The pasty-nosed Squint laughed sneeringly, and his lips twisted in a simulation of pity.
There came a low whine over the distant dunes. The disputing pair had not noticed that the sun's light was fading out. The air was stifling.
"Don't be uh boob," gibed Squint. And there was a crackling edge to his laugh. "The Chink's tryin' uhnother shindy on us." But his tone carried no confidence in his words. There seemed to be an insidious, occult, inexorable something about this Oriental who had communed so long with the desert.
The badgered Shorty twitched his gun hand instinctively, then discreetly checked himself.
"Yeh—yeh, damn yuh!" he wailed in terrified anger. "Now yer scared to let go of it, yerself!"
Neither of them had noticed why their words had to be shouted. They were too wrapt in their argument to perceive that the dull whine had risen to a distinct roar.
Swiftly the Chinaman had gathered up his outfit, and he was cinching it into place on the burro. The cut-throats had taken about twenty paces from him when he had halted them with his recital of the black opal's mythical qualities. Still in verbal conflict, they moved on.
A wind puff swished over the low dunes, driving loose sand through the crackling branches of the brittle salt bush. An incessant rush of suffocating air followed. Little rivulets of sand began to lift and worm along the ground and spill over the rolling dunes. Dust cloud blanketed the desert.
Prince Chu picked up the lead rope of his abbreviated burro and commenced to plod southward, with his back to the swirling, wind-driven dust. A hundred yards ahead of him the fleeing pair were trying to take note of their position and were traveling undecided as to direction.
In the south distance, before the dust had filled the air, there had been visible the jagged outline of the San Francisco Mountains. Now nothing was visible save the immediate wind-swept surface of the earth, the troubled dunes, and the higher desert ridges. Yuen Ming Chu had no intention of letting his despoilers beyond the range of his vision. And he was obliged to shorten the intervening distance; for the hot wind rose into a hurricane.