Gale believed himself the keenest of the party, the one who thought
most, and he watched the effect of the desert upon his companions.
He imagined that he saw Ladd grow old sitting round the campfire.
Certain it was that the ranger's gray hair had turned white. What
had been at times hard and cold and grim about him had strangely
vanished in sweet temper and a vacant-mindedness that held him
longer as the days passed. For hours, it seemed, Ladd would bend
over his checkerboard and never make a move. It mattered not now
whether or not he had a partner. He was always glad of being
spoken to, as if he were called back from vague region of mind.
Jim Lash, the calmest, coolest, most nonchalant, best-humored
Westerner Gale had ever met, had by slow degrees lost that cheerful
character which would have been of such infinite good to his
companions, and always he sat broding, silently brooding. Jim had
no ties, few memories, and the desert was claiming him.
Thorne and Mercedes, however, were living, wonderful proof
that spirit, mind, and heart were free--free to soar in scorn
of the colossal barrenness and silence and space of that
terrible hedging prison of lava. They were young; they
loved; they were together; and the oasis was almost a paradise.
Gale believe he helped himself by watching them. Imagination had
never pictured real happiness to him. Thorne and Mercedes had
forgotten the outside world. If they had been existing on the
burned-out desolate moon they could hardly have been in a harsher,
grimmer, lonelier spot than this red-walled arroyo. But it might
have been a statelier Eden than that of the primitive day.
Mercedes grew thinner, until she was a slender shadow of her former
self. She became hard, brown as the rangers, lithe and quick as
a panther. She seemed to live on water and the air--perhaps, indeed,
on love. For of the scant fare, the best of which was continually
urged upon her, she partook but little. She reminded Gale of a
wild brown creature, free as the wind on the lava slopes. Yet,
despite the great change, her beauty remained undiminished. Her
eyes, seeming so much larger now in her small face, were great
black, starry gulfs. She was the life of that camp. Her smiles,
her rapid speech, her low laughter, her quick movements, her
playful moods with the rangers, the dark and passionate glance,
which rested so often on her lover, the whispers in the dusk as
hand in hand they paced the campfire beat--these helped Gale to
retain his loosening hold on reality, to resist the lure of a
strange beckoning life where a man stood free in the golden open,
where emotion was not, nor trouble, nor sickness, nor anything but
the savage's rest and sleep and action and dream.
Although the Yaqui was as his shadow, Gale reached a point when
he seemed to wander alone at twilight, in the night, at dawn. Far
down the arroyo, in the deepening red twilight, when the heat
rolled away on slow-dying wind, Blanco Sol raised his splendid
head and whistled for his master. Gale reproached himself for
neglect of the noble horse. Blanco Sol was always the same. He
loved four things--his master, a long drink of cool water, to graze
at will, and to run. Time and place, Gale thought, meant little
to Sol if he could have those four things. Gale put his arm over
the great arched neck and laid his cheek against the long white
mane, and then even as he stood there forgot the horse. What was
the dull, red-tinged, horizon-wide mantle creeping up the slope?