“Fer that very reason—ter see how soon we do get to a town. I’d like a drink myself just about now.”
He perused the map for a minute in silence. Then he looked up, his face graver even than before.
“Well, she can go sixty miles or better, but I’m afraid of heating the engine too much if we travel at that pace,” responded Billy, who was at the steering wheel.
“Well, we’ve got to hustle; it’s most a hundred miles to Gitalong, and that’s the nearest town to us.”
“Nonsense, Bart,” exclaimed Lathrop, pointing to another name on the wide waste, which on the map represents sparsely settled New Mexico, “here’s a place called Cow Wells.”
“That’s all right; maps ain’t always ter be relied on any more than preachers. Cow Wells has gone dry. I reckon that’s why they called it Cow Wells. Everybody has moved away. It used ter be a mining camp.”
“Are you sure it’s abandoned?” asked Billy in a trembling voice.
“Sartain sure,” responded Bart. “I heard about it when I come through on my way east.”
“Then we can’t get a thing to drink till we reach Gitalong?”
“That’s about the size of it,” was the dispiriting reply of the old plainsman.
While the lads in the auto were thus discussing the doleful prospect ahead of them, Frank and Harry were making good time through the upper air on the run toward Cow Wells, which they had noted on their maps as the spot by which they would stop for refreshment. As they neared it in due time, from a distance of a mile away they noted its desolate appearance.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of anything there,” remarked Frank, as he looked ahead of him at the collection of ramshackle buildings that they knew from their observations must be Cow Wells.
“I don’t see a soul moving,” declared Harry.
“Neither do I,” was the other lad’s response. “Maybe they are all away at a festival or something.”
“Well, we’ll get water there, anyhow,” remarked Frank. “I’m so thirsty I could drink a river dry.”
As the boys neared it, the lifeless appearance of Cow Wells became even more marked. The timbers of the houses had baked a dirty gray color in the hot sun, and what few buildings had been painted had all faded to the same neutral hue. The pigment had peeled off them under the heat in huge patches.
