The Border Boys Across the Frontier | Page 4

do, Pete?" asked Jack, turning to the cow-puncher.
It had now grown so dark that he could hardly see Pete's face. It was
hot, too, with a heavy, suffocating sort of heat. The wind that drove the
myriads upon myriads of tiny sand grains now darkening the air, was

ardent as the blast from an opened oven-door.
"Get your saddles off, quick! Lie down, and put your heads under 'em,"
ordered the cow-puncher, briskly swinging himself out of his saddle as
he spoke.
The others hastened to follow his example. It was not a minute too soon.
Already their mouths were full of gritty particles, and their eyes
smarted as if they had been seared with hot irons. The ponies could
hardly be induced to stand up while the process of unsaddling was gone
through. As for the burros, those intelligent beasts had thrown
themselves down as soon as the halt was made. With their heads laid as
low as possible, and their hind quarters turned to the direction of the
hot blast, they were as well prepared to weather the sand storm as they
could be.
The instant the saddles were off the ponies, down they flopped, too, in
the same positions as their long-eared cousins. The bipeds of the party
made haste to follow their animals' example, only, in their case, their
heads were sheltered as snugly as if under a tent, by the big,
high-peaked, broad-flapped Mexican saddles.
It was well they had made haste, for, as Pete had said, the sand storm
was evidently going to get "a whole lot worse before it got better." The
air grew almost as black as night, and the wind fairly screamed as it
swept over them. Jack could feel little piles of sand drifting up about
them, just as driven snow forms in drifts when it strikes an obstruction.
How hot it was under the saddles! The boys' mouths felt as if they
would crack, so dry and feverish had they become.
"Oh, for a drink of water!" thought Jack, trying in vain to moisten his
mouth by moving his tongue about within it.
All at once, above the screaming of the wind, the lad caught another
sound--the galloping of hoofs coming toward them at a rapid rate. For
an instant the thought flashed across him that it was their own stock
that had stampeded. He stuck his head out to see, braving the furious
sweep of the stinging sand.

He withdrew it like a tortoise beneath its cover, with a cry that was
only half of pain. Through the driving sand he had distinctly seen three
enormous forms sweep by, seen like dim shadows in the gloom around.
What could they have been? In vain Jack cudgeled his brains for a
solution to the mystery.
The forms he had seen drift by had been larger than any horse. So
vague had their outlines been in the semi-darkness, however, that
beyond an impression of their great size, he had no more definite idea
of the apparitions. That they were travelling at a tremendous pace was
doubtless, for hardly had he sighted them before they vanished, and he
could not have had his head out of its shelter for more than a second or
so.
While the lad lay in the semi-suffocation of the saddle, his mind
revolved the problem, but no explanation that he could think of would
fit the case. "Might they not have been wild horses?" he thought.
But no,--these were three times the size of any horse he had ever seen.
Besides, their blotty-looking outlines bore no semblance to the form of
a horse.
But presently something happened which put the thought of the
mysterious shadows out of his mind. The wind began to abate. To be
sure, at first it hardly seemed to have diminished its force, but in the
course of half an hour or so the party could once more emerge, like so
many ostriches, from their sand-piles, and gaze about them.
Very little sand was in the air now, but it was everywhere else. In their
eyes, mouths, ears, while, if they shook their heads, a perfect little
shower of it fell all about them. The animals, too, struggling to their
feet out of the little mounds that had formed around them, were covered
with a thick coat of grayish dust. It was a sorry-looking party. With
red-rimmed eyes, cracked, parched lips and swollen tongues, they
looked as if they had been dragged through a blast furnace.
The sky above them now shone with its brilliant, metallic blue once
more, while ahead, the sun was sinking lower. In a short time it would

have set, and, as Ralph Stetson, in a choked voice, called for "Water,"
the same thought flashed across the minds of all