Mosquitoes bred in the sluggish streams, full-fed by recent storms, and when evening fell surrounded us in dense clouds. Their bites are almost as painful to me as bee stings, raising great, red wheals, which itch and burn for days, so that I was nearly wild from the irritation. To add to the general discomfort, my new shoes, which were very heavy for the coming trip across the desert, blistered my feet atrociously, so that when the rear chain broke in crossing a bad gully, I was scarcely able to hobble.
And each succeeding day made greater demands on one’s endurance. The country became hilly with stretches of treacherous sand. High bench lands, seamed with narrow ravines, skirted rugged buttes, while to the south and west one caught vistas of barren plains. Small farmhouses perched on the hillsides, and here and there great fields of grain or sprouting corn appeared, with groups of animals grazing in the distance.
Dan had managed to mend the damaged chain, but his natural recklessness chafed constantly against my caution, so that each steep descent provoked an argument. At last I flung discretion to the winds and down the hills we flew, bounding from hummock to hummock, swaying, lurching, recovering ourselves by seeming miracles.
We had been riding across a jutting arm of bench land, and as we approached a sharp turn in the road, the ground began to fall away abruptly. I endeavoured to slow down, but Dan was of a different mind. Spurred on by his words of ridicule, I permitted the wheel to gain momentum and we spun around the curve at racing speed.
A tremendously long and steep declivity lay before us, the strip of road disappearing from our sight in another turn at the bottom of a ravine. My heart leaped convulsively as the wind whistled past my ears, but I had scant time to coddle fear. The strain of handling the heavy tandem at such a speed took all my attention. The pitch increased; we seemed to fly through space. Then the front wheel struck a bed of heavy sand at the curve, and I knew no more.
My next sensation was of a shaking, joggling motion and by degrees I discovered that I was lying on my back on the bottom of a farm wagon that was jolting slowly up a rutty hillside. Dan, very pale, was bending over me, and the wheel with twisted handle bars and dangling chain was propped alongside. In answer to his anxious inquiries, I undertook a few investigative movements and soon was able to assure him that I suffered from nothing worse than some severe bruises and slight concussion from alighting on my head. He had received a rather deep scratch in the mêlée, but otherwise was uninjured.
The wagon turned abruptly and I struggled to a sitting posture, as our driver, a lad of some sixteen summers, halted his team of mules in front of a low, unpainted farmhouse. A motherly woman hurried out in answer to his call, and in a moment was all solicitude. With tender care she guided my reeling footsteps into the house and I was soon ensconced on the living room lounge while Dan occupied a rocker at my side. After seeing that we were both as comfortable as circumstances would permit, our hostess left the room to prepare supper.
The outer door swung open and a handsome, blue-eyed boy about twelve years old, dressed from head to foot in blue denim, passed slowly through the room and, with a shy nod to us, entered the kitchen. Scarcely ten seconds later the same door opened and the boy again appeared and with another little duck of the head disappeared in the rear. I was marvelling at the speed he had shown in encircling the house in such a short time, when the sound of the latch caught my ear and I turned to confront the same blue-clad figure. But was it the same? No, this lad was larger. It must be a brother. He also passed through and vanished with the peculiar sideways nod. Almost before I could wink an eye, his double followed, using the identical gesture of his predecessors. I turned to Dan, who was staring round-eyed after the vanishing figure. Just as I opened my mouth to address him, the door opened and a fifth youth appeared. He too was blue-eyed, blue-clad and strikingly good to look upon. Dan rubbed his eyes; then ran his hand through his thick curls.
“That jolt must have done something to my brain,” he declared with a worried look at me. “Do you see whole droves of kids, all looking the same, all dressed the same, all acting the same, all going from the front to the back of the house? First I thought a kid was running round the house to fool us. Then I thought I was seeing double, but they keep getting bigger all the time, till darned if I know what to think. What in blazes do you suppose is the matter with me?”
“It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you,” I replied. “Whatever it is, it affects us both the same way, for I saw them just as you did. There were five, all dressed in blue, all with blue eyes and light hair, and about the same size, though the first seemed the smallest and the last the largest. At first I thought they were twins, but there could scarcely be five twins.”