McHale handed him the weapon.
"I don't reckon she's accurate at much over ten yards," he observed. "If I was you, I'd fix myself with a good belt gun. It ain't unlikely I packs one myself after this, and we might meet up."
"Organize yourself the way you want to," said Lewis carelessly, slipping the weapon in his pocket. "And if you're a friend of that big Swede, tell him not to look for me too hard. I don't want to hurt him; but I ain't taking chances on no goose guns." He nodded and marched off after the others.
The three men, left alone, stood in silence for a moment. Then Oscar, with a rumbling curse, began to strip saddle and bridle from his dead pet mare, the tears running down his cheeks.
"And now what?" asked McHale.
"Now," Casey replied, "I guess we've got to make good."
CHAPTER XI
Some two miles distant from the construction camp at the dam, a little cavalcade moved slowly through the darkness of a moonless, cloudy night. A southeast wind was blowing, but it was a drying wind, with no promise of rain. It had blown for days steadily, until it had sucked every vestige of moisture from the top earth, leaving it merely powdery dust. Because of it, too, no dew had fallen; the nights were as dry as the days.
In the grain fields, the continued blast had stripped the surface soil away from the young plants, wrenching and twisting them, desiccating their roots, which, still too feeble to reach what dampness lay lower down, sucked ineffectually at the dry breast of the earth. The plants they could not feed took on the pale-green hue of starvation. There, among the young grain, the stronger gusts lifted dust clouds acres in extent. Low down along the surface, the soil sifted and shifted continually, piling in windrows in spots, burying the young plants, leaving others bare. Odd little devils of whirlwinds, marked by columnar pillars of dust, danced deviously across the fields and along the trails. From the standpoint of a disinterested person, the ceaseless wind would have been unpleasant in its monotony; but from the viewpoint of a rancher it was deadly in its persistence.
The moving figures were so strung out that it appeared almost as though they were riding in the same direction fortuitously, without relation to each other. First came two horsemen; then, at an interval of five hundred yards, came a buckboard, with two men and a led horse. In the rear, five hundred yards back, were two more riders.