Long Trail where the tracks all point one way?  Yet the fierceness, the craft, the relentless cruelty of the silent struggle matched his own mood.  He felt the stimulus of the high dry sun-fused tireless air.  He began to understand why the Desert prophets of the East, who camped on sand plains rimmed round and round by an unbroken sky line, had been the first of the human race to grasp the idea of the Oneness of God.  And was it not the Desert prophets, who had preached a God relentless as he was merciful; and the retribution that was fire?  Well, Wayland ruminated, who should say that they were wrong?  If the God who created the Desert, was the God of life; but there, his thought had been broken by coming on the withered carcass beside the yellow pool.

“They can’t keep going on in this heat!  We’ll run ’em down if we can only keep going,” Wayland had said; as they set out again in the blistering wind; but to his dying day, he will never forget the traverse of the Desert in that mid-day sun.  To his dying day he will never see the spectrum colors of white light split by a prism, or the spectrum colors of a child’s soap bubble, without living over the tortures of that afternoon, for the air, whipped to dust by the hurricane wind, acted as a prism splitting the white flame of light to lurid reds and oranges and yellows and violets.

Now, on this second morning before the stars had faded to the orange sunrise coming up through the lavender air in a half fan, the heat had thrown riders and horses in a sweltering sweat; and the nagging wind had begun driving ash dust in eyes and skin like pepper on a raw sore.  Matthews’ ruddy face had turned livid; his blood-shot eyes were dark ringed.  The horses travelled with heads hung low.  Spite of the sun, it was a cloudy sky, but whether rain clouds or dust clouds, they could not tell.  Towards noon, they could see against the purple mountains the red tinged clouds fraying out to a fringe that swept the sky.

“A thought it never rained in the Desert in summer, Wayland?”

“It doesn’t.”

“What’s that ahead?”

“Rain; but if you look again, you’ll see it doesn’t reach the sky line!  It’s sucked up and evaporated before it hits the dust. . . .”

Towards the middle of the afternoon, the horses were resting in the shade of a reddish butte.  Both men had dismounted.  Wayland did not notice what was happening till he glanced where the blue shadow of the rock met the wavering glare of the sand.  The old man had stooped to one knee and had twice laved his hand down to the wavering margin of blue light and bluer shadows.

“Fooled you again, did it?’ asked the Ranger, throwing the saddle from his own pony, strapping the cased rifle to his shoulder and carrying the hatchet in the crook of his elbow.

“Better let me give you a drink from the water bag; it’s hot and stale; but it will keep you from seeing water at your feet till we find another spring.”