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Updated: May 16, 2025
A demoniac strength took possession of his limbs and once more he broke into a run, the muttered oaths grew louder and gave way to savage shouts and then to delirious babblings; and when he awoke he was groveling in a sand-wash and the sun had sunk in the west.
A deep purple predominated and was lightened presently to a velvet violet haze. Then the stars came out, close and cold and innumerable. Still Girard rode, taking advantage of the cool breath of night. Toward morning he stopped at a sand-wash where three or four dusty cottonwoods relieved the vegetation of mesquite, palo verde, and cacti.
But the mountain side was empty and as the dusk was gathering he passed through the portals of Bone Canyon. Like all desert canyons it boxed in at its mouth, opening out later in a broad valley behind; his road was the sand-wash, the path of the last cloudburst, now packed hard and set like stone.
Every canyon in the range, and in the Funeral Range beyond, and in Tin Mountain and the Grapevines to the north every one of them had been swept by the floods from the heights and ripped out as clean as a sand-wash. And this waterspout, which had turned into a mighty cloudburst, would sweep one of them clean again. The question was which one?
The wind was cooler now, for the night was well along and the bare ground had radiated its heat; but it was dry, powder dry, and every pore of his skin seemed to gasp and cry out for water. There was water, even yet, in the bottom of his canteen; but he dared not drink it till the Gateway was in sight, and the sand-wash that led to the valley beyond.
The sand-wash seemed to have been deflected by the projecting mass of a heap of driftwood which I now saw opposite to us, its long white arms reaching out toward those of our floating craft.
The road was bad out across the desert, and on through Vegas to the ranch, but he came thundering back the next night. He had left the mine to run itself, for his thoughts were of Virginia, but as he slowed down at the sand-wash and listened for the pumps he noticed that the engine had stopped.
In the middle of the sand-wash a little channel had been dug by the last of the sluicing water; above the wash there rose another cut-bank where the cloudburst before it had taken out an even greater slice; and then on both sides there rose high bluffs of conglomerate which some father of all the cloudbursts had formed.
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