distances swimming with light.  Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above an irregular roof of rocks.  It blazed into the range on the other side of the valley.  It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great, red tongue would lick up crumbs.  Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock and dry earth and sand, that was all.  Nowhere in that stretch of basin that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of human life.

But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving.  Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders and a pack animal in single file.  Now Jack and Firio were coming into a region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a white sail on a green sea.

“Very thick sand there—­five or six miles of it.  It make this the long way,” said Firio.  “They call it the apron of hell to fools who ride at noon.”

“And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?”

“Five or six.”

But Firio knew a way around where the going was good.  It made a difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of their ponies.

“How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?” Jack asked.

Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he wanted to be exact.

“Almost as many hours as miles,” he said.

Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins.  A single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into the steel-blue of the sky.  The savage, merciless hours of the desert day approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared travellers.

Jag Ear’s bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance lost through a lapse in effort.  He had ceased altogether to wiggle the sliver of ear—­the baton with which he conducted his orchestra—­because this was clearly a waste of energy.  P.D.’s steps still retained their dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a clock that needs winding.  His head hung low.  Wrath of God was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack’s yard.  It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off his body.