After this scene followed days of hot travelling over hard, gravelly plains, thinly coated with grass and dotted with cacti, mezquit trees, the leafless palo verde, and the greasewood bush.  Here and there towered that giant cactus, the saguarra, a fluted shaft, thirty, forty, and even sixty feet high, with a coronet of richly-colored flowers, the whole fabric as splendid as a Corinthian column.  Prickly pears, each one large enough to make a thicket, abounded.  Through the scorching sunshine ran scorpions and lizards, pursued by enormous rattlesnakes.  During the days the heat ranged from 100 to 115 deg. in the shade, while the nights were swept by winds as parching as the breath of an oven.  The distant mountains glared at the eye like metals brought to a white heat.  Not seldom they passed horses, mules, cattle, and sheep, which had perished in this terrible transit and been turned to mummies by the dry air and baking sun.  Some of these carcasses, having been set on their legs by passing travellers, stood upright, staring with blind eyeballs, grinning through dried lips, mockeries of life, statues of death.

In spite of these hardships and horrors, Clara kept up her courage and was almost cheerful; for in the first place Coronado had ceased his terrifying attentions, and in the second place they were nearing Cactus Pass, where she hoped to meet Thurstane.  When love has not a foot of certainty to stand upon, it can take wing and soar through the incredible.  The idea that they two, divided hundreds of miles back, should come together at a given point by pure accident, was obviously absurd.  Yet Clara could trust to the chance and live for it.

The scenery changed to mountains.  There were barren, sublime, awful peaks to the right and left.  To the girl’s eyes they were beautiful, for she trusted that Thurstane beheld them.  She was always on horseback now, scanning every feature of the landscape, searching of course for him.  She did not pass a cactus, or a thicket of mezquit, or a bowlder without anxious examination.  She imagined herself finding him helpless with hunger, or passing him unseen and leaving him to die.  She was so pale and thin with constant anxiety that you might have thought her half starved, or recovering from some acute malady.

About five one afternoon, as the train was approaching its halting-place at a spring on the western side of the pass, Clara’s feverish mind fixed on a group of rocks half a mile from the trail as the spot where she would find Thurstane.  In obedience to similar impressions she had already made many expeditions of this nature.  Constant failure, and a consciousness that all this searching was folly, could not shake her wild hopes.  She set off at a canter alone; but after going some four hundred yards she heard a gallop behind her, and, looking over her shoulder, she saw Coronado.  She did not want to be away from the train with him; but she must at all hazards reach that group of rocks; something within impelled her.  Better mounted than she, he was soon by her side, and after a while struck out in advance, saying, “I will look out for an ambush.”