Also he searched for roads and then avoided them.

It would be a fat morsel for Marie and her mother to roll under their tongues, he told himself savagely, if he were arrested and appeared in the papers as one of that bunch of crooks! Late that afternoon, by traveling steadily in one direction, he topped a low ridge and saw an arm of the desert thrust out to meet him.

A scooped gully with gravelly sides and rocky bottom led down that way, and because his feet were sore from so much sidehill travel, Bud went down.
He was pretty well fagged too, and ready to risk meeting men, if thereby he might gain a square meal.

Though he was not starving, or anywhere near it, he craved warm food and hot coffee.
So when he presently came upon two sway-backed burros that showed the sweaty imprint of packsaddles freshly removed, and a couple of horses also sweat roughened, he straightway assumed that some one was making camp not far away.

One of the horses was hobbled, and they were all eating hungrily the grass that grew along the gully's sides.