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It tore in mad witch-dances about the dismal basin, sending whirling dust-devils dancing over that dreary place. They spread, gyrated, swelled to giant mushroom shape, and died down in a monstrous ballet. Peggy felt her senses slipping under the strain. But she kept a tight rein on herself. "I must brace up for Roy's sake," she thought. She stole a glance at her brother.
From the floor of the desert great dust-devils of white alkali arose and swirled solemnly across the wastes. In the semi-darkness they looked like gaunt ghosts. Peggy shuddered. It was like a nightmare. Once or twice she even pinched herself to see if she were awake. The night, from being cool, had now become blisteringly hot. The wind was like the fiery exhalations of a blast furnace.
The ground was very bad, and now and again we rushed through the whirling, choking "dust-devils" in the skirts of the flying storm. There was a burning hot wind blowing that brought up a stench of stale brick-kilns with it; and through the half light and through the dust-devils, across that desolate plain, flickered the brown holland habit on the gray horse. She headed for the Station at first.
Judith scarce heeded, her thoughts straying after first one then another of the group that made up her little world—Peter Hamilton, Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, his family—thoughts inconsequent as the dancing dust-devils that whirled over that infinity of space, and, whirling, disappeared and reappeared at some new corner of the compass.
Then the wind came a breeze rising as it were from the hot earth forcing the Spanish dagger to dipping acknowledgment, sending dust-devils swirling across the slow curves of the desert and then the storm burst in all its might. For this was a storm a sand-storm of the Southwest. Down the slopes to the west billowed giant clouds of sand.
Particularly hard on me were what the Arizonians called dust-devils, whirlwinds of sand. On and off I walked a good many miles, the latter of which I hobbled. Don Carlos did not know what to make of this. He eyed me, and nosed me, and tossed his head as if to say I was a strange rider for him. Like my mustang, Night, he would not stand to be mounted.
It struck up from the baked ground and seemed to scorch the body through the clothes. The glare from the white sand and even whiter patches of salt was blinding and penetrated through the closed eyelids. A hot wind blew over the hazy, shimmering desert, setting the whirling dust-devils dancing and striking the face like the touch of a heated iron.
Dust-devils whirled about in quick eddies, stray sheets of paper leaped up, tumbleweed began steady forward movement, rabbit-like, scurrying before the winds, the advance occupied by largest growths, the rear brought up with smallest clumps, the order determined by the area each presented to the winds.
When the wind blows, the dust-devils play tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the midst of this desolation, stretch forth their fantastically twisted and withered arms, seeming to invoke a curse on nature herself while warning the traveler that the heritage of this land is death.
He recalled the distance seven hundred no, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha. So far westward was Benton. It lay in the heart of barrenness, alkali, and desolation, on the face of the windy desert, alive with dust-devils, sweeping along, yellow and funnel-shaped a huge blocked-out town, and set where no town could ever live.
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