his
actions. So with mute lips, with the fire in her beginning to chill,
with a lifelessness menacing her spirit, she watched, hoped against
hope, prayed for a long, straight, smooth road.

Quite suddenly she saw it, seemingly miles of clear, narrow lane
disappearing like a thin, white streak in distant green. Perhaps Link
Stevens's heart leaped like Madeline's. The huge car with a roar and a
jerk seemed to answer Madeline's call, a cry no less poignant because it
was silent.

Faster, faster, faster! The roar became a whining hum. Then for Madeline
sound ceased to be anything--she could not hear. The wind was now heavy,
imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an
on-rushing wall. It bore down upon Madeline with such resistless weight
that she could not move. The green of desert plants along the road
merged in two shapeless fences, sliding at her from the distance.
Objects ahead began to blur the white road, to grow streaky, like rays
of light, the sky to take on more of a reddening haze.

Madeline, realizing her sight was failing her, turned for one more look
at Link Stevens. It had come to be his ride almost as much as it was
hers. He hunched lower than ever, rigid, strained to the last degree, a
terrible, implacable driver. This was his hour, and he was great. If he
so much as brushed a flying tire against one of the millions of spikes
clutching out, striking out from the cactus, there would be a shock,
a splitting wave of air--an end. Madeline thought she saw that Link's
bulging cheek and jaw were gray, that his tight-shut lips were white,
that the smile was gone. Then he really was human--not a demon. She felt
a strange sense of brotherhood. He understood a woman's soul as Monty
Price had understood it. Link was the lightning-forged automaton, the
driving, relentless, unconquerable instrument of a woman's will. He was
a man whose force was directed by a woman's passion. He reached up to
her height, felt her love, understood the nature of her agony. These
made him heroic. But it was the hard life, the wild years of danger on
the desert, the companionship of ruthless men, the elemental, that made
possible his physical achievement. Madeline loved his spirit then and
gloried in the man.

She had pictured upon her heart, never to be forgotten, this little
hunched, deformed figure of Link's hanging with dauntless, with
deathless grip over the wheel, his gray face like a marble mask.

That was