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Updated: May 12, 2025
He turned wearily to hide his face from her, and looked thoughtfully out the window, across the level reaches of the Mojave desert, to where the sun hung low over the Tehachapis. In the fading light the little dust-devils were beginning to caper and obscure the landscape, much as the dark shadows were already trooping athwart the horizon of Mr. Hennage's wasted life.
"It is as I thought!" declared Mahommed Gunga. "It is war, sahib! He has summoned men from his estates. As a rule, he can afford but ten men for that fort of his, and he would not send all his men to meet us he has a garrison up yonder!" Like blown dust-devils the twenty raced to them, and drew up thundering within a lance-length.
Holding himself more and more alert to every least movement about him, he was steadily becoming keyed up to a dangerous pitch. Rollicking tumbleweed did not worry him any more than did the swirling dust-devils. These were things of the desert, each the complexion of the desert. But not so with scraps of paper.
Learoyd, bowed on his bedstead, groaned, and the gentleman-ranker sighed in his sleep. Ortheris took Mulvaney's tendered pouch and we three smoked gravely for a space while the dust-devils danced on the glacis and scoured the red-hot plain. 'Pop? said Ortheris, wiping his forehead.
The desert lay white and palpitating beneath the noonday glare, and from the outermost rim of desolation came dancing "dust-devils" whirling and gliding through the mazes of their eerie dance. "I think sometimes," said Judith, "that they are the ghosts of those who have died of thirst in the desert." Mary shuddered imperceptibly. "How do you stand it with never a glimpse of the sea?"
Learoyd, bowed on his bedstead, groaned, and the gentleman-ranker sighed in his sleep. Ortheris took Mulvaney's tendered pouch, and we three smoked gravely for a space while the dust-devils danced on the glacis and scoured the red-hot plain. "Pop?" said Ortheris, wiping his forehead.
June had cast its withering smile upon the San Gregorio and the green hills had turned to a parched brown. Grasshoppers whirred everywhere; squirrels whistled; occasional little dust-devils whirled up the now thoroughly dry river-bed and the atmosphere was redolent of the aroma of dust and tarweed.
The columns, clouds and spirals of dust save perhaps from a near supply wagon coming in or passing out could not be distinguished from the whirling dust-devils that danced always over the hot plains. The toiling pigmy dots of the little army were far beyond her vision's range. It was as though the fierce land had swallowed up horses, wagons and men.
The wind rose and everywhere were moving sheets of sand, and in the distance circular yellow dust-devils, rising high like waterspouts, and back down in the sun-scorched valley a sandstorm moved along majestically, burying the desert in its yellow pall.
The Irishman, as the engineer translated, crossed himself. "Howly Mither, fwhat a name!" Jefferson Worth spoke. "Drive on, Texas." And so, with the yellow dust-devils dancing along their road and that yellow cloud in the distance, they moved down the slope down into The King's Basin into La Palma de la Mano de Dios, The Hollow of God's Hand. "Is that true, sir?" asked Abe of the Seer.
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