The white, narrow road flashed out of the foreground, slipped with inconceivable rapidity under the car.  When she marked a clump of cactus far ahead it seemed to shoot at her, to speed behind her even the instant she noticed it.  Nevertheless, Madeline knew Link was not putting the car to its limit.  Swiftly as he was flying, he held something in reserve.  But he took the turns of the road as if he knew the way was cleared before him.  He trusted to a cowboy’s luck.  A wagon in one of those curves, a herd of cattle, even a frightened steer, meant a wreck.  Madeline never closed her eyes at these fateful moments.  If Link could stake himself, the others, and her upon such chance, what could not she stake with her motive?  So while the great car hummed and thrummed, and darted round the curves on two wheels, and sped on like a bullet, Madeline lived that ride, meant to feel it to the uttermost.

But it was not all swift going.  A stretch of softer ground delayed Link, made the car labor and pant and pound and grind through gravel.  Moreover, the cactus plants assumed an alarming ability to impede progress.  Long, slender arms of the ocotillo encroached upon the road; broad, round leaves did likewise; fluted columns, fallen like timbers in a forest, lay along the narrow margins; the bayonet cactus and the bisnagi leaned threateningly; clusters of maguey, shadowed by the huge, looming saguaro, infringed upon the highway to Mezquital.  And every leaf and blade and branch of cactus bore wicked thorns, any one of which would be fatal to a tire.

It came at length, the bursting report.  The car lurched, went on like a crippled thing, and halted, obedient to the master hand at the wheel.  Swift as Link was in replacing the tire, he lost time.  The red sun, more sullen, duskier as it neared the black, bold horizon, appeared to mock Madeline, to eye her in derision.

Link leaped in, and the car sprang ahead.  The road-bed changed, the trees changed—­all the surroundings changed except the cactus.  There were miles of rolling ridges, rough in the hollows, and short rocky bits of road, and washes to cross, and a low, sandy swale where mesquites grouped a forest along a trickling inch-deep sheet of water.  Green things softened the hard, dry aspect of the desert.  There were birds and parrots and deer and wild boars.  All these Madeline remarked with clear eyes, with remarkable susceptibility of attention; but what she strained to see, what she yearned for, prayed for, was straight, unobstructed road.

But the road began to wind up; it turned and twisted in tantalizing lazy curves; it was in no hurry to surmount a hill that began to assume proportions of a mountain; it was leisurely, as were all things in Mexico except strife.  That was quick, fierce, bloody—­it was Spanish.