“Allow me to introduce you to our first messenger, Mr. Tumbleweed,” said the girl. “When he has been uprooted, and a message tied to one of his branches, and we’ve pitched him up in the wind, he’ll go racing across the sands as fast as some horses can run. Have you never seen them? But this is your first windstorm to experience in this fair land. Well, cattle uproot them, I suppose, and when the wind comes they go scooting over the desert, rolling and bouncing ten feet into the air at times, and often, when a gust gets under them, they reach quite a height and sail through the air in great shape. Fences catch them, and Mart and I used to have to go get them out when we were kids. Then at school here on the desert, we kids used to play they were cows, and we’d ride after ’em on broomsticks when they came racing by at recess. But don’t ask me how many years ago that was. Now up with this one!”
He laid hold of the dry, tough tumbleweed and with an effort pulled it from the ground. The girl had torn strips from a handkerchief which was no concern of his, and with one of them she tied a message to an inside branch of the weed, after having wrapped the paper about the branch.
They collected three more, which were in like manner intrusted with messages by the wind witch. Then, with one in each hand—for they were as large as tubs—they hurried back to the yucca grove.
“It’s too bad we don’t dare slip along under cover till we’re abreast Squawtooth,” she complained. “But the wind’s sort of blowing in that direction, as it is. These will go out over the desert, and with folks hunting everywhere for us some one surely will see one of the six messages in one of our weeds.
“All right. Here we go! Say something mysterious or uncanny—some sort of incantation. Anything—on the spur of the moment, you know. I’m going to throw it up. Shoot!”
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!” was The Falcon’s impromptu incantation as she pitched the weed, and it sailed off exultingly on the wings of the wind.
Away it sped, now and then striking the earth, only to spring up as if it were on delicate springs and soar for hundreds of feet again. Bounding, rolling, caroming from hummock to hummock, it raced away until it was only a tiny moving speck in the distance.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” muttered Falcon the Flunky.
Manzanita tossed up another and another and the fourth. After the first the three sped along as if they were live things released from long imprisonment.
Three times more The Falcon was jiggered; then they collected messengers for the two remaining letters, and sent them out.