"But I wish!" exclaimed Phil earnestly. "Don't think I'm unwilling, Captain! Don't think it!"
Middleton laughed.
"I don't," he said. "I knew that you would be keen for it. Saddle your horse and look to your arms. We ride in five minutes."
Phil was ready in three, and the thirty troopers rode silently down one of the ravines and into the lower country. Phil looked back and saw the fires of the camp, mere red, yellow, and pink dots of flame. The mountains themselves were fused into a solid mass of black. The troop, arrow headed in shape, with Middleton at the point of the shaft, and Phil, Breakstone, and Arenberg close behind him, rode in silence save for the beat of their horses' hoofs. The wind here did not moan like that in the pass, but it seemed to Phil to be colder, and it had an edge of fine particles that stung his cheeks and eyes.
The night was bright enough to allow of fairly swift riding, and the ground was no longer cut and gullied as at the mouth of the pass. Hence the troopers were not compelled to devote their whole attention to their horses and they could watch the country for sign of an enemy. But they did not yet see any such sign. Phil knew that they were on the road, leading southward to Santa Anna, and he felt sure that if they kept upon it they must soon come upon the Mexican army. Yet the silence and desolation were complete here. The pass had been weird and somber to the full, but there they had thousands of comrades, and the fires in the ravines had been cheering. Now the unlit darkness was all about them, and it still had that surcharged quality that it had borne for Phil when in the pass. Nor did the fine dust cease to sting his face.
"What is it, Bill?" he asked. "Where does it come from, this dust?"
"It's a wind of the desert that stings us, Phil," replied Breakstone. "It comes vast distances, and I think, too, that it brings some of the fine dust ground off the surface of the lava. Its effect is curious. It's like burnt gunpowder in the nostrils. It seems to heat the inside, too."
"It makes me feel that way," said Phil, "and it seems to be always urging us on."
"An irritant, as it were," said Breakstone, "but I don't think we need it. The event itself is enough to keep us all on edge. Feel cold, Phil?"
"No, I've got a pair of buckskin gauntlets. Fine thing for riding on nights like this."