelers in the desert carry in their cars. But there was only a pitifully small amount of water in it.

He turned and looked back up the Funeral Mountains. Was there movement up there? Was his pursuer that close to him? Would he follow him even into Death Valley?

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