The stillness of the desert is around them--its silence only interrupted by the "whip-whip" of the night-hawk's wings, and at intervals its soft note answering to the shriller cry of the kid-deer plover that rises screaming before their feet.

These, with the constant skirr of the ground-crickets and the prolonged whine of the coyote, are the only sounds that salute them as they glide on--none of which are of a kind to cause alarm.
There appears no great reason for making haste now.

They have all the night before them, and, ere daylight can discover them, they will be sure to find some place of concealment.
The ground is favourable to pedestrianism in the darkness.

The surface, hard-baked by the sun, is level as a set flagstone, and in most places so smooth that a carriage could run upon it as on the drive of a park.
Well for them it is so.

Had the path been a rugged one the wounded man would not go far before giving out.