the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling
more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the
deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling
ball. The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their
little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding,
plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight,
while the curtain melted away before blue distances swimming with light.
Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above
an irregular roof of rocks. It blazed into the range on the other side of
the valley. It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great,
red tongue would lick up crumbs. Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock
and dry earth and sand, that was all. Nowhere in that stretch of basin
that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of
human life.

But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert
reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or
even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving.
Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders
and a pack animal in single file. Now Jack and Firio were coming into a
region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into
a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a
white sail on a green sea.

"Very thick sand there--five or six miles of it. It make this the
long way," said Firio. "They call it the apron of hell to fools who
ride at noon."

"And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?"

"Five or six."

But Firio knew a way around where the going was good. It made a
difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or
three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of
their ponies.

"How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?" Jack asked.

Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he
wanted to be exact.

"Almost as many hours as miles," he said.

Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through
shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A
single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that
basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into
the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of th