The wind flayed them with hot peppering sand.
"If we took time to go back for one now, this wind would wipe out the tracks."
"What's yon splash o' dust goin' over the roll o' th' hill?"
Beyond the quiver of the dusky heat, they could see the drift of ash dust eddying to the wind like dirty snow.
"I wish, sir, you would turn back here," urged Wayland; but Matthews was not heeding. He had gathered up the broncho's reins.
"Time to be moving," he said. "'Tis my observation, Wayland, that the devil gets away from the saint because, he'll always ride one faster. Many's the time when A've been pressed in the old days, when if the man behind had just ridden the one bit harder that he thought he couldn't, just not sagged where he nagged, he'd ha' got me, Wayland! When y' pace two men, one ridin' with the devil behind him, and the other jog trotting with a dumpy comfortable conscience, 'tis a safe bet which will win."
There was the clitter clatter of the horses' hoofs over the lava rocks; the padded beat of the easy plains lope as they left the lava for the ashy silt; then no sound but the swash of saddle leather along trail marks that cut the crusted silt like tracks in soft snow. The wind had been flaring a steady torrid white flame. Now it began to come in puffs and whirls that beat the air to dust of ashes and sent the sand foaming in the wave lines of a yellow sea. The mule no longer ambled ahead with ears pointed. He shuffled through the ash with dragging steps; and the sage brush crackled brittle where the trail led out from the silt across the baked earth. The heat waves writhed and throbbed through the atmosphere, a flame through a sieve, with a scorch of burning from the ground and clouds of dust like smoke.
"I think I'll get off and walk," said Wayland, suiting the action to the word. "I hope those blackguards are counting on camping at a spring to-night."
They plodded on for another half hour before Matthews answered.
"Do you think they did it intentionally? A mean, do y' think they lured us here to get rid of us?"