For once Belding's great white devil had met his master. He fought
rider, bit, bridle, cactus, sand--and yet he went on and on,
zigzagging, turning, winding, crashing through the barbed growths.
The middle of the afternoon saw Thorne reeling in his saddle, and
then, wherever possible, Gale's powerful arm lent him strength to
hold his seat.
The giant cactus came to be only so in name. These saguaros were
thinning out, growing stunted, and most of them were single columns.
Gradually other cactus forms showed a harder struggle for existence,
and the spaces of sand between were wider. But now the dreaded,
glistening choya began to show pale and gray and white upon the
rising slope. Round-topped hills, sunset-colored above, blue-black
below, intervened to hide the distant spurs and peaks. Mile and
mile long tongues of red lava streamed out between the hills and
wound down to stop abruptly upon the slope.
The fugitives were entering a desolate, burned-out world. It rose
above them in limitless, gradual ascent and spread wide to east
and west. Then the waste of sand began to yield to cinders. The
horses sank to their fetlocks as they toiled on. A fine, choking
dust blew back from the leaders, and men coughed and horses
snorted. The huge, round hills rose smooth, symmetrical, colored
as if the setting sun was shining on bare, blue-black surfaces.
But the sun was now behind the hills. In between ran the streams
of lava. The horsemen skirted the edge between slope of hill and
perpendicular ragged wall.
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