By midafternoon another sandstorm began to beat at our backs. Glassy dust swirled around us, driven by a keening, howling wind. Soon the landscape we rode through, featureless enough at best, was hidden by surging billows of grit. Even the mountains that had loomed before us were soon obscured.

We made a cold camp that night. Neither of us was hungry, and we were both too tired to struggle around in the wind trying to find enough wood for a fire. I felt very low, and, from the few glimpses I had of Billy, he felt just as low. We turned our backs to the wind, wrapped in our blankets, and got what sleep we could.

At dawn the sand was still blowing fiercely. We rode silently, the wind at our backs all day—the sun was only a dim ring in the dust. I was not certain where we were, and I’m sure Billy had no idea himself, but before evening we struck a river that could only be the Pecos and followed it north. I was in such a melancholic state that it was almost a comfort to consider that we would probably starve before reaching any settlement; it would no doubt be painful, but at least Billy Bone could claim no more victims, and Cecily Snow would be denied her elopement with a famous outlaw.

Thwarting Cecily, if only in some small particular, seemed, in the mood I was in, reason enough to die of starvation on the banks of a forlorn river.

Billy Bone was bitterly depressed, too.

“I wish Katie had just shot me,” he said at one point. “It would be easier than having your lungs sandpapered for two days.”

But we stumbled on, through weather that turned day into dusk, expecting to have to endure another fireless, foodless night—then Rosy suddenly stuck her head up and brayed loudly, only to draw an answering bray from a donkey.

A minute or two later we spotted the donkey, and Billy recognized it.

“Dern, that’s the Tulip’s donkey,” he said. “The one with the funny name.”

Sure enough, it was Bonaparte; and the dim shapes, which we had been about to pass without interest, thinking them to be small sand dunes, turned out to be the hovels of Greasy Corners. Two horses were hitched outside the China Pond.

“Now, this is luck!” Billy Bone said, his spirits immediately improved.

Mine remained rather at the low end of the thermometer, but I admit I was glad enough to follow him into the saloon, out of the sand.

2.