With faces blistered by the sun and caked with alkali, blue shirts faded to a purple tinge, and trousers and accouterments covered with a gray, powdery dust, the soldiers rode on silently and determinedly. Hour after hour the troop flung itself across the plains and into the heart of the Lava Beds, each day cutting down the Apache lead.
CHAPTER XIII
The Atonement
False dawn in the Lava Beds of Arizona. The faint tinge on the eastern horizon fades, and the stars shine the more brilliantly in the brief, darkest hour before the true daybreak. An icy wind sweeps down canons and over mesas, stinging the marrow of the wayfarer's bones. In the heavens, the innumerable stars burn steadily in crystal coldness. Shadows lie in Stygian blackness at foot of rock and valley. Soft and clear the lights of night swathe the uplands. An awesome silence hangs over the desert. Hushed and humbled by the immensity of space, one expects to hear the rush of worlds through the universe. At times the bosom swells with a wild desire to sing and shout in the glory of pure living.
The day comes quickly; the sun, leaping edge of the world, floods mesa and canon, withering, sparing no living thing, lavishing reds and purples, blues and violets upon canon walls and wind-sculptured rocks. But a remorseful glare, blinding, sight-destroying, is thrown back from the sand and alkali of the desert. Shriveled sage-brush and shrunken cactus bravely fight for life.
A narrow pathway leads from the mesa down the canon's wall, twisting and doubling on itself to Apache Spring. The trail then moves southward between towering cliffs, a lane through which is caught a far-distant glimpse of the mountains. Little whirlwinds of dust spring up, ever and anon, twirling wildly across the sandy wastes. The air suffocates, like the breath of a furnace. Ever the pitiless sun searches and scorches, as conscience sears and stings a stricken soul.
Down the narrow trail, past the spring, ride in single file the Apaches, slowly, on tired horses, for the pursuing soldiers have given them no halting space. Naked, save for a breech-clout, with a narrow red band of dyed buckskin about his forehead, in which sticks a feather, each rides silent, grim, cruel, a hideous human reptile, as native to the desert as is the Gila monster. The horse is saddleless. For a bridle, the warrior uses a piece of grass rope twisted about the pony's lower jaw. His legs droop laxly by the horse's sides. In his right hand he grasps his rifle, resting the butt on the knee. The only sound to break the stillness of the day is the rattle of stones, slipping and sliding down the pathway when loosened by hoofs of the ponies.
Creeping down the canon wall, they cross the bottom, pass the spring, and disappear at a turn in the canon walls. Nature and Indian meet and merge in a world of torture and despair.
Dick had fared badly in the Lava Beds. One spring after the other he found dry. His horse fell from exhaustion and thirst; he ended the sufferings of his pack-mule with a revolver-bullet.