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Below, stretching in endless miles was the desert a sinister, forbidding land of desolate distances, marked only by slender yucca palms, mesquite, dusty greasewood, an occasional clump of green palo verde, the slim fingers of the ocatilla, the high "forks" of the giant sahuara, and clumps of la cholla cactus, looking like apple orchards in full bloom.
I observed to Brower, who, crying with nervous rage and chagrin, and undoubtedly considerably stuck up with cholla spines, was crawling to his feet. "Can't we catch him? Won't he stop?" asked Miss Emory. "If he gets to the ranch, won't they look for you?" "He's one of my range ponies: he won't stop short of the Gila."
She knew that she repeatedly offered the last of their water to John and that he repeatedly refused it, urging it on her. She knew that the pulp of the barrel cactus that she tried to chew turned to bitter sawdust in her mouth and sickened her. Then suddenly, as she struggled to refocus her wandering wits on the cholla, it appeared within touch of her hand.
Moss and cactus had been trampled down by boot heels. To the cholla hung here and there scraps of cloth. A blood splash stared at them from an outcropping slope of rock. Jim swung from the saddle and rescued the hat from the spines. Inside the sweat band were the initials L.K. Silently he handed the hat to Phil. "It's his hat," the boy cried. "It's his hat," Jim agreed.
Vegetation grew scant except for patches of cholla and mesquite, a sand-cherry bush here and there, occasionally a clump of shining poison ivy. Sunset brought them to the Salt Flats. The foreman gave orders to throw off and make camp. A course was chosen for the race. From a selected point the horses were to run to a clump of mesquite, round it, and return to the starting-place.
Let's get as far as that before we stop again!" With a great effort, DeWitt gathered himself together and, fixing his eyes on the fantastic cactus growth, he plodded desperately through the sand. At the cholla bunch, Rhoda pointed to a jutting lavender rock. "At that we'll rest for a minute. Come on, John!"
The distance from the nearest pine to the jacal was about thirty feet. A clump of cholla grew thick just outside the window. Roy crouched behind the trunk for several minutes before he could bring himself to take the chance of covering that last ten yards. But every minute it was getting lighter. Every minute increased the likelihood of detection.
As often Four Bits had wheeled in its tracks and pounded through clutching cholla and down breakneck inclines after the escaping three-year-old.
In the way she sped through the mesquit, evading the clutch of the cholla by supple dips to right and left, there was a kind of pantherine litheness. At the summit she waited for the horse to clamber up the shale after her. "Get down in your collar, you Buckskin," she urged, and when the pony was again beside her petted the animal with little love pats on the nose.
"Go get your famous top-buggy and I'll be ready in a minute." In a short time Rhoda and Cartwell, followed by many injunctions from Katherine, started off toward the irrigating ditch. At a slow pace they drove through the peach orchard into the desert. As they reached the open trail, thrush and to-hee fluttered from the cholla. Chipmunk and cottontail scurried before them.
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