Dust of the Desert

Six days after Quelele the Papago set out on his mission of mercy from the Casa O’Donoju he returned to the oasis. It was in the first flush of dawn that the _shuf-shuf_ of the...

With the lithe spring of a cat Bim put himself between Grant and the advancing Indian. His face had gone dead white and his eyes were coals blown upon by the wind of anger.

Colonel Urgo straightened himself, and the smile that had twisted his little waxed moustache awry suddenly was smudged out. For his eyes encountered what they were hardly prepar...

The sandstorm that overwhelmed Stooder and his guide on the Road of the Dead Men brought the mighty voice of the desert to the Garden of Solitude in requiem for the soul of Don...

With evenly divided cause and equal cheerfulness Grant could have kicked the porter and himself when he awoke tardily next morning and found his car at a standstill. He raised t...

On a March evening of sunset splendour the worthy doctor descended from the single combination coach and baggage car which a suffering locomotive drags once daily from a junctio...

Before he had descended to the street Grant began to regret his flash of anger which had launched him out of Doc Stooder’s office. To be sure, the unconventional doctor had been...

Bim translated Quelele’s intelligence for Grant. “Our li’l friend Urgo’s been burnin’ the wind,” was his dry comment. Grant sent a quick glance around the cul-de-sac of rock whi...

“But, Doc, I tell you you’re crazy! How could a tenderfoot like Hickman just in town from the East breeze across the Line and get into a jam the first night he’s in town--drop o...

Meanwhile from another direction adventurers were moving through the night upon the slag mountains of Pinacate. Empty space of Altar’s ultimate sweep was become almost populous....

The sun went down before the sand storm abated. Two men, the one called civilized, the other a savage, crouched like rabbits in a covert beneath the body of the little car with...

Grant Hickman was not one of that tribe dignified by the name of he-flirts. He abominated the whole slimy clan with the loathing of a clean man. When he had seized upon the part...

Benicia O’Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with the twin towns on the Line behind her--ahead the unlimned immensity of the wilderness--gave herself to the exhila...

Grant was stunned. The vision of the figure with the fine patrician face there on the bed--in the breast the savage mark of violence--seemed but a part with the disordered fanci...

Colonel Hamilcar Urgo was not addicted to introspection. He took himself as he found himself and as a rule was well pleased with the find. Had any non-partisan voice of conscien...

The Desert of Altar is transcendence of silence. From the savage Growler range in Arizona south to the obsidian bastions of Pinacate, by the dead Gulf, is space to crowd five mi...

“Don Padraic’s compliments, and he awaits the pleasure of his guests’ company in the music room if the sick señor feels able.” It was ’Cepcion’s soft patois that interrupted Bim...

Dawn marched over the mountains like a phalanx of Alexander: spear points of light on long hafts, which drove at the zenith in solid bundles. Then the mercenaries of the sun tro...

An hour after the sun had set on the day of Colonel Urgo’s humiliation at the Casa O’Donoju, Quelele tooled his car into the avenue of palms at the end of the long return journe...

The Mexican theory of the treatment of prisoners, their status before the law and the responsibilities of government toward them has few complexities and knows no interference o...

The storm ceased with the same suddenness as it began. Hardly an hour had torrential waters lashed the cinder wastes of Pinacate when the black pall over the heavens broke away...

That day omniscient will of the desert moved to point a murderer’s guilt the same inscrutable power flexed a finger to mould events some seventy miles away from the Garden of So...

The Golden Sunset Limited, Pacific Coast bound, snaked its way through a cleft in mountains and came sighing to a stop at the man’s town, El Paso. A patchwork crowd spilled out...

Somewhere in the darkness of the ancient house a deep-toned bell tolled the hour of two. The sound came to Grant, broad awake in his room, as if from a great distance--tocsin st...

Bim Bagley, on the trail of the information brought by Doc Stooder’s pipe line, found himself against a blank wall the instant he passed through the barrier of the Line into Son...