CHAPTER XIII
A SAND STORM
The return to the car was not without difficulties. At the spot where the natural steps were not close together, Jerry, finding the merest toe-hold in the cliff and only the scraggliest growth to which he could cling, did, however, manage to reach the step above. He then dropped one end of the rope down and Dick ascended nimbly. Then, Jerry made a swing of the lariat. Mary, flushed and laughing up at him, sat in it and was slowly lifted to the ledge above. This, being narrow, could hold no more than three. So Mary climbed still higher, then turned and watched, while Dora was lifted in the swing. The girls were told to return to the car while the boys tied the box on the end of the rope and drew it up over the sheer place.
From the road, Mary looked out far across the desert. “How queer the air looks, doesn’t it?” she said, pointing to what seemed to be a huge yellow cloud of sand which was moving rapidly across the floor of the desert and shutting out the Little Grand Canyon from their view.
Jerry, with the small trunk on one shoulder joined them; Dick, whirling the lariat playfully, was not far behind.
Mary again pointed. “What is that far below there, Jerry? Is it a wind storm?”
“I reckon that’s what it is,” Jerry said. “Carrying enough sand with it to change things up a little. But more’n like, it will blow itself away before we get down to the valley road.” He seemed little concerned about it and the girls, in their curiosity about the small trunk, also forgot it. Where they stood, in a flood of late warm afternoon sun, there was not a breath of air stirring.
“What a queer little trunk,” Mary said, touching the battered top of it with an investigating finger. “What is it made of, Jerry?”
“You’ve got me guessing,” the cowboy replied. “Some kind of a thick animal skin, I reckon, stretched over a frame. It tightened as it dried. Shouldn’t you say so, Dick?”
The boy addressed was helping to lash the small box on the running board of the car. “It looks like a home-made affair to me,” he said. “Probably they brought it over from Scandinavia.”
Dora was peering around it. “There isn’t a lock,” she observed. “I suppose whatever it was tied with rotted away long ago.” Then, as another thought came, “Oh, Jerry, if we had waited, maybe even a week, the stage coach might have crumbled, don’t you think? It couldn’t have stayed together much longer.”