Raymond S. Spears

“ As to their ignorance, everybody had agreed over all those wandering miles of wire. As to his own thoughts Utah held them merely to the driving of the car, with occasional flashes about the two little kiddies. Thought of the children kept him patient.
He was still rolling when night fell. Good driver as he was, for hours he could do no better than four or five miles an hour. He shuddered to think of the tourist, the 'way back Easter, from New York, who had run into that place, refusing to take the word of the people whose government had forbidden this thing. ”

“ Dust fluffed up behind it, so that he could not always see the car. When he did see it, the black seemed at one moment like a near-by crow, at another like a reeling black mountain, and again resembled nothing more than a volcano belching smoke to unimaginable heights. Hall pictured in his mind the people in that car.
At the wheel was a man; of him Hall thought only with contempt. With the man there was probably a woman, who had married such a man— Oh, well! ”

“ Utah replied. "How many miles do you make on a gallon?"
"Why, usually about twenty, but on this road, running so much on second and low, only about ten. I thought I had plenty!"
"You better fill at every gas barrel," Utah suggested mildly. "And you can run on high through here, even if you slip your clutch a little once in a while. I've five spare gallons, though. It's fifty miles to Zack's where you can fill your tank. Water in your radiator?" ”

“ Cars from the main road showed up. Then it was known the next car must be the Cut-Off tourists, for there was no other car on the main road.
At sunset Zack rode out in his car to the Pass, which he reached at flat dark. With a pair of glasses he looked eastward along the Cut-Off road. He could see thirty odd miles, and there was no automobile headlight coming. Somewhere in the seventy miles of the Cut-Off beyond was a tourist's car. He rode back to his place, and five minutes later Utah Hall knew that the tourists were out there.
"And they're stuck!" he said to himself. "Well—all right!" ”

“ He rolled up to the automobile. Cries and shouts greeted him. Frantic people danced up and down waving for him to stop. They had seen him coming, and for a quarter of a mile as he approached his lights revealed them. ”

“ Zack had him in to breakfast, and knowing the meaning of his bloodshot eyes, she sent him to bed in a darkened room, where he slept at last, having been two days and two nights without rest because a tourist car had taken the Cutoff and he had seen it.
The tourists didn't know—how could tourists ever know?—that Utah Hall claimed them by right of discovery, saved them from deadly arid desert peril before they realized their jeopardy, and handed them on westward to the desert kind of half a thousand miles or so; the wanderers wiser, perhaps ”