“You brutes had no right to steal this child!” he cried out, passionately. “He’s starving! He’s pining away! Look at his thin little legs! Look at his poor little eyes—getting hollow!” Tears were streaming from his own tired eyes as he spoke. “Slivers, you did this!” he charged, angrily. “You tell me where you got him, or I’ll shoot you down like a dog!” He had hastened up to the teamster, against whose very breast he thrust a pistol a foot in length.
“By God! he’d do it!” said Slivers, unmoved by the push of the loaded weapon. “Uncock it, Barney. You’d ought to know I wouldn’t harm the kid, any quicker than you. I’d do as much as any man if we had to save his life.”
“He may not live through the day!” cried Barney. “I’m going to take him home—back to his mother! And if you don’t tell me where she is—”
“Hold on, now; I call,” interrupted Slivers. “We’ll see if you’ve got any sand. The Injun camp is over across the desert, in Thimbleberry Cove.... Do you reckon you’ve got the nerve to pack him across?”
A peculiar silence followed this announcement. Barney stood like an animal at bay. His face became deathly white. He fully comprehended the awfulness of that great white dead-land just outside.
Wooster broke the silence. “It looks as if the wind is going to blow harder to-day,” he said. “It’s stirring up the desert some already. A man could never get two miles out from here, unless the breeze goes down.”
Barney, with a crazed, wild look on his face, hastened away to the kitchen.
“I’m glad he didn’t take you up on that,” said Moody, gazing forth from a window. “Get on to the way the whirlwinds are kickin’ up the smoke already.”
“I reckon it won’t blow no worse than yesterday,” replied Slivers. “But I knowed he wouldn’t tackle it anyhow. He’ll be back here in a minute, to squirm out of the game.”
They drummed on the table for fifteen minutes, as they waited. A brisk wind was blowing; the desert began to deliver up its cohorts of dust-clouds, where powdered alkali billowed and eddied and swept across the valley in ever-increasing volumes.