one horse seemed to have fallen; and the load had been lightened still more by casting off half sacks of flour and some canvas tenting; but the tracks of the lame horse picking the soft places along the trail showed drops of blood.  Had it cut itself on the glassy lava rocks; or was it the hoof?  A little farther ahead, the same horse had fallen again to its knees, rolling over headlong; and the other tracks doubled back confusedly where the riders had come to help.

The Ranger smiled, though the yellow heat danced in blood clots before his blistered vision.  He had had to put the old frontiersman back on his horse three times.  The stirrup was wrong; or the saddle was slipping; or . . . what alarmed Wayland was each time he had stopped, the old man was stooping as if to follow the wavering outline of invisible water.  Then, when the Ranger tried to count how many days they had been out, he found he couldn’t.  He had lost track:  the days had slipped into nights and the nights into days; and he suddenly realized that his head pounded like a steel derrick; that the crackling of the dry sage brush leaves snapped something strung and irritable in his own nerves.  There was no longer a drowsy hum in his ears.  It was a wild rushing.

Once, the horses shuffled to a dead stop.  Wayland looked up from the dancing sand at his feet.  He rubbed his eyes and looked again.

“I keep thinking I see a white horse lagging behind that dust drift.  What puzzles me is whether they are trying to get out of the Desert or lose us in it.  While we are seeing them, you can bet they are seeing us!  There hasn’t been a yard for a mile back, where the hoof tracks weren’t bloody.  They’ll lose a horse if they keep on to-day:  then, they’ll be without a packer; but if they are plumb up against it, why don’t they face round and fight?  They are three to our two?  They could hide behind any of these sand rolls and pot us crossing the sinks; but if they are not at the end of their tether, why don’t they hustle and get out of sight?  If they aren’t played out, they could outride us in half a day.”

The old man was shading his eyes and gazing across the sun glare.  Wayland noticed that he was steadying himself in the saddle by the pummel.

“Is my eye playing me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something stuck on yon bush along the way?  First glance, it looks like the leaf of a note book.  Keep looking, it might be a tent a couple of miles away.  That used to happen when we were buildin’ bridges in the Rockies.  Surveyors crossing upper snows would stick up a message in neck of a ginger ale bottle:  then, when we’d come along with the line men after trampin’ the snow for hours, we’d mistake the thing for a man with a white hat till we almost tumbled over the bottle.  Is it the Desert playin’ me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something?  Look, . . . where that bit of brush grows against the lava rock there.”