Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/169



HE barrel cactus that had, for the time, saved Stone, Larkin, and Healy from the Death of the Desert, the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and desiccation, was the solitary outpost of groves and thickets of its kind. They had passed, although they did not know it, the worst of the mesa, the sandy plain, strewn with stones in patches, too arid, too inhospitable for even the tiny knob cactus to grow. From there on to the western verge, the soil became more and more thickly set with prickly-pear, towering torch-thistles, hedgehog and whipstock cactus, old-man cactus, growing in thorny mazes, with the tip-tops of the barrel or torch thistles, forty, even fifty feet above a rider's head.

Lunging, scuffing, skidding, rolling through the irregular avenues of these strange growths, fleshy-stemmed, gray-green, flaccid creations, needle-spined, decked with myriads of brilliant blossoms, a panting automobile of the variety made its way eastward. A heavier machine would have foundered in the breadths of soft and shifting sand. Where a six-cylinder would have wallowed this two-cylindered contraption skimmed. The hot sand failed to affect its well-used tires though they were almost at 155