From the time the first blast struck Dick, until the "dancing giants" whirled away to the westward, leaving the sky unclouded and the yellow sands shimmering in the sunlight, no more than thirty minutes had passed; yet in that short interval one human life on which others depended would have been sacrificed, unless these two travellers who were uninjured should chance to reach that exact spot where lay the boy partially covered by the desert's winding-sheet.
"You can talk of a gale at sea where the sailors are half drowned all the time; but it ain't a marker alongside of these 'ere red-hot blizzards, eh, Parsons?" one of the horsemen said as he threw off the blanket from his head with a long-drawn sigh of relief.
"Drownin' must be mighty pleasant kind of fun alongside of chokin' to death on account of bein' filled plum full with dry sand," Parsons replied. "I allow there ain't no call for us to stay here braggin' about our Nevada hurricanes, Tom Robinson, more especially since we'll make less headway now the sand has been stirred up a bit."
"There's nothin' to hold me here," Robinson replied with a laugh.
Straightway the two men turned their ponies' heads toward the west; and as they advanced the patient burros, laden with a miscellaneous assortment of goods until little else than their heads and tails could be seen, followed steadily in the rear.
Five minutes after they had resumed their journey Parsons cried, as he raised himself in the stirrups, shading his eyes with his hands as he peered ahead,—
"What's that 'ere bit of blue out there? Part of somebody's outfit? or was there a shipwreck close at hand?"
"It's a man—most likely a tenderfoot, if he tried to walk across this 'ere desert."
The two halted, and Dick Stevens's life was saved.
Had the storm lasted two or three minutes longer, or these prospectors gone in any other direction, he must have died where he had fallen.