Part 18 (2/2)

She turned her head from side to side for a breath. The air was thicker than smoke with dust as heavy as flour.

”Barney!” she called, from time to time, but the alkali coated her tongue. On either side she could see for a distance of twenty feet, or less. It seemed far less, in all that terrible drift of white.

She rode across the wind, doggedly, crying Barney's name. A nameless hopelessness began to grow upon her. Now this way, now that, she urged her horse. How far could Barney hear her calling? How far could he wander? How far would she ride? There were forty miles in length and fifteen in width of this reek of wind-driven alkali. G.o.d keep them if ever they got more than two miles away from the Hole!

It was aimless riding, presently, but she still persisted. A sickening conviction that Barney and the little captive would both be dead before she could find them made her desperation unendurable. With eyes starting hotly, with every breath seeming like a struggle for existence, in the dust, she galloped, calling, calling, till at last she could call no more.

Dazed, she halted her horse at last, and sat staring blindly at nothing. The pony turned about, unheeded, and began to fight his way against the storm, his head down between his legs.

Sally's head also came down, by instinct more than by design. She felt past thinking. For a time she rode thus, heedlessly. Then abruptly she clutched at the reins and drew the horse to a halt. The animal p.r.i.c.ked up his ears peculiarly.

Weirdly out of the wind and dust came a sound--not a moan, not a croon, but like them both, yet a song, uncertain, apparently coming from no definitive point. She even caught the words:

”All on some lonesome bill-din The swallow makes her nest;

All on some--lonesome bill-din The--swallow makes--her nest.”

Sally tried to call out. She made but a croaking noise. Slipping from her horse's back, she groped her way forward, leading the pony, and trying to shout.

For a rod or more she battled against the driving dust, then halted as before. Not another sound would the desert render up--only the strange dry swis.h.i.+ng by of the particles of stuff rasping the desert's surface as they pa.s.sed and rose.

”Barney!” she called, by a mighty effort. There was no response.

Crying now, in her anguish and plight, she led the pony this way and that, up and down, listening, trying to force a shout through her swollen lips. At length, in despair, she knew she could search no more. A lifelessness of feeling was creeping upon her. Mechanically she walked beside her pony, and it was the animal that was leading.

It seemed as if she had plodded onward thus for hours, when at length she stumbled upon a gray little mound in the drifting alkali.

”Barney!” she said, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper. Crooning and sobbing, she lifted him up--unconscious, but clinging to the still, little form that was hugged to the shelter of his breast.

”Hang on--oh, hang on to the horse, dear, please,” she coaxed, in all the tender strength of a new-born love. ”Barney--try--try, dear, please. I'll be your wife--I'll do anything--if only you'll try.”

She had raised him bodily to the pony's back. Stiffly as a man that freezes he straddled the animal. He made no answer, no movement.

She feared he must be dead. She dared not look at the little papoose.

Barney's weight rested partially upon her shoulder. She tossed away the reins.

”Go on, Sancho--go on home,” she croaked to the horse, pa.s.sionately.

The pony seemed to comprehend. With some faint fragrance of the waters of Bitter Hole in his nostrils, the willing creature fought slowly, steadily forward, against the terrible drift.

John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl, against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike slowness and silence toward them.

And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely see--and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust.

Moody ran to meet him.

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