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Updated: May 21, 2025
Women and children and old men dribbled out from the houses, all eager for the news. "Billie he found Miss Lee in the Mal-Pais. That boy sure had his lucky pants on to-day. She's all right too. I done seen her myself just a mite tuckered out, as you might say," explained the former cowpuncher. Live-Oaks shook hands with itself in exuberant joy. For an hour the school bell pealed out the good news.
She lay there motionless for what seemed a long time before it penetrated her consciousness that one of her palms pained from a jagged cut the fall had caused. Her body lay on sharp-pointed rocks. As far as they could reach, the groping fingers of the girl found nothing but hard, rough stone. Then, in a flash, the truth came to her. She had reached the Mal-Pais.
Sometimes, when the thought of her fate would become an agony to him, he could hardly keep his shout from rising to a scream. Billie struck a match and looked at his watch. It was five minutes past three. A faint gray was beginning to sift into the sky. He had been nearly seven hours in the Mal-Pais. Out in God's country the world would soon be shaking sleep from its eyes.
He was an old plainsman, tough as leather, and he had weathered the storm safely. A full day late he staggered into Live-Oaks a sorry sight. The news that shook Live-Oaks into swift activity had to do with Lee Snaith. Just before the storm hit him the buckboard driver had met her riding toward the Mal-Pais. Prince arrived to find the town upside down with the confusion of preparation.
Most of them were to spend the night, and if necessary the next day and night, in combing the sand desert east of the Mal-Pais. Here Lee had last been seen, and here probably she had wandered round and round until the storm had beaten her down.
Not until late in the afternoon did the sun show at all and by that time the wanderer was so deep in the Mal-Pais that when night closed down again she was still its prisoner. She was hungry and fagged. The soles of her boots were worn out and her feet were badly blistered. Again she took refuge in a deep crevice for the night. The loneliness appalled her. No living creature was to be seen.
It had struck him a mile or two this side of the Mal-Pais, as the great lava beds in the Tularosa Basin are commonly called. He had unhitched the horses, overturned the buckboard, and huddled in the shelter of the bed. There he had lain crouched for ten hours while the drifting sand, fine as powder, blotted out the world and buried him in drifts.
He held out to Prince a note scrawled on a piece of wrapping-paper. It was in Clanton's pell-mell, huddled chirography: Sorry I can't stay to entertain you, Billie. Make yourself at home. Bacon and other grub in a lard can by the creek. Help yourself. Crack Sanders one on the bean with your six-gun on account for me. The Mal-Pais Billie Prince laughed. The joke was on him, but he was glad of it.
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