Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared travellers.
Jag Ear's bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance lost through a lapse in effort. He had ceased altogether to wiggle the sliver of ear—the baton with which he conducted his orchestra—because this was clearly a waste of energy. P.D.'s steps still retained their dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off his body.
"Firio, you brown son of the sun," said Jack, with a sudden display of his old-time trail imagery, "you prolix, garrulous Firio, you knew! You had the great equine trio ready, and look at the miles they have done since sunset to prove it! You, P.D., favorite trooper of our household cavalry! You, Wrath of God, don't be afraid to make an inward smile, for your face will never tell on you! You, Jag Ear, beat a tattoo with the fragment of the gothic glory of burrohood, for we rest, to go on all the faster when the heat of the day is past!"
While Prather and Nogales were riding over hell's apron, their pursuers had saddles off hot, moist backs, over which knowing hands were run to find no sores. After they had eaten, P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear stood in drooping relaxation which would make the most of every moment of respite. Jack and Firio, with a blanket fastened to the rifles as standards, made a patch of shade in which they lay down.
"Have a nap, Firio," said Jack. "I will wake you when it is time to start."
"And you—you no sleep?" asked Firio.
"I could not sleep to-day," Jack answered. "I don't feel as if I could sleep until I've seen Prather and heard his story—my story—Firio!" And he lay with eyes half closed, staring at the steel blue overhead.
It was well after midday when they mounted for the remainder of the journey. The Eternal Painter was shaking out the silvery cloud-mist of his beard across a background that had a softer, kindlier, deeper blue. The shadows of the ponies and their riders and Jag Ear and his pack no longer lay under their bellies heavily, but were stretched out to one side by the angle of the sun, in cheerful, jogging fraternity. Prather and Nogales had again become only a speck.
"Do you think that they are out of the sand?" asked Jack.
"Very near," Firio answered.