There was the clitter clatter of the horses’ hoofs over the lava rocks; the padded beat of the easy plains lope as they left the lava for the ashy silt; then no sound but the swash of saddle leather along trail marks that cut the crusted silt like tracks in soft snow.  The wind had been flaring a steady torrid white flame.  Now it began to come in puffs and whirls that beat the air to dust of ashes and sent the sand foaming in the wave lines of a yellow sea.  The mule no longer ambled ahead with ears pointed.  He shuffled through the ash with dragging steps; and the sage brush crackled brittle where the trail led out from the silt across the baked earth.  The heat waves writhed and throbbed through the atmosphere, a flame through a sieve, with a scorch of burning from the ground and clouds of dust like smoke.

“I think I’ll get off and walk,” said Wayland, suiting the action to the word.  “I hope those blackguards are counting on camping at a spring to-night.”

They plodded on for another half hour before Matthews answered.

“Do you think they did it intentionally?  A mean, do y’ think they lured us here to get rid of us?”

Wayland paused and thought.

“It’s all the same whether they did or not . . . now!  What was it you said about a man chased by the devil setting a good live pace?  They have to find water.  They know where water is.  We don’t!  Only safety is to follow.”

“Queer how y’ keep imaginin’ ye hear wimplin’ brooks!  When A let myself go, A keep hearin’ the tinkle o’ y’r rills back in the mountains!  A keep seein’ the blue false water waverin’ up to my feet an’ recedin’ again!  Isn’t there a fellow in mythology, Wayland, died o’ thirst in water because when he reached to drink it, it kept waverin’ away?”

“That fellow had travelled in the Desert,” answered Wayland.

He aimed his revolver at a green rattlesnake lying under a sage brush.  The sun glinted from the steel barrel.  The snake coiled and raised its head.  “See,” said Wayland, “the snake takes aim.  The light sort of hypnotizes it.  The greenest tenderfoot couldn’t miss it.”

“How far d’ y’ call it across?”

“Two to four days straight:  eleven to twenty if you take it diagonally.  As I make it, they are steering due West for one of the deep cut ways to take ’em South under shade.”

“Shade would taste pretty good to me, Wayland.”

Wayland looked back at his companion.  What he thought, he did not say; but he mounted at once and hastened pace.

“Once we find a spring, we’ll travel at night,” he said.

A condor rose from the rocks and circled away with slow lazy sweep of wings.

“You would wonder what they could find to eat here, if it were not for the snakes and the lizards.”

“Perhaps, we’ll not wonder so much before we finish.”

Wayland looked at the old frontiersman again.  He was riding heavily, sagged forward, with one hand on the high pommel of the Mexican saddle.