The descent from that elevation was difficult, extremely hazardous, yet Link Stevens drove fast.  At the base of the hill rocks and sand all but halted him for good.  Then in taking an abrupt curve a grasping spear ruined another tire.  This time the car rasped across the road into the cactus, bursting the second front-wheel tire.  Like demons indeed Link and Nels worked.  Shuddering, Madeline felt the declining heat of the sun, saw with gloomy eyes the shading of the red light over the desert.  She did not look back to see how near the sun was to the horizon.  She wanted to ask Nels.  Strange as anything on this terrible ride was the absence of speech.  As yet no word had been spoken.  Madeline wanted to shriek to Link to hurry.  But he was more than humanly swift in all his actions.  So with mute lips, with the fire in her beginning to chill, with a lifelessness menacing her spirit, she watched, hoped against hope, prayed for a long, straight, smooth road.

Quite suddenly she saw it, seemingly miles of clear, narrow lane disappearing like a thin, white streak in distant green.  Perhaps Link Stevens’s heart leaped like Madeline’s.  The huge car with a roar and a jerk seemed to answer Madeline’s call, a cry no less poignant because it was silent.

Faster, faster, faster!  The roar became a whining hum.  Then for Madeline sound ceased to be anything—­she could not hear.  The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall.  It bore down upon Madeline with such resistless weight that she could not move.  The green of desert plants along the road merged in two shapeless fences, sliding at her from the distance.  Objects ahead began to blur the white road, to grow streaky, like rays of light, the sky to take on more of a reddening haze.

Madeline, realizing her sight was failing her, turned for one more look at Link Stevens.  It had come to be his ride almost as much as it was hers.  He hunched lower than ever, rigid, strained to the last degree, a terrible, implacable driver.  This was his hour, and he was great.  If he so much as brushed a flying tire against one of the millions of spikes clutching out, striking out from the cactus, there would be a shock, a splitting wave of air—­ an end.  Madeline thought she saw that Link’s bulging cheek and jaw were gray, that his tight-shut lips were white, that the smile was gone.  Then he really was human—­not a demon.  She felt a strange sense of brotherhood.  He understood a woman’s soul as Monty Price had understood it.  Link was the lightning-forged automaton, the driving, relentless, unconquerable instrument of a woman’s will.  He was a man whose force was directed by a woman’s passion.  He reached up to her height, felt her love, understood the nature of her agony.  These made him heroic.  But it was the hard life, the wild years of danger on the desert, the companionship of ruthless men, the elemental, that made possible his physical achievement.  Madeline loved his spirit then and gloried in the man.