“Uh-huh, old Peg-legged Grandpap,” chuckled the Doc. “Seen him lots times. Gotta hole in his peg-leg you can drive a car through slick’s a whistle—allowin’ you can find the hole.”
A half hour later the sun changed colour. Like the passing of a shutter across a calcium light: now blinding white, now blood-orange. Instantaneous.
Three gusts of sand-laden wind came sweeping toward them from the west. A long lull, then the storm.
It pounced upon them with a sibilant whistle growing momentarily to a roar which was engulfing. The little desert skimmer bucked like a wild colt against the onslaught of the wind; but when the Doc dropped the engine into low the car wallowed on in the face of the gale. The air was thick as flour. Wind-driven sand had the bite of an emery wheel at high revolution; it rasped the skin and drove eyelids tight shut. The two in the car buttoned jackets above their noses to breathe.
All the space of the desert was a poisonous yellow glare. Minute by minute density thickened until the car’s radiator was hardly visible.
Then the sturdy engine quit. First a tortured grinding of clogged cylinders, puny explosions from the exhaust, a bucking and quivering. After that sudden stoppage of movement as if the car had plumped into a stone wall.
The Doc and Guadalupe tumbled out of the seat and crawled beneath the car for protection. A stab of fear shot down through Stooder’s disordered thoughts—the water! None in the canteens, for they had drained the last into the radiator before starting from the treasure ground. Was there—could the sand have—?
He inched himself through a new sand drift below the front axle to where the drain cock projected below the radiator base. Like a suckling kid he lifted his lips to the steel teat and turned the cock. A trickle of heavy mud filled his mouth with grit, then stopped.
Radiator a mess of mud—cylinders clogged—feed pipes all choked and water—gone!
Doc Stooder pulled his floppy hat over his face and whimpered the name of God.