Lash
directed Gale to mount the other saddled horse and go next.
Dick had not ridden a hundred yards behind the trotting leaders
before he had sundry painful encounters with reaching cactus arms.
The horse missed these by a narrow margin. Dick's knees appeared
to be in line, and it became necessary for him to lift them high and
let his boots take the onslaught of the spikes. He was at home
in the saddle, and the accomplishment was about the only one he
possessed that had been of any advantage during his sojourn in the West.
Ladd pursued a zigzag course southward across the desert, trotting
down the aisles, cantering in wide, bare patches, walking through
the clumps of cacti. The desert seemed all of a sameness to
Dick--a wilderness of rocks and jagged growths hemmed in by
lowering ranges, always looking close, yet never growing any nearer.
The moon slanted back toward the west, losing its white radiance,
and the gloom of the earlier evening began to creep into the washes
and to darken under the mesas. By and by Ladd entered an arroyo,
and here the travelers turned and twisted with the meanderings
of a dry stream bed. At the head of a canyon they had to take
once more to the rougher ground. Always it led down, always it
grew rougher, more rolling, with wider bare spaces, always the
black ranges loomed close.
Gale became chilled to the bone, and his clothes were damp and cold.
His knees smarted from the wounds of the poisoned thorns, and his
right hand was either swollen stiff or too numb to move.
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