She wondered why he did not try to light a fire, but she wouldn't ask him another thing if she died. In point of fact, he knew the sagebrush would not burn. Suddenly the wind blew fiercer, there came a rushing sound, and the top and walls of the wigwam were whisked off like a flash, and as they staggered to their feet, buffeted by the whirling bushes, a cloud of fine alkali-dust enveloped them, blinding their eyes, penetrating their ears and noses, and setting them gasping, sneezing and coughing spasmodically. Then, like a puff of smoke, the suffocating storm was dissipated, and when they opened their smarting eyes there was nothing but the silent, glorious desolation of the ghostly desert around them, with the snow-peaks in the distance glittering beneath the moon. A sand-spout had struck them, that was all--one of the whirling dust-columns which they had admired all day from the car-windows.
Wretched enough before both for physical and sentimental reasons, this last experience quite demoralized Miss Dwyer, and she sat down and cried. Now, a few tears, regarded from a practical, middle-aged point of view, would not appear to have greatly complicated the situation, but they threw Lombard into a panic. If she was going to cry, something must be done. Whether anything could be done or not, something _must_ be done.
"Don't leave me," she cried hysterically as he rushed off to reconnoitre the vicinity.
But five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and he did not come back. Terror dried her tears, and her heart almost stopped beating. She had quite given him up for lost, and herself too, when with inexpressible relief she heard him call to her. She replied, and in a moment more he was at her side, breathless with running.
"I lost my bearings," he said. "If you had not answered me I could not have found you."
"Don't leave me again," she sobbed, clinging to his arm.
He put his arms round her and kissed her. It was mean, base, contemptible to take advantage of her agitation in that way, but she did not resist, and he did it again and again--I forbear to say how many times.
"Isn't it a perfectly beautiful night?" he exclaimed with a fine gush of enthusiasm.
"Isn't it exquisite?" she echoed with a rush of sympathetic feeling.