“Wayland, A’ don’t believe you!”

He had dismounted as he spoke and proceeded down the yellow sands to a pit at the foot of the rolling slope.  Wayland saw him halt, again shade his eyes from the sun glare, and stoop.  On his knees, he looked again and rose.  He came up the slope shaking his head.  “Y’d swear it was water at y’r very feet till you bent down.”

“Till you changed the angle of reflection . . . eh? and then the water vanished, sir.”

Both men had thrown their coats across the rear of the saddles.  Matthews now knotted a large handkerchief round his neck.  There was not a cloud, nor the shadow of a cloud for shade.  It was a wilted, shrivelled, heat-flayed, fire-blasted world of arid desolation; trenched by the dry arroyos; sifted by the hot winds fine as flour; with rings and belts and wavering layers of heat—­heat from the orange sun edged red by the Desert dust of the atmosphere—­heat from the wind off some white flamed furnace—­heat from the ochre shifting sands panting to the loom and writhe of the blue-flamed air, and over all a veil, was it blue or lilac or lavender? tinted as of rainbow mists.  For a little while, neither spoke.  Each knew what the dusty dead orange earth, the smoking sand hills, the sifted volcanic ash, the burnt oil smell of shrivelled growth, meant to unprepared travellers.

“I wish, sir,” said Wayland, “I wish you would turn back here and let me go on alone; I really do!”

“What! turn tail like a whipped dog an’ scuttle at first danger?  Go to blazes, my boy!  Do you think y’r beasts will stand crossing before sunset?”

“It’s about as easy going ahead as standing still.  If we only had a water canteen, it wouldn’t be such a fool-thing to risk.”

The wind flayed them with hot peppering sand.

“If we took time to go back for one now, this wind would wipe out the tracks.”

“What’s yon splash o’ dust goin’ over the roll o’ th’ hill?”

Beyond the quiver of the dusky heat, they could see the drift of ash dust eddying to the wind like dirty snow.

“I wish, sir, you would turn back here,” urged Wayland; but Matthews was not heeding.  He had gathered up the broncho’s reins.

“Time to be moving,” he said. “’Tis my observation, Wayland, that the devil gets away from the saint because, he’ll always ride one faster.  Many’s the time when A’ve been pressed in the old days, when if the man behind had just ridden the one bit harder that he thought he couldn’t, just not sagged where he nagged, he’d ha’ got me, Wayland!  When y’ pace two men, one ridin’ with the devil behind him, and the other jog trotting with a dumpy comfortable conscience, ’tis a safe bet which will win.”