The Doc found himself in a frolicsome mood, for his night’s potations, predicated on a dwindling supply, had recklessly drained that supply but availed to carry him over to another day with the stars of his dream world still burning. Hunched low in his seat so that the tip of his goatee waggled against the rim of the wheel, with his flopping black hat all grease streaked pulled low against the sun glare, the tramp physician chewed tobacco with all the unction of a care-free conscience and indulged himself in wandering monologue. Guadalupe’s meagre stock of Spanish made him anything but a lively conversationalist, so the Doc was constrained to carry on a vivid conversation with himself. Into what penetralia of reminiscence this auto-dialogue carried him! Back through the years--through countless dim valleys of a Never-Never Land of alcoholic fantasies where his spirit had been wont to pitch its tent. Scraps of jest and shreds of song stirred the ghosts along the Road of the Dead Men. No such exuberance from Guadalupe, slave of the desert. They had not been an hour on the road when the Papago began to feel a crawling of the nerves along the spine and the pressure of invisible fingers across the brow--evil signs! No less than the mountain sheep or the road-runner in the scrub could the Papago interpret the desert’s forerunners of portent. A feel in the air--hue of the mountain rims--colour of sunlight against a rock: these things had their meaning. Away off to the northward where a patch of gypsum showed white as film ice the Indian’s eye caught the first tangible evidence of trouble ahead. A dust whirlwind like a gigantic leg in baggy trousers was wavering across the flats; the thing possessed volition of its own so surely did it map its course across a five-mile span in less than five minutes. Guadalupe nudged his companion timidly and pointed to it. “Uh-huh, old Peg-legged Grandpap,” chuckled the Doc. “Seen him lots times. Gotta hole in his peg-leg you can drive a car through slick’s a whistle--allowin’ you can find the hole.” A half hour later the sun changed colour. Like the passing of a shutter across a calcium light: now blinding white, now blood-orange. Instantaneous. Three gusts of sand-laden wind came sweeping toward them from the west. A long lull, then the storm. It pounced upon them with a sibilant whistle growing momentarily to a roar which was engulfing. The little desert skimmer bucked like a wild colt against the onslaught of the wind; but when the Doc dropped the engine into low the car wallowed on in the face of the gale. The air was thick as flour. Wind-driven sand had the bite of an emery wheel at high revolution; it rasped the skin and drove eyelids tight shut. The two in the car buttoned jackets above their noses to breathe. All the space of the desert was a poisonous yellow glare. Minute by minute density thickened until the car’s radiator was hardly visible.