At last, when Peggy's head was beginning to sway with exhaustion, the eastern sky began to grow gray. The coming day lit up the desert wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over undulating country overgrown with rough brush. It was a sad, drab color, and smelled pungently where the ponies' hooves trampled it.
But presently they broke into a different country. It was flatter than that which they had already traversed and, if possible, more desolate, sun-bleached and parched. The ponies stumbled over loose shale, raising clouds of suffocating dust that tingled in the nostrils. Down they rode into its basin-like formation. All about the depression arose the craggy, stripped hills. Their jagged peaks seemed to shut out the rest of the world and compress the universe into this baked, burning basin in the desert.
Across the bottom of it the alkali swept in little vagrant puffs, proceeding from the gaps of the hills. It piled in little gray heaps like ashes. The air hung steady and still as a plumb line dropped from the sky.
"We've got ter git across hyar muy pronto, (very quickly)," grunted the red-headed man, whose perspiring, fat face was coated gray with dust and alkali. "What a hole fer white men ter be in."
"It's like a busted heat-blister on a big piecrust," commented Buck Bellew, whose jauntiness had wilted. His red sash was of a piece now with the rest of his garments-a dirty, dull gray.
After a while a hot wind sprang up. It felt like the heated blast from an opened oven door. It tore in mad witch-dances about the dismal basin, sending whirling dust-devils dancing over that dreary place.
They spread, gyrated, swelled to giant mushroom shape, and died down in a monstrous ballet. Peggy felt her senses slipping under the strain. But she kept a tight rein on herself.
"I must brace up for Roy's sake," she thought.
She stole a glance at her brother. Roy, despite his plight and the dust which enveloped him, was tight-lipped and defiant. No sign of a breakdown appeared on his features, for which Peggy breathed a prayer of thanks.
"After all, God is near us even in this dreadful place," she thought, and the reflection comforted her strangely.