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Desert Gold

by Zane Grey · English · Gutenberg #502 · 604,406 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Desert Gold

Author: Zane Grey


        
Release date: April 1, 1996 [eBook #502]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/502


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESERT GOLD ***






DESERT GOLD

A ROMANCE OF THE BORDER


BY

ZANE GREY




CONTENTS


 Prologue

     I.  Old Friends
    II.  Mercedes Castaneda
   III.  A Flight Into The Desert
    IV.  Forlorn River
     V.  A Desert Rose
    VI.  The Yaqui
   VII.  White Horses
  VIII.  The Running of Blanco Sol
    IX.  An Interrupted Siesta
     X.  Rojas
    XI.  Across Cactus and Lava
   XII.  The Crater of Hell
  XIII.  Changes at Forlorn River
   XIV.  A Lost Son
    XV.  Bound In The Desert
   XVI.  Mountain Sheep
  XVII.  The Whistle of a Horse
 XVIII.  Reality Against Dreams
   XIX.  The Secret of Forlorn River
    XX.  Desert Gold




D E S E R T  G O L D



PROLOGUE


I

A FACE haunted Cameron--a woman's face.  It was there in the white
heart of the dying campfire; it hung in the shadows that hovered over
the flickering light; it drifted in the darkness beyond.

This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set in
with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged
with memories of a time long past--of a home back in Peoria, of a woman
he had wronged and lost, and loved too late.  He was a prospector for
gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed
infinitude, because he wanted to be alone to remember.

A sound disturbed Cameron's reflections.  He bent his head listening. A
soft wind fanned the paling embers, blew sparks and white ashes and
thin smoke away into the enshrouding circle of blackness.  His burro
did not appear to be moving about.  The quiet split to the cry of a
coyote.  It rose strange, wild, mournful--not the howl of a prowling
upland beast baying the campfire or barking at a lonely prospector, but
the wail of a wolf, full-voiced, crying out the meaning of the desert
and the night.  Hunger throbbed in it--hunger for a mate, for
offspring, for life.  When it ceased, the terrible desert silence smote
Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul. He and that wandering wolf
were brothers.

Then a sharp clink of metal on stone and soft pads of hoofs in sand
prompted Cameron to reach for his gun, and to move out of the light of
the waning campfire.  He was somewhere along the wild border line
between Sonora and Arizona; and the prospector who dared the heat and
barrenness of that region risked other dangers sometimes as menacing.

Figures darker than the gloom approached and took shape, and in the
light turned out to be those of a white man and a heavily packed burro.

"Hello there," the man called, as he came to a halt and gazed about
him.  "I saw your fire.  May I make camp here?"

Cameron came forth out of the shadow and greeted his visitor, whom he
took for a prospector like himself.  Cameron resented the breaking of
his lonely campfire vigil, but he respected the law of the desert.

The stranger thanked him, and then slipped the pack from his burro.
Then he rolled out his pack and began preparations for a meal. His
movements were slow and methodical.

Cameron watched him, still with resentment, yet with a curious and
growing interest.  The campfire burst into a bright blaze, and by its
light Cameron saw a man whose gray hair somehow did not seem to make
him old, and whose stooped shoulders did not detract from an impression
of rugged strength.

"Find any mineral?" asked Cameron, presently.

His visitor looked up quickly, as if startled by the sound of a human
voice.  He replied, and then the two men talked a little. But the
stranger evidently preferred silence.  Cameron understood that.  He
laughed grimly and bent a keener gaze upon the furrowed, shadowy face.
Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some
relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that
between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and
undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert
wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible
relation having its roots back in the past.  A long-forgotten sensation
stirred in Cameron's breast, one so long forgotten that he could not
recognize it.  But it was akin to pain.



II

When he awakened he found, to his surprise, that his companion had
departed.  A trail in the sand led off to the north.  There was no
water in that direction.  Cameron shrugged his shoulders; it was not
his affair; he had his own problems.  And straightway he forgot his
strange visitor.

Cameron began his day, grateful for the solitude that was now unbroken,
for the canyon-furrowed and cactus-spired scene that now showed no sign
of life.  He traveled southwest, never straying far from the dry stream
bed; and in a desultory way, without eagerness, he hunted for signs of
gold.

The work was toilsome, yet the periods of rest in which he indulged
were not taken because of fatigue.  He rested to look, to listen, to
feel.  What the vast silent world meant to him had always been a
mystical thing, which he felt in all its incalculable power, but never
understood.

That day, while it was yet light, and he was digging in a moist
white-bordered wash for water, he was brought sharply up by hearing the
crack of hard hoofs on stone.  There down the canyon came a man and a
burro.  Cameron recognized them.

"Hello, friend," called the man, halting.  "Our trails crossed again.
That's good."

"Hello," replied Cameron, slowly.  "Any mineral sign to-day?"

"No."

They made camp together, ate their frugal meal, smoked a pipe, and
rolled in their blankets without exchanging many words.  In the morning
the same reticence, the same aloofness characterized the manner of
both.  But Cameron's companion, when he had packed his burro and was
ready to start, faced about and said:  "We might stay together, if it's
all right with you."

"I never take a partner," replied Cameron.

"You're alone; I'm alone," said the other, mildly.  "It's a big place.
If we find gold there'll be enough for two."

"I don't go down into the desert for gold alone," rejoined Cameron,
with a chill note in his swift reply.

His companion's deep-set, luminous eyes emitted a singular flash. It
moved Cameron to say that in the years of his wandering he had met no
man who could endure equally with him the blasting heat, the blinding
dust storms, the wilderness of sand and rock and lava and cactus, the
terrible silence and desolation of the desert. Cameron waved a hand
toward the wide, shimmering, shadowy descent of plain and range.  "I
may strike through the Sonora Desert.  I may head for Pinacate or north
for the Colorado Basin.  You are an old man."

"I don't know the country, but to me one place is the same as another,"
replied his companion.  For moments he seemed to forget himself, and
swept his far-reaching gaze out over the colored gulf of stone and
sand.  Then with gentle slaps he drove his burro in behind Cameron.
"Yes, I'm old.  I'm lonely, too.  It's come to me just lately.  But,
friend, I can still travel, and for a few days my company won't hurt
you."

"Have it your way," said Cameron.

They began a slow march down into the desert.  At sunset they camped
under the lee of a low mesa.  Cameron was glad his comrade had the
Indian habit of silence.  Another day's travel found the prospectors
deep in the wilderness.  Then there came a breaking of reserve,
noticeable in the elder man, almost imperceptibly gradual in Cameron.
Beside the meager mesquite campfire this gray-faced, thoughtful old
prospector would remove his black pipe from his mouth to talk a little;
and Cameron would listen, and sometimes unlock his lips to speak a
word.  And so, as Cameron began to respond to the influence of a desert
less lonely than habitual, he began to take keener note of his comrade,
and found him different from any other he had ever encountered in the
wilderness. This man never grumbled at the heat, the glare, the driving
sand, the sour water, the scant fare.  During the daylight hours he was
seldom idle.  At night he sat dreaming before the fire or paced to and
fro in the gloom.  He slept but little, and that long after Cameron had
had his own rest.  He was tireless, patient, brooding.

Cameron's awakened interest brought home to him the realization that
for years he had shunned companionship.  In those years only three men
had wandered into the desert with him, and these had left their bones
to bleach in the shifting sands.  Cameron had not cared to know their
secrets.  But the more he studied this latest comrade the more he began
to suspect that he might have missed something in the others.  In his
own driving passion to take his secret into the limitless abode of
silence and desolation, where he could be alone with it, he had
forgotten that life dealt shocks to other men.  Somehow this silent
comrade reminded him.

One afternoon late, after they had toiled up a white, winding wash of
sand and gravel, they came upon a dry waterhole.  Cameron dug deep into
the sand, but without avail.  He was turning to retrace weary steps
back to the last water when his comrade asked him to wait.  Cameron
watched him search in his pack and bring forth what appeared to be a
small, forked branch of a peach tree.  He grasped the prongs of the
fork and held them before him with the end standing straight out, and
then he began to walk along the stream bed.  Cameron, at first amused,
then amazed, then pitying, and at last curious, kept pace with the
prospector.  He saw a strong tension of his comrade's wrists, as if he
was holding hard against a considerable force.  The end of the peach
branch began to quiver and turn.  Cameron reached out a hand to touch
it, and was astounded at feeling a powerful vibrant force pulling the
branch downward.  He felt it as a magnetic shock.  The branch kept
turning, and at length pointed to the ground.

"Dig here," said the prospector.

"What!" ejaculated Cameron.  Had the man lost his mind?

Then Cameron stood by while his comrade dug in the sand.  Three feet he
dug--four--five, and the sand grew dark, then moist.  At six feet water
began to seep through.

"Get the little basket in my pack," he said.

Cameron complied, and saw his comrade drop the basket into the deep
hole, where it kept the sides from caving in and allowed the water to
seep through.  While Cameron watched, the basket filled.  Of all the
strange incidents of his desert career this was the strangest.
Curiously he picked up the peach branch and held it as he had seen it
held.  The thing, however, was dead in his hands.

"I see you haven't got it," remarked his comrade.  "Few men have."

"Got what?" demanded Cameron.

"A power to find water that way.  Back in Illinois an old German used
to do that to locate wells.  He showed me I had the same power. I can't
explain.  But you needn't look so dumfounded.  There's nothing
supernatural about it."

"You mean it's a simple fact--that some men have a magnetism, a force
or power to find water as you did?"

"Yes.  It's not unusual on the farms back in Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania.  The old German I spoke of made money traveling round
with his peach fork."

"What a gift for a man in the desert!"

Cameron's comrade smiled--the second time in all those days.

They entered a region where mineral abounded, and their march became
slower.  Generally they took the course of a wash, one on each side,
and let the burros travel leisurely along nipping at the bleached
blades of scant grass, or at sage or cactus, while they searched in the
canyons and under the ledges for signs of gold.  When they found any
rock that hinted of gold they picked off a piece and gave it a chemical
test.  The search was fascinating.  They interspersed the work with
long, restful moments when they looked afar down the vast reaches and
smoky shingles to the line of dim mountains. Some impelling desire, not
all the lure of gold, took them to the top of mesas and escarpments;
and here, when they had dug and picked, they rested and gazed out at
the wide prospect.  Then, as the sun lost its heat and sank lowering to
dent its red disk behind far-distant spurs, they halted in a shady
canyon or likely spot in a dry wash and tried for water.  When they
found it they unpacked, gave drink to the tired burros, and turned them
loose.  Dead mesquite served for the campfire.  While the strange
twilight deepened into weird night they sat propped against stones,
with eyes on the dying embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the
sand with the light of white stars on their dark faces.

Each succeeding day and night Cameron felt himself more and more drawn
to this strange man.  He found that after hours of burning toil he had
insensibly grown nearer to his comrade.  He reflected that after a few
weeks in the desert he had always become a different man. In
civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest
and gloom.  But once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely
world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness. Did not
the desert magnify men?  Cameron believed that wild men in wild places,
fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the
elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the
savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere brutes.  Likewise he
believed that men wandering or lost in the wilderness often reversed
that brutal order of life and became noble, wonderful, super-human.  So
now he did not marvel at a slow stir stealing warmer along his veins,
and at the premonition that perhaps he and this man, alone on the
desert, driven there by life's mysterious and remorseless motive, were
to see each other through God's eyes.

His companion was one who thought of himself last.  It humiliated
Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him from
doing more than an equal share of the day's work.  The man was mild,
gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness he seemed to
be made of the fiber of steel.  Cameron could not thwart him.
Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron, not for
himself.  Cameron's hands always trembled at the turning of rock that
promised gold; he had enough of the prospector's passion for fortune to
thrill at the chance of a strike.  But the other never showed the least
trace of excitement.

One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon.  The day had been
exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat from the
rocks persisted.  A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy note from a
dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully. The stars shone
white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their whiteness.  And on
this night Cameron watched his comrade, and yielded to interest he had
not heretofore voiced.

"Pardner, what drives you into the desert?"

"Do I seem to be a driven man?"

"No. But I feel it.  Do you come to forget?"

"Yes."

"Ah!" softly exclaimed Cameron.  Always he seemed to have known that.
He said no more.  He watched the old man rise and begin his nightly
pace to and fro, up and down.  With slow, soft tread, forward and back,
tirelessly and ceaselessly, he paced that beat. He did not look up at
the stars or follow the radiant track of the moon along the canyon
ramparts.  He hung his head.  He was lost in another world.  It was a
world which the lonely desert made real. He looked a dark, sad,
plodding figure, and somehow impressed Cameron with the helplessness of
men.

Cameron grew acutely conscious of the pang in his own breast, of the
fire in his heart, the strife and torment of his passion-driven soul.
He had come into the desert to remember a woman.  She appeared to him
then as she had looked when first she entered his life--a golden-haired
girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, tall and slender and
beautiful. He had never forgotten, and an old, sickening remorse
knocked at his heart.  He rose and climbed out of the canyon and to the
top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro and looked down into the weird
and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on
down the moon track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the
cold, blue horizon.  The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars
shone serene.  The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine.  The
desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of
rock and sand, silent, austere, ancient, always waiting.  It spoke to
Cameron.  It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul.  In that wild
solitude the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly.
They had shone upon a desert that might once have been alive and was
now dead, and might again throb with life, only to die.  It was a
terrible ordeal for him to stand alone and realize that he was only a
man facing eternity.  But that was what gave him strength to endure.
Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow
necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that
desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and
changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven.  In that
endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt
hovering near him what he imagined to be phantoms of peace.

He returned to camp and sought his comrade.

"I reckon we're two of a kind," he said.  "It was a woman who drove me
into the desert.  But I come to remember.  The desert's the only place
I can do that."

"Was she your wife?" asked the elder man.

"No."

A long silence ensued.  A cool wind blew up the canyon, sifting the
sand through the dry sage, driving away the last of the lingering heat.
The campfire wore down to a ruddy ashen heap.

"I had a daughter," said Cameron's comrade.  "She lost her mother at
birth.  And I--I didn't know how to bring up a girl.  She was pretty
and gay.  It was the--the old story."

His words were peculiarly significant to Cameron.  They distressed him.
He had been wrapped up in his remorse.  If ever in the past he had
thought of any one connected with the girl he had wronged he had long
forgotten.  But the consequences of such wrong were far-reaching.  They
struck at the roots of a home.  Here in the desert he was confronted by
the spectacle of a splendid man, a father, wasting his life because he
could not forget--because there was nothing left to live for.  Cameron
understood better now why his comrade was drawn by the desert.

"Well, tell me more?" asked Cameron, earnestly.

"It was the old, old story.  My girl was pretty and free.  The young
bucks ran after her.  I guess she did not run away from them. And I was
away a good deal--working in another town.  She was in love with a wild
fellow.  I knew nothing of it till too late.  He was engaged to marry
her. But he didn't come back.  And when the disgrace became plain to
all, my girl left home.  She went West.  After a while I heard from
her.  She was well--working--living for her baby.  A long time passed.
I had no ties.  I drifted West.  Her lover had also gone West.  In
those days everybody went West.  I trailed him, intending to kill him.
But I lost his trail.  Neither could I find any trace of her.  She had
moved on, driven, no doubt, by the hound of her past.  Since then I
have taken to the wilds, hunting gold on the desert."

"Yes, it's the old, old story, only sadder, I think," said Cameron; and
his voice was strained and unnatural.  "Pardner, what Illinois town was
it you hailed from?"

"Peoria."

"And your--your name?" went on Cameron huskily.

"Warren--Jonas Warren."

That name might as well have been a bullet.  Cameron stood erect,
motionless, as men sometimes stand momentarily when shot straight
through the heart.  In an instant, when thoughts resurged like blinding
flashes of lightning through his mind, he was a swaying, quivering,
terror-stricken man.  He mumbled something hoarsely and backed into the
shadow.  But he need not have feared discovery, however surely his
agitation might have betrayed him.  Warren sat brooding over the
campfire, oblivious of his comrade, absorbed in the past.

Cameron swiftly walked away in the gloom, with the blood thrumming
thick in his ears, whispering over and over:

"Merciful God!  Nell was his daughter!"



III

As thought and feeling multiplied, Cameron was overwhelmed.  Beyond
belief, indeed, was it that out of the millions of men in the world two
who had never seen each other could have been driven into the desert by
memory of the same woman.  It brought the past so close.  It showed
Cameron how inevitably all his spiritual life was governed by what had
happened long ago.  That which made life significant to him was a
wandering in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret.
Some fateful chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had
wrecked. It was incomprehensible; it was terrible.  It was the one
thing of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both
father and lover would have found unendurable.

Cameron's pain reached to despair when he felt this relation between
Warren and himself.  Something within him cried out to him to reveal
his identity.  Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death that
put Cameron on the rack.  He had faced death too often to be afraid.
It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering man.  All
at once Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's trouble, or
let him stain his hands with blood.  He would tell the truth of Nell's
sad story and his own, and make what amends he could.

Then Cameron's thought shifted from father to daughter.  She was
somewhere beyond the dim horizon line.  In those past lonely hours by
the campfire his fancy had tortured him with pictures of Nell. But his
remorseful and cruel fancy had lied to him.  Nell had struggled upward
out of menacing depths.  She had reconstructed a broken life.  And now
she was fighting for the name and happiness of her child.  Little Nell!
Cameron experienced a shuddering ripple in all his being--the physical
rack of an emotion born of a new and strange consciousness.

As Cameron gazed out over the blood-red, darkening desert suddenly the
strife in his soul ceased.  The moment was one of incalculable change,
in which his eyes seemed to pierce the vastness of cloud and range, and
mystery of gloom and shadow--to see with strong vision the illimitable
space before him.  He felt the grandeur of the desert, its simplicity,
its truth.  He had learned at last the lesson it taught.  No longer
strange was his meeting and wandering with Warren. Each had marched in
the steps of destiny; and as the lines of their fates had been
inextricably tangled in the years that were gone, so now their steps
had crossed and turned them toward one common goal.  For years they had
been two men marching alone, answering to an inward driving search, and
the desert had brought them together. For years they had wandered alone
in silence and solitude, where the sun burned white all day and the
stars burned white all night, blindly following the whisper of a
spirit.  But now Cameron knew that he was no longer blind, and in this
flash of revelation he felt that it had been given him to help Warren
with his burden.

He returned to camp trying to evolve a plan.  As always at that long
hour when the afterglow of sunset lingered in the west, Warren plodded
to and fro in the gloom.  All night Cameron lay awake thinking.

In the morning, when Warren brought the burros to camp and began
preparations for the usual packing, Cameron broke silence.

"Pardner, your story last night made me think.  I want to tell you
something about myself.  It's hard enough to be driven by sorrow for
one you've loved, as you've been driven; but to suffer sleepless and
eternal remorse for the ruin of one you've loved as I have
suffered--that is hell....  Listen.  In my younger days--it seems long
now, yet it's not so many years--I was wild.  I wronged the sweetest
and loveliest girl I ever knew.  I went away not dreaming that any
disgrace might come to her.  Along about that time I fell into terrible
moods--I changed--I learned I really loved her.  Then came a letter I
should have gotten months before.  It told of her trouble--importuned
me to hurry to save her.  Half frantic with shame and fear, I got a
marriage certificate and rushed back to her town. She was gone--had
been gone for weeks, and her disgrace was known. Friends warned me to
keep out of reach of her father.  I trailed her--found her.  I married
her.  But too late!... She would not live with me. She left me--I
followed her west, but never found her."

Warren leaned forward a little and looked into Cameron's eyes, as if
searching there for the repentance that might make him less deserving
of a man's scorn.

Cameron met the gaze unflinchingly, and again began to speak:

"You know, of course, how men out here somehow lose old names, old
identities.  It won't surprise you much to learn my name really isn't
Cameron, as I once told you."

Warren stiffened upright.  It seemed that there might have been a
blank, a suspension, between his grave interest and some strange mood
to come.

Cameron felt his heart bulge and contract in his breast; all his body
grew cold; and it took tremendous effort for him to make his lips form
words.

"Warren, I'm the man you're hunting.  I'm Burton.  I was Nell's lover!"

The old man rose and towered over Cameron, and then plunged down upon
him, and clutched at his throat with terrible stifling hands. The harsh
contact, the pain awakened Cameron to his peril before it was too late.
Desperate fighting saved him from being hurled to the ground and
stamped and crushed.  Warren seemed a maddened giant.  There was a
reeling, swaying, wrestling struggle before the elder man began to
weaken.  The Cameron, buffeted, bloody, half-stunned, panted for speech.

"Warren--hold on!  Give me--a minute.  I married Nell.  Didn't you know
that?... I saved the child!"

Cameron felt the shock that vibrated through Warren.  He repeated the
words again and again.  As if compelled by some resistless power,
Warren released Cameron, and, staggering back, stood with uplifted,
shaking hands.  In his face was a horrible darkness.

"Warren!  Wait--listen!" panted Cameron.  "I've got that marriage
certificate--I've had it by me all these years.  I kept it--to prove to
myself I did right."

The old man uttered a broken cry.

Cameron stole off among the rocks.  How long he absented himself or
what he did he had no idea.  When he returned Warren was sitting before
the campfire, and once more he appeared composed.  He spoke, and his
voice had a deeper note; but otherwise he seemed as usual.

They packed the burros and faced the north together.

Cameron experienced a singular exaltation.  He had lightened his
comrade's burden.  Wonderfully it came to him that he had also
lightened his own.  From that hour it was not torment to think of Nell.
Walking with his comrade through the silent places, lying beside him
under the serene luminous light of the stars, Cameron began to feel the
haunting presence of invisible things that were real to him--phantoms
whispering peace.  In the moan of the cool wind, in the silken seep of
sifting sand, in the distant rumble of a slipping ledge, in the faint
rush of a shooting star he heard these phantoms of peace coming with
whispers of the long pain of men at the last made endurable.  Even in
the white noonday, under the burning sun, these phantoms came to be
real to him. In the dead silence of the midnight hours he heard them
breathing nearer on the desert wind--nature's voices of motherhood,
whispers of God, peace in the solitude.



IV

There came a morning when the sun shone angry and red through a dull,
smoky haze.

"We're in for sandstorms," said Cameron.

They had scarcely covered a mile when a desert-wide, moaning, yellow
wall of flying sand swooped down upon them.  Seeking shelter in the lee
of a rock, they waited, hoping the storm was only a squall, such as
frequently whipped across the open places.  The moan increased to a
roar, and the dull red slowly dimmed, to disappear in the yellow pall,
and the air grew thick and dark.  Warren slipped the packs from the
burros.  Cameron feared the sandstorms had arrived some weeks ahead of
their usual season.

The men covered their heads and patiently waited.  The long hours
dragged, and the storm increased in fury.  Cameron and Warren wet
scarfs with water from their canteens, and bound them round their
faces, and then covered their heads.  The steady, hollow bellow of
flying sand went on.  It flew so thickly that enough sifted down under
the shelving rock to weight the blankets and almost bury the men.  They
were frequently compelled to shake off the sand to keep from being
borne to the ground.  And it was necessary to keep digging out the
packs.  The floor of their shelter gradually rose higher and higher.
They tried to eat, and seemed to be grinding only sand between their
teeth.  They lost the count of time. They dared not sleep, for that
would have meant being buried alive. The could only crouch close to the
leaning rock, shake off the sand, blindly dig out their packs, and
every moment gasp and cough and choke to fight suffocation.

The storm finally blew itself out.  It left the prospectors heavy and
stupid for want of sleep.  Their burros had wandered away, or had been
buried in the sand.  Far as eye could reach the desert had marvelously
changed; it was now a rippling sea of sand dunes. Away to the north
rose the peak that was their only guiding mark. They headed toward it,
carrying a shovel and part of their packs.

At noon the peak vanished in the shimmering glare of the desert. The
prospectors pushed on, guided by the sun.  In every wash they tried for
water.  With the forked peach branch in his hands Warren always
succeeded in locating water.  They dug, but it lay too deep.  At
length, spent and sore, they fell and slept through that night and part
of the next day.  Then they succeeded in getting water, and quenched
their thirst, and filled the canteens, and cooked a meal.

The burning day found them in an interminably wide plain, where there
was no shelter from the fierce sun. The men were exceedingly careful
with their water, though there was absolute necessity of drinking a
little every hour.  Late in the afternoon they came to a canyon that
they believed was the lower end of the one in which they had last found
water.  For hours they traveled toward its head, and, long after night
had set, found what they sought. Yielding to exhaustion, they slept,
and next day were loath to leave the waterhole.  Cool night spurred
them on with canteens full and renewed strength.

Morning told Cameron that they had turned back miles into the desert,
and it was desert new to him.  The red sun, the increasing heat, and
especially the variety and large size of the cactus plants warned
Cameron that he had descended to a lower level.  Mountain peaks loomed
on all sides, some near, others distant; and one, a blue spur,
splitting the glaring sky far to the north, Cameron thought he
recognized as a landmark.  The ascent toward it was heartbreaking, not
in steepness, but in its league-and-league-long monotonous rise.
Cameron knew there was only one hope--to make the water hold out and
never stop to rest.  Warren began to weaken. Often he had to halt.  The
burning white day passed, and likewise the night, with its white stars
shining so pitilessly cold and bright.

Cameron measured the water in his canteen by its weight.  Evaporation
by heat consumed as much as he drank.  During one of the rests, when he
had wetted his parched mouth and throat, he found opportunity to pour a
little water from his canteen into Warren's.

At first Cameron had curbed his restless activity to accommodate the
pace of his elder comrade.  But now he felt that he was losing
something of his instinctive and passionate zeal to get out of the
desert.  The thought of water came to occupy his mind.  He began to
imagine that his last little store of water did not appreciably
diminish.  He knew he was not quite right in his mind regarding water;
nevertheless, he felt this to be more of fact than fancy, and he began
to ponder.

When next they rested he pretended to be in a kind of stupor; but he
covertly watched Warren.  The man appeared far gone, yet he had
cunning.  He cautiously took up Cameron's canteen and poured water into
it from his own.

This troubled Cameron.  The old irritation at not being able to thwart
Warren returned to him.  Cameron reflected, and concluded that he had
been unwise not to expect this very thing.  Then, as his comrade
dropped into weary rest, he lifted both canteens.  If there were any
water in Warren's, it was only very little.  Both men had been enduring
the terrible desert thirst, concealing it, each giving his water to the
other, and the sacrifice had been useless.

Instead of ministering to the parched throats of one or both, the water
had evaporated.  When Cameron made sure of this, he took one more
drink, the last, and poured the little water left into Warren's
canteen.  He threw his own away.

Soon afterward Warren discovered the loss.

"Where's your canteen?" he asked.

"The heat was getting my water, so I drank what was left."

"My son!" said Warren.

The day opened for them in a red and green hell of rock and cactus.
Like a flame the sun scorched and peeled their faces.  Warren went
blind from the glare, and Cameron had to lead him.  At last Warren
plunged down, exhausted, in the shade of a ledge.

Cameron rested and waited, hopeless, with hot, weary eyes gazing down
from the height where he sat.  The ledge was the top step of a ragged
gigantic stairway.  Below stretched a sad, austere, and lonely valley.
A dim, wide streak, lighter than the bordering gray, wound down the
valley floor.  Once a river had flowed there, leaving only a forlorn
trace down the winding floor of this forlorn valley.

Movement on the part of Warren attracted Cameron's attention. Evidently
the old prospector had recovered his sight and some of his strength,
for he had arisen, and now began to walk along the arroyo bed with his
forked peach branch held before him.  He had clung to the precious bit
of wood.  Cameron considered the prospect for water hopeless, because
he saw that the arroyo had once been a canyon, and had been filled with
sands by desert winds.  Warren, however, stopped in a deep pit, and,
cutting his canteen in half, began to use one side of it as a scoop.
He scooped out a wide hollow, so wide that Cameron was certain he had
gone crazy.  Cameron gently urged him to stop, and then forcibly tried
to make him. But these efforts were futile.  Warren worked with slow,
ceaseless, methodical movement.  He toiled for what seemed hours.
Cameron, seeing the darkening, dampening sand, realized a wonderful
possibility of water, and he plunged into the pit with the other half
of the canteen.  Then both men toiled, round and round the wide hole,
down deeper and deeper.  The sand grew moist, then wet.  At the bottom
of the deep pit the sand coarsened, gave place to gravel. Finally water
welled in, a stronger volume than Cameron ever remembered finding on
the desert.  It would soon fill the hole and run over.  He marveled at
the circumstance.  The time was near the end of the dry season.
Perhaps an underground stream flowed from the range behind down to the
valley floor, and at this point came near to the surface.  Cameron had
heard of such desert miracles.

The finding of water revived Cameron's flagging hopes.  But they were
short-lived.  Warren had spend himself utterly.

"I'm done.  Don't linger," he whispered.  "My son, go--go!"

Then he fell.  Cameron dragged him out of the sand pit to a sheltered
place under the ledge.  While sitting beside the failing man Cameron
discovered painted images on the wall.  Often in the desert he had
found these evidences of a prehistoric people.  Then, from long habit,
he picked up a piece of rock and examined it. Its weight made him
closely scrutinize it.  The color was a peculiar black.  He scraped
through the black rust to find a piece of gold.  Around him lay
scattered heaps of black pebbles and bits of black, weathered rock and
pieces of broken ledge, and they showed gold.

"Warren!  Look!  See it!  Feel it!  Gold!"

But Warren had never cared, and now he was too blind to see.

"Go--go!" he whispered.

Cameron gazed down the gray reaches of the forlorn valley, and
something within him that was neither intelligence nor
emotion--something inscrutably strange--impelled him to promise.

Then Cameron built up stone monuments to mark his gold strike.  That
done, he tarried beside the unconscious Warren.  Moments passed--grew
into hours.  Cameron still had strength left to make an effort to get
out of the desert.  But that same inscrutable something which had
ordered his strange involuntary promise to Warren held him beside his
fallen comrade.  He watched the white sun turn to gold, and then to red
and sink behind mountains in the west.  Twilight stole into the arroyo.
It lingered, slowly turning to gloom. The vault of blue black lightened
to the blinking of stars. Then fell the serene, silent, luminous desert
night.

Cameron kept his vigil.  As the long hours wore on he felt creep over
him the comforting sense that he need not forever fight sleep. A wan
glow flared behind the dark, uneven horizon, and a melancholy misshapen
moon rose to make the white night one of shadows.  Absolute silence
claimed the desert.  It was mute.  Then that inscrutable something
breathed to him, telling him when he was alone.  He need not have
looked at the dark, still face beside him.

Another face haunted Cameron's--a woman's face.  It was there in the
white moonlit shadows; it drifted in the darkness beyond; it softened,
changed to that of a young girl, sweet, with the same dark, haunting
eyes of her mother.  Cameron prayed to that nameless thing within him,
the spirit of something deep and mystical as life.  He prayed to that
nameless thing outside, of which the rocks and the sand, the spiked
cactus and the ragged lava, the endless waste, with its vast star-fired
mantle, were but atoms.  He prayed for mercy to a woman--for happiness
to her child.  Both mother and daughter were close to him then.  Time
and distance were annihilated. He had faith--he saw into the future.
The fateful threads of the past, so inextricably woven with his error,
wound out their tragic length here in this forlorn desert.

Cameron then took a little tin box from his pocket, and, opening it,
removed a folded certificate.  He had kept a pen, and now he wrote
something upon the paper, and in lieu of ink he wrote with blood.  The
moon afforded him enough light to see; and, having replaced the paper,
he laid the little box upon a shelf of rock. It would remain there
unaffected by dust, moisture, heat, time. How long had those painted
images been there clear and sharp on the dry stone walls?  There were
no trails in that desert, and always there were incalculable changes.
Cameron saw this mutable mood of nature--the sands would fly and seep
and carve and bury; the floods would dig and cut; the ledges would
weather in the heat and rain; the avalanches would slide; the cactus
seeds would roll in the wind to catch in a niche and split the soil
with thirsty roots.  Years would pass.  Cameron seemed to see them,
too; and likewise destiny leading a child down into this forlorn waste,
where she would find love and fortune, and the grave of her father.

Cameron covered the dark, still face of his comrade from the light of
the waning moon.

That action was the severing of his hold on realities.  They fell away
from him in final separation.  Vaguely, dreamily he seemed to behold
his soul.  Night merged into gray day; and night came again, weird and
dark.  Then up out of the vast void of the desert, from the silence and
illimitableness, trooped his phantoms of peace. Majestically they
formed around him, marshalling and mustering in ceremonious state, and
moved to lay upon him their passionless serenity.



I

OLD FRIENDS

RICHARD GALE reflected that his sojourn in the West had been what his
disgusted father had predicted--idling here and there, with no
objective point or purpose.

It was reflection such as this, only more serious and perhaps somewhat
desperate, that had brought Gale down to the border. For some time the
newspapers had been printing news of Mexican revolution, guerrilla
warfare, United States cavalry patrolling the international line,
American cowboys fighting with the rebels, and wild stories of bold
raiders and bandits.  But as opportunity, and adventure, too, had
apparently given him a wide berth in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, he had
struck southwest for the Arizona border, where he hoped to see some
stirring life.  He did not care very much what happened.  Months of
futile wandering in the hope of finding a place where he fitted had
inclined Richard to his father's opinion.

It was after dark one evening in early October when Richard arrived in
Casita.  He was surprised to find that it was evidently a town of
importance.  There was a jostling, jabbering, sombreroed crowd of
Mexicans around the railroad station.  He felt as if he were in a
foreign country.  After a while he saw several men of his nationality,
one of whom he engaged to carry his luggage to a hotel.  They walked up
a wide, well-lighted street lined with buildings in which were bright
windows.  Of the many people encountered by Gale most were Mexicans.
His guide explained that the smaller half of Casita lay in Arizona, the
other half in Mexico, and of several thousand inhabitants the majority
belonged on the southern side of the street, which was the boundary
line.  He also said that rebels had entered the town that day, causing
a good deal of excitement.

Gale was almost at the end of his financial resources, which fact
occasioned him to turn away from a pretentious hotel and to ask his
guide for a cheaper lodging-house.  When this was found, a sight of the
loungers in the office, and also a desire for comfort, persuaded Gale
to change his traveling-clothes for rough outing garb and boots.

"Well, I'm almost broke," he soliloquized, thoughtfully.  "The governor
said I wouldn't make any money.  He's right--so far. And he said I'd be
coming home beaten.  There he's wrong.  I've got a hunch that something
'll happen to me in this Greaser town."

He went out into a wide, whitewashed, high-ceiled corridor, and from
that into an immense room which, but for pool tables, bar, benches,
would have been like a courtyard.  The floor was cobblestoned, the
walls were of adobe, and the large windows opened like doors.  A blue
cloud of smoke filled the place.  Gale heard the click of pool balls
and the clink of glasses along the crowded bar.  Bare-legged,
sandal-footed Mexicans in white rubbed shoulders with Mexicans mantled
in black and red.  There were others in tight-fitting blue uniforms
with gold fringe or tassels at the shoulders.  These men wore belts
with heavy, bone-handled guns, and evidently were the rurales, or
native policemen.  There were black-bearded, coarse-visaged Americans,
some gambling round the little tables, others drinking.  The pool
tables were the center of a noisy crowd of younger men, several of whom
were unsteady on their feet.  There were khaki-clad cavalrymen
strutting in and out.

At one end of the room, somewhat apart from the general meelee, was a
group of six men round a little table, four of whom were seated, the
other two standing.  These last two drew a second glance from Gale.
The sharp-featured, bronzed faces and piercing eyes, the tall, slender,
loosely jointed bodies, the quiet, easy, reckless air that seemed to be
a part of the men--these things would plainly have stamped them as
cowboys without the buckled sombreros, the colored scarfs, the
high-topped, high-heeled boots with great silver-roweled spurs.  Gale
did not fail to note, also, that these cowboys wore guns, and this fact
was rather a shock to his idea of the modern West.  It caused him to
give some credence to the rumors of fighting along the border, and he
felt a thrill.

He satisfied his hunger in a restaurant adjoining, and as he stepped
back into the saloon a man wearing a military cape jostled him.
Apologies from both were instant.  Gale was moving on when the other
stopped short as if startled, and, leaning forward, exclaimed:

"Dick Gale?"

"You've got me," replied Gale, in surprise.  "But I don't know you."

He could not see the stranger's face, because it was wholly shaded by a
wide-brimmed hat pulled well down.

"By Jove!  It's Dick!  If this isn't great!  Don't you know me?"

"I've heard your voice somewhere," replied Gale.  "Maybe I'll recognize
you if you come out from under that bonnet."

For answer the man, suddenly manifesting thought of himself, hurriedly
drew Gale into the restaurant, where he thrust back his hat to disclose
a handsome, sunburned face.

"George Thorne!  So help me--"

"'S-s-ssh.  You needn't yell," interrupted the other, as he met Gale's
outstretched hand.  There was a close, hard, straining grip. "I must
not be recognized here.  There are reasons.  I'll explain in a minute.
Say, but it's fine to see you!  Five years, Dick, five years since I
saw you run down University Field and spread-eagle the whole Wisconsin
football team."

"Don't recollect that," replied Dick, laughing.  "George, I'll bet you
I'm gladder to see you than you are to see me.  It seems so long.  You
went into the army, didn't you?"

"I did.  I'm here now with the Ninth Cavalry.  But--never mind me.
What're you doing way down here?  Say, I just noticed your togs. Dick,
you can't be going in for mining or ranching, not in this God-forsaken
desert?"

"On the square, George, I don't know any more why I'm here than--than
you know."

"Well, that beats me!" ejaculated Thorne, sitting back in his chair,
amaze and concern in his expression.  "What the devil's wrong? Your old
man's got too much money for you ever to be up against it. Dick, you
couldn't have gone to the bad?"

A tide of emotion surged over Gale.  How good it was to meet a
friend--some one to whom to talk!  He had never appreciated his
loneliness until that moment.

"George, how I ever drifted down here I don't know.  I didn't exactly
quarrel with the governor.  But--damn it, Dad hurt me--shamed me, and I
dug out for the West.  It was this way. After leaving college I tried
to please him by tackling one thing after another that he set me to do.
On the square, I had no head for business.  I made a mess of
everything.  The governor got sore. He kept ramming the harpoon into me
till I just couldn't stand it. What little ability I possessed deserted
me when I got my back up, and there you are.  Dad and I had a rather
uncomfortable half hour. When I quit--when I told him straight out that
I was going West to fare for myself, why, it wouldn't have been so
tough if he hadn't laughed at me.  He called me a rich man's son--an
idle, easy-going spineless swell.  He said I didn't even have character
enough to be out and out bad.  He said I didn't have sense enough to
marry one of the nice girls in my sister's crowd.  He said I couldn't
get back home unless I sent to him for money.  He said he didn't
believe I could fight--could really make a fight for anything under the
sun.  Oh--he--he shot it into me, all right."

Dick dropped his head upon his hands, somewhat ashamed of the smarting
dimness in his eyes.  He had not meant to say so much. Yet what a
relief to let out that long-congested burden!

"Fight!" cried Thorne, hotly.  "What's ailing him?  Didn't they call
you Biff Gale in college?  Dick, you were one of the best men Stagg
ever developed.  I heard him say so--that you were the fastest,
one-hundred-and-seventy-five-pound man he'd ever trained, the hardest
to stop."

"The governor didn't count football," said Dick.  "He didn't mean that
kind of fight.  When I left home I don't think I had an idea what was
wrong with me.  But, George, I think I know now.  I was a rich man's
son--spoiled, dependent, absolutely ignorant of the value of money.  I
haven't yet discovered any earning capacity in me.  I seem to be unable
to do anything with my hands.  That's the trouble.  But I'm at the end
of my tether now.  And I'm going to punch cattle or be a miner, or do
some real stunt--like joining the rebels."

"Aha!  I thought you'd spring that last one on me," declared Thorne,
wagging his head.  "Well, you just forget it.  Say, old boy, there's
something doing in Mexico.  The United States in general doesn't
realize it.  But across that line there are crazy revolutionists,
ill-paid soldiers, guerrilla leaders, raiders, robbers, outlaws,
bandits galore, starving peons by the thousand, girls and women in
terror.  Mexico is like some of her volcanoes--ready to erupt fire and
hell!  Don't make the awful mistake of joining rebel forces.  Americans
are hated by Mexicans of the lower class--the fighting class, both
rebel and federal.  Half the time these crazy Greasers are on one side,
then on the other. If you didn't starve or get shot in ambush, or die
of thirst, some Greaser would knife you in the back for you belt buckle
or boots.  There are a good many Americans with the rebels eastward
toward Agua, Prieta and Juarez.  Orozco is operating in Chihuahua, and
I guess he has some idea of warfare.  But this is Sonora, a mountainous
desert, the home of the slave and the Yaqui.  There's unorganized
revolt everywhere.  The American miners and ranchers, those who could
get away, have fled across into the States, leaving property.  Those
who couldn't or wouldn't come must fight for their lives, are fighting
now."

"That's bad," said Gale.  "It's news to me.  Why doesn't the government
take action, do something?"

"Afraid of international complications.  Don't want to offend the
Maderists, or be criticized by jealous foreign nations.  It's a
delicate situation, Dick.  The Washington officials know the gravity of
it, you can bet.  But the United States in general is in the dark, and
the army--well, you ought to hear the inside talk back at San Antonio.
We're patrolling the boundary line.  We're making a grand bluff.  I
could tell you of a dozen instances where cavalry should have pursued
raiders on the other side of the line.  But we won't do it.  The
officers are a grouchy lot these days.  You see, of course, what
significance would attach to United States cavalry going into Mexican
territory.  There would simply be hell.  My own colonel is the sorest
man on the job.  We're all sore.  It's like sitting on a powder
magazine.  We can't keep the rebels and raiders from crossing the line.
Yet we don't fight.  My commission expires soon.  I'll be discharged in
three months.  You can bet I'm glad for more reasons than I've
mentioned."

Thorne was evidently laboring under strong, suppressed excitement. His
face showed pale under the tan, and his eyes gleamed with a dark fire.
Occasionally his delight at meeting, talking with Gale, dominated the
other emotions, but not for long.  He had seated himself at a table
near one of the doorlike windows leading into the street, and every
little while he would glance sharply out.  Also he kept consulting his
watch.

These details gradually grew upon Gale as Thorne talked.

"George, it strikes me that you're upset," said Dick, presently.  "I
seem to remember you as a cool-headed fellow whom nothing could
disturb. Has the army changed you?"

Thorne laughed.  It was a laugh with a strange, high note.  It was
reckless--it hinted of exaltation.  He rose abruptly; he gave the
waiter money to go for drinks; he looked into the saloon, and then into
the street.  On this side of the house there was a porch opening on a
plaza with trees and shrubbery and branches.  Thorne peered out one
window, then another.  His actions were rapid.  Returning to the table,
he put his hands upon it and leaned over to look closely into Gale's
face.

"I'm away from camp without leave," he said.

"Isn't that a serious offense?" asked Dick.

"Serious?  For me, if I'm discovered, it means ruin.  There are rebels
in town.  Any moment we might have trouble.  I ought to be ready for
duty--within call.  If I'm discovered it means arrest. That means
delay--the failure of my plans--ruin."

Gale was silenced by his friend's intensity.  Thorne bent over closer
with his dark eyes searching bright.

"We were old pals--once?"

"Surely," replied Dick.

"What would you say, Dick Gale, if I told you that you're the one man
I'd rather have had come along than any other at this crisis of my
life?"

The earnest gaze, the passionate voice with its deep tremor drew Dick
upright, thrilling and eager, conscious of strange, unfamiliar
impetuosity.

"Thorne, I should say I was glad to be the fellow," replied Dick.

Their hands locked for a moment, and they sat down again with heads
close over the table.

"Listen," began Thorne, in low, swift whisper, "a few days, a week
ago--it seems like a year!--I was of some assistance to refugees
fleeing from Mexico into the States.  They were all women, and one of
them was dressed as a nun.  Quite by accident I saw her face. It was
that of a beautiful girl.  I observed she kept aloof from the others.
I suspected a disguise, and, when opportunity afforded, spoke to her,
offered my services.  She replied to my poor efforts at Spanish in
fluent English.  She had fled in terror from her home, some place down
in Sinaloa.  Rebels are active there.  Her father was captured and held
for ransom.  When the ransom was paid the rebels killed him. The leader
of these rebels was a bandit named Rojas.  Long before the revolution
began he had been feared by people of class--loved by the peons.
Bandits are worshiped by the peons. All of the famous bandits have
robbed the rich and given to the poor. Rojas saw the daughter, made off
with her.  But she contrived to bribe her guards, and escaped almost
immediately before any harm befell her.  She hid among friends.  Rojas
nearly tore down the town in his efforts to find her.  Then she
disguised herself, and traveled by horseback, stage, and train to
Casita.

"Her story fascinated me, and that one fleeting glimpse I had of her
face I couldn't forget.  She had no friends here, no money. She knew
Rojas was trailing her.  This talk I had with her was at the railroad
station, where all was bustle and confusion.  No one noticed us, so I
thought.  I advised her to remove the disguise of a nun before she left
the waiting-room.  And I got a boy to guide her.  But he fetched her to
his house.  I had promised to come in the evening to talk over the
situation with her.

"I found her, Dick, and when I saw her--I went stark, staring, raving
mad over her.  She is the most beautiful, wonderful girl I ever saw.
Her name is Mercedes Castaneda, and she belongs to one of the old
wealthy Spanish families.  She has lived abroad and in Havana.  She
speaks French as well as English.  She is--but I must be brief.

"Dick, think, think!  With Mercedes also it was love at first sight. My
plan is to marry her and get her farther to the interior, away from the
border.  It may not be easy.  She's watched.  So am I. It was
impossible to see her without the women of this house knowing. At
first, perhaps, they had only curiosity--an itch to gossip.  But the
last two days there has been a change.  Since last night there's some
powerful influence at work.  Oh, these Mexicans are subtle, mysterious!
After all, they are Spaniards.  They work in secret, in the dark.  They
are dominated first by religion, then by gold, then by passion for a
woman.  Rojas must have got word to his friends here; yesterday his
gang of cutthroat rebels arrived, and to-day he came.  When I learned
that, I took my chance and left camp.  I hunted up a priest.  He
promised to come here.  It's time he's due.  But I'm afraid he'll be
stopped."

"Thorne, why don't you take the girl and get married without waiting,
without running these risks?" said Dick.

"I fear it's too late now.  I should have done that last night. You
see, we're over the line--"

"Are we in Mexican territory now?" queried Gale, sharply.

"I guess yes, old boy.  That's what complicates it.  Rojas and his
rebels have Casita in their hands.  But Rojas without his rebels would
be able to stop me, get the girl, and make for his mountain haunts.  If
Mercedes is really watched--if her identity is known, which I am sure
is the case--we couldn't get far from this house before I'd be knifed
and she seized."

"Good Heavens!  Thorne, can that sort of thing happen less than a
stone's throw from the United States line?" asked Gale, incredulously.

"It can happen, and don't you forget it.  You don't seem to realize the
power these guerrilla leaders, these rebel captains, and particularly
these bandits, exercise over the mass of Mexicans. A bandit is a man of
honor in Mexico.  He is feared, envied, loved. In the hearts of the
people he stands next to the national idol--the bull-fighter, the
matador.  The race has a wild, barbarian, bloody strain.  Take
Quinteros, for instance.  He was a peon, a slave. He became a famous
bandit.  At the outbreak of the revolution he proclaimed himself a
leader, and with a band of followers he devastated whole counties.  The
opposition to federal forces was only a blind to rob and riot and carry
off women.  The motto of this man and his followers was:  'Let us enjoy
ourselves while we may!'

"There are other bandits besides Quinteros, not so famous or such great
leaders, but just as bloodthirsty.  I've seen Rojas.  He's a handsome,
bold sneering devil, vainer than any peacock.  He decks himself in gold
lace and sliver trappings, in all the finery he can steal.  He was one
of the rebels who helped sack Sinaloa and carry off half a million in
money and valuables.  Rojas spends gold like he spills blood.  But he
is chiefly famous for abducting women. The peon girls consider it an
honor to be ridden off with.  Rojas has shown a penchant for girls of
the better class."

Thorne wiped the perspiration from his pale face and bent a dark gaze
out of the window before he resumed his talk.

"Consider what the position of Mercedes really is.  I can't get any
help from our side of the line.  If so, I don't know where. The
population on that side is mostly Mexican, absolutely in sympathy with
whatever actuates those on this side.  The whole caboodle of Greasers
on both sides belong to the class in sympathy with the rebels, the
class that secretly respects men like Rojas, and hates an aristocrat
like Mercedes.  They would conspire to throw her into his power.  Rojas
can turn all the hidden underground influences to his ends.  Unless I
thwart him he'll get Mercedes as easily as he can light a cigarette.
But I'll kill him or some of his gang or her before I let him get
her.... This is the situation, old friend.  I've little time to spare.
I face arrest for desertion.  Rojas is in town. I think I was followed
to this hotel.  The priest has betrayed me or has been stopped.
Mercedes is here alone, waiting, absolutely dependent upon me to save
her from--from....  She's the sweetest, loveliest girl!... In a few
moments--sooner or later there'll be hell here!  Dick, are you with me?"

Dick Gale drew a long, deep breath.  A coldness, a lethargy, an
indifference that had weighed upon him for months had passed out of his
being.  On the instant he could not speak, but his hand closed
powerfully upon his friend's.  Thorne's face changed wonderfully, the
distress, the fear, the appeal all vanishing in a smile of passionate
gratefulness.

Then Dick's gaze, attracted by some slight sound, shot over his
friend's shoulder to see a face at the window--a handsome, bold,
sneering face, with glittering dark eyes that flashed in sinister
intentness.

Dick stiffened in his seat.  Thorne, with sudden clenching of hands,
wheeled toward the window.

"Rojas!" he whispered.



II

MERCEDES CASTANEDA

THE dark face vanished.  Dick Gale heard footsteps and the tinkle of
spurs.  He strode to the window, and was in time to see a Mexican
swagger into the front door of the saloon.  Dick had only a glimpse;
but in that he saw a huge black sombrero with a gaudy band, the back of
a short, tight-fitting jacket, a heavy pearl-handled gun swinging with
a fringe of sash, and close-fitting trousers spreading wide at the
bottom.  There were men passing in the street, also several Mexicans
lounging against the hitching-rail at the curb.

"Did you see him?  Where did he go?" whispered Thorne, as he joined
Gale.  "Those Greasers out there with the cartridge belts crossed over
their breasts--they are rebels."

"I think he went into the saloon," replied Dick.  "He had a gun, but
for all I can see the Greasers out there are unarmed."

"Never believe it!  There!  Look, Dick!  That fellow's a guard, though
he seems so unconcerned.  See, he has a short carbine, almost
concealed.... There's another Greaser farther down the path.  I'm
afraid Rojas has the house spotted."

"If we could only be sure."

"I'm sure, Dick.  Let's cross the hall; I want to see how it looks from
the other side of the house."

Gale followed Thorne out of the restaurant into the high-ceiled
corridor which evidently divided the hotel, opening into the street and
running back to a patio.  A few dim, yellow lamps flickered. A Mexican
with a blanket round his shoulders stood in the front entrance. Back
toward the patio there were sounds of boots on the stone floor. Shadows
flitted across that end of the corridor.  Thorne entered a huge chamber
which was even more poorly lighted than the hall.  It contained a table
littered with papers, a few high-backed chairs, a couple of couches,
and was evidently a parlor.

"Mercedes has been meeting me here," said Thorne.  "At this hour she
comes every moment or so to the head of the stairs there, and if I am
here she comes down.  Mostly there are people in this room a little
later.  We go out into the plaza.  It faces the dark side of the house,
and that's the place I must slip out with her if there's any chance at
all to get away."

They peered out of the open window.  The plaza was gloomy, and at first
glance apparently deserted.  In a moment, however, Gale made out a
slow-pacing dark form on the path.  Farther down there was another.  No
particular keenness was required to see in these forms a sentinel-like
stealthiness.

Gripping Gale's arm, Thorne pulled back from the window.

"You saw them," he whispered.  "It's just as I feared.  Rojas has the
place surrounded.  I should have taken Mercedes away.  But I had no
time--no chance!  I'm bound!... There's Mercedes now!  My God!... Dick,
think--think if there's a way to get her out of this trap!"

Gale turned as his friend went down the room.  In the dim light at the
head of the stairs stood the slim, muffled figure of a woman. When she
saw Thorne she flew noiselessly down the stairway to him. He caught her
in his arms.  Then she spoke softly, brokenly, in a low, swift voice.
It was a mingling of incoherent Spanish and English; but to Gale it was
mellow, deep, unutterably tender, a voice full of joy, fear, passion,
hope, and love.  Upon Gale it had an unaccountable effect.  He found
himself thrilling, wondering.

Thorne led the girl to the center of the room, under the light where
Gale stood.  She had raised a white hand, holding a black-laced
mantilla half aside.  Dick saw a small, dark head, proudly held, an
oval face half hidden, white as a flower, and magnificent black eyes.

Then Thorne spoke.

"Mercedes--Dick Gale, an old friend--the best friend I ever had."

She swept the mantilla back over her head, disclosing a lovely face,
strange and striking to Gale in its pride and fire, its intensity.

"Senor Gale--ah!  I cannot speak my happiness.  His friend!"

"Yes, Mercedes; my friend and yours," said Thorne, speaking rapidly.
"We'll have need of him.  Dear, there's bad news and no time to break
it gently.  The priest did not come.  He must have been detained.  And
listen--be brave, dear Mercedes--Rojas is here!"

She uttered an inarticulate cry, the poignant terror of which shook
Gale's nerve, and swayed as if she would faint.  Thorne caught her, and
in husky voice importuned her to bear up.

"My darling!  For God's sake don't faint--don't go to pieces! We'd be
lost!  We've got a chance.  We'll think of something.  Be strong!
Fight!"

It was plain to Gale that Thorne was distracted.  He scarcely knew what
he was saying.  Pale and shaking, he clasped Mercedes to him. Her
terror had struck him helpless.  It was so intense--it was so full of
horrible certainty of what fate awaited her.

She cried out in Spanish, beseeching him; and as he shook his head, she
changed to English:

"Senor, my lover, I will be strong--I will fight--I will obey. But
swear by my Virgin, if need be to save me from Rojas--you will kill me!"

"Mercedes!  Yes, I'll swear," he replied hoarsely.  "I know--I'd rather
have you dead than-- But don't give up.  Rojas can't be sure of you, or
he wouldn't wait.  He's in there.  He's got his men there--all around
us.  But he hesitates.  A beast like Rojas doesn't stand idle for
nothing.  I tell you we've a chance.  Dick, here, will think of
something.  We'll slip away.  Then he'll take you somewhere.
Only--speak to him--show him you won't weaken. Mercedes, this is more
than love and happiness for us.  It's life or death."

She became quiet, and slowly recovered control of herself.

Suddenly she wheeled to face Gale with proud dark eyes, tragic
sweetness of appeal, and exquisite grace.

"Senor, you are an American.  You cannot know the Spanish blood--the
peon bandit's hate and cruelty.  I wish to die before Rojas's hand
touches me.  If he takes me alive, then the hour, the little day that
my life lasts afterward will be tortured--torture of hell. If I live
two days his brutal men will have me.  If I live three, the dogs of his
camp... Senor, have you a sister whom you love? Help Senor Thorne to
save me.  He is a soldier.  He is bound. He must not betray his honor,
his duty, for me.... Ah, you two splendid Americans--so big, so strong,
so fierce!  What is that little black half-breed slave Rojas to such
men?  Rojas is a coward. Now, let me waste no more precious time.  I am
ready.  I will be brave."

She came close to Gale, holding out her white hands, a woman all fire
and soul and passion.  To Gale she was wonderful.  His heart leaped.
As he bent over her hands and kissed them he seemed to feel himself
renewed, remade.

"Senorita," he said, "I am happy to be your servant.  I can conceive of
no greater pleasure than giving the service you require."

"And what is that?" inquired Thorne, hurriedly.

"That of incapacitating Senor Rojas for to-night, and perhaps several
nights to come," replied Gale.

"Dick, what will you do?" asked Thorne, now in alarm.

"I'll make a row in that saloon," returned Dick, bluntly.  "I'll start
something.  I'll rush Rojas and his crowd.  I'll--"

"Lord, no; you mustn't, Dick--you'll be knifed!" cried Thorne. He was
in distress, yet his eyes were shining.

"I'll take a chance.  Maybe I can surprise that slow Greaser bunch and
get away before they know what's happened.... You be ready watching at
the window.  When the row starts those fellows out there in the plaza
will run into the saloon.  Then you slip out, go straight through the
plaza down the street.  It's a dark street, I remember.  I'll catch up
with you before you get far."

Thorne gasped, but did not say a word.  Mercedes leaned against him,
her white hands now at her breast, her great eyes watching Gale as he
went out.

In the corridor Gale stopped long enough to pull on a pair of heavy
gloves, to muss his hair, and disarrange his collar.  Then he stepped
into the restaurant, went through, and halted in the door leading into
the saloon.  His five feet eleven inches and one hundred and eighty
pounds were more noticeable there, and it was part of his plan to
attract attention to himself.  No one, however, appeared to notice him.
The pool-players were noisily intent on their game, the same crowd of
motley-robed Mexicans hung over the reeking bar. Gale's roving glance
soon fixed upon the man he took to be Rojas. He recognized the huge,
high-peaked, black sombrero with its ornamented band.  The Mexican's
face was turned aside.  He was in earnest, excited colloquy with a
dozen or more comrades, most of whom were sitting round a table.  They
were listening, talking, drinking.  The fact that they wore cartridge
belts crossed over their breasts satisfied that these were the rebels.
He had noted the belts of the Mexicans outside, who were apparently
guards.  A waiter brought more drinks to this group at the table, and
this caused the leader to turn so Gale could see his face.  It was
indeed the sinister, sneering face of the bandit Rojas.  Gale gazed at
the man with curiosity.  He was under medium height, and striking in
appearance only because of his dandified dress and evil visage. He wore
a lace scarf, a tight, bright-buttoned jacket, a buckskin vest
embroidered in red, a sash and belt joined by an enormous silver clasp.
Gale saw again the pearl-handled gun swinging at the bandit's hip.
Jewels flashed in his scarf.  There were gold rings in his ears and
diamonds on his fingers.

Gale became conscious of an inward fire that threatened to overrun his
coolness.  Other emotions harried his self-control.  It seemed as if
sight of the man liberated or created a devil in Gale.  And at the
bottom of his feelings there seemed to be a wonder at himself, a
strange satisfaction for the something that had come to him.

He stepped out of the doorway, down the couple of steps to the floor of
the saloon, and he staggered a little, simulating drunkenness. He fell
over the pool tables, jostled Mexicans at the bar, laughed like a
maudlin fool, and, with his hat slouched down, crowded here and there.
Presently his eye caught sight of the group of cowboys whom he had
before noticed with such interest.

They were still in a corner somewhat isolated.  With fertile mind
working, Gale lurched over to them.  He remembered his many
unsuccessful attempts to get acquainted with cowboys.  If he were to
get any help from these silent aloof rangers it must be by striking
fire from them in one swift stroke.  Planting himself squarely before
the two tall cowboys who were standing, he looked straight into their
lean, bronzed faces.  He spared a full moment for that keen cool gaze
before he spoke.

"I'm not drunk.  I'm throwing a bluff, and I mean to start a rough
house.  I'm going to rush that damned bandit Rojas.  It's to save a
girl--to give her lover, who is my friend, a chance to escape with her.
When I start a row my friend will try to slip out with her.  Every door
and window is watched.  I've got to raise hell to draw the guards
in.... Well, you're my countrymen.  We're in Mexico.  A beautiful
girl's honor and life are at stake.  Now, gentlemen, watch me!"

One cowboy's eyes narrowed, blinking a little, and his lean jaw
dropped; the other's hard face rippled with a fleeting smile.

Gale backed away, and his pulse leaped when he saw the two cowboys, as
if with one purpose, slowly stride after him.  Then Gale swerved,
staggering along, brushed against the tables, kicked over the empty
chairs.  He passed Rojas and his gang, and out of the tail of his eye
saw that the bandit was watching him, waving his hands and talking
fiercely.  The hum of the many voices grew louder, and when Dick
lurched against a table, overturning it and spilling glasses into the
laps of several Mexicans, there arose a shrill cry. He had succeeded in
attracting attention; almost every face turned his way.  One of the
insulted men, a little tawny fellow, leaped up to confront Gale, and in
a frenzy screamed a volley of Spanish, of which Gale distinguished
"Gringo!"  The Mexican stamped and made a threatening move with his
right hand.  Dick swung his leg and with a swift side kick knocked the
fellows feet from under him, whirling him down with a thud.

The action was performed so suddenly, so adroitly, it made the Mexican
such a weakling, so like a tumbled tenpin, that the shrill jabbering
hushed.  Gale knew this to be the significant moment.

Wheeling, he rushed at Rojas.  It was his old line-breaking plunge.
Neither Rojas nor his men had time to move.  The black-skinned bandit's
face turned a dirty white; his jaw dropped; he would have shrieked if
Gale had not hit him.  The blow swept him backward against his men.
Then Gale's heavy body, swiftly following with the momentum of that
rush, struck the little group of rebels.  They went down with table and
chairs in a sliding crash.

Gale carried by his plunge, went with them.  Like a cat he landed on
top.  As he rose his powerful hands fastened on Rojas.  He jerked the
little bandit off the tangled pile of struggling, yelling men, and,
swinging him with terrific force, let go his hold.  Rojas slid along
the floor, knocking over tables and chairs. Gale bounded back, dragged
Rojas up, handling him as if he were a limp sack.

A shot rang out above the yells.  Gale heard the jingle of breaking
glass.  The room darkened perceptibly.  He flashed a glance backward.
The two cowboys were between him and the crowd of frantic rebels. One
cowboy held two guns low down, level in front of him.  The other had
his gun raised and aimed.  On the instant it spouted red and white.
With the crack came the crashing of glass, another darkening shade over
the room.  With a cry Gale slung the bleeding Rojas from him.  The
bandit struck a table, toppled over it, fell, and lay prone.

Another shot made the room full of moving shadows, with light only back
of the bar.  A white-clad figure rushed at Gale.  He tripped the man,
but had to kick hard to disengage himself from grasping hands.  Another
figure closed in on Gale.  This one was dark, swift. A blade
glinted--described a circle aloft.  Simultaneously with a close, red
flash the knife wavered; the man wielding it stumbled backward.  In the
din Gale did not hear a report, but the Mexican's fall was significant.
Then pandemonium broke loose.  The din became a roar.  Gale heard shots
that sounded like dull spats in the distance.  The big lamp behind the
bar seemingly split, then sputtered and went out, leaving the room in
darkness.

Gale leaped toward the restaurant door, which was outlined faintly by
the yellow light within.  Right and left he pushed the groping men who
jostled with him.  He vaulted a pool table, sent tables and chairs
flying, and gained the door, to be the first of a wedging mob to
squeeze through.  One sweep of his arm knocked the restaurant lamp from
its stand; and he ran out, leaving darkness behind him. A few bounds
took him into the parlor.  It was deserted.  Thorne had gotten away
with Mercedes.

It was then Gale slowed up.  For the space of perhaps sixty seconds he
had been moving with startling velocity.  He peered cautiously out into
the plaza.  The paths, the benches, the shady places under the trees
contained no skulking men.  He ran out, keeping to the shade, and did
not go into the path till he was halfway through the plaza.  Under a
street lamp at the far end of the path he thought he saw two dark
figures.  He ran faster, and soon reached the street. The uproar back
in the hotel began to diminish, or else he was getting out of hearing.
The few people he saw close at hand were all coming his way, and only
the foremost showed any excitement. Gale walked swiftly, peering ahead
for two figures.  Presently he saw them--one tall, wearing a cape; the
other slight, mantled.  Gale drew a sharp breath of relief.  Thorne and
Mercedes were not far ahead.

From time to time Thorne looked back.  He strode swiftly, almost
carrying Mercedes, who clung closely to him.  She, too, looked back.
Once Gale saw her white face flash in the light of a street lamp. He
began to overhaul them; and soon, when the last lamp had been passed
and the street was dark, he ventured a whistle.  Thorne heard it, for
he turned, whistled a low reply, and went on.  Not for some distance
beyond, where the street ended in open country, did they halt to wait.
The desert began here.  Gale felt the soft sand under his feet and saw
the grotesque forms of cactus.  Then he came up with the fugitives.

"Dick!  Are you--all right?" panted Thorne, grasping Gale.

"I'm--out of breath--but--O.K.," replied Gale.

"Good! Good!" choked Thorne.  "I was scared--helpless.... Dick, it
worked splendidly.  We had no trouble.  What on earth did you do?"

"I made the row, all right," said Dick.

"Good Heavens!  It was like a row I once heard made by a mob.  But the
shots, Dick--were they at you?  They paralyzed me.  Then the yells.
What happened?  Those guards of Rojas ran round in front at the first
shot.  Tell me what happened."

"While I was rushing Rojas a couple of cowboys shot out the lamplights.
A Mexican who pulled a knife on me got hurt, I guess.  Then I think
there was some shooting from the rebels after the room was dark."

"Rushing Rojas?" queried Thorne, leaning close to Dick.  His voice was
thrilling, exultant, deep with a joy that yet needed confirmation.
"What did you do to him?"

"I handed him one off side, tackled, then tried a forward pass,"
replied Dick, lightly speaking the football vernacular so familiar to
Thorne.

Thorne leaned closer, his fine face showing fierce and corded in the
starlight.  "Tell me straight," he demanded, in thick voice.

Gale then divined something of the suffering Thorne had
undergone--something of the hot, wild, vengeful passion of a lover who
must have brutal truth.

It stilled Dick's lighter mood, and he was about to reply when Mercedes
pressed close to him, touched his hands, looked up into his face with
wonderful eyes.  He thought he would not soon forget their beauty--the
shadow of pain that had been, the hope dawning so fugitively.

"Dear lady," said Gale, with voice not wholly steady, "Rojas himself
will hound you no more to-night, nor for many nights."

She seemed to shake, to thrill, to rise with the intelligence. She
pressed his hand close over her heaving breast.  Gale felt the quick
throb of her heart.

"Senor!  Senor Dick!" she cried.  Then her voice failed.  But her hands
flew up; quick as a flash she raised her face--kissed him.  Then she
turned and with a sob fell into Thorne's arms.

There ensued a silence broken only by Mercedes' sobbing.  Gale walked
some paces away.  If he were not stunned, he certainly was agitated.
The strange, sweet fire of that girl's lips remained with him.  On the
spur of the moment he imagined he had a jealousy of Thorne.  But
presently this passed.  It was only that he had been deeply
moved--stirred to the depths during the last hour--had become conscious
of the awakening of a spirit.  What remained with him now was the
splendid glow of gladness that he had been of service to Thorne.  And
by the intensity of Mercedes' abandon of relief and gratitude he
measured her agony of terror and the fate he had spared her.

"Dick, Dick, come here!" called Thorne softly.  "Let's pull ourselves
together now.  We've got a problem yet.  What to do?  Where to go? How
to get any place?  We don't dare risk the station--the corrals where
Mexicans hire out horses.  We're on good old U.S. ground this minute,
but we're not out of danger."

As he paused, evidently hoping for a suggestion from Gale, the silence
was broken by the clear, ringing peal of a bugle.  Thorne gave a
violent start.  Then he bent over, listening.  The beautiful notes of
the bugle floated out of the darkness, clearer, sharper, faster.

"It's a call, Dick!  It's a call!" he cried.

Gale had no answer to make.  Mercedes stood as if stricken.  The bugle
call ended.  From a distance another faintly pealed.  There were other
sounds too remote to recognize.  Then scattering shots rattled out.

"Dick, the rebels are fighting somebody," burst out Thorne, excitedly.
"The little federal garrison still holds its stand. Perhaps it is
attacked again.  Anyway, there's something doing over the line.  Maybe
the crazy Greasers are firing on our camp.  We've feared it--in the
dark.... And here I am, away without leave--practically a deserter!"

"Go back!  Go back, before you're too late!" cried Mercedes.

"Better make tracks, Thorne," added Gale.  "It can't help our
predicament for you to be arrested.  I'll take care of Mercedes."

"No, no, no," replied Thorne.  "I can get away--avoid arrest."

"That'd be all right for the immediate present.  But it's not best for
the future.  George, a deserter is a deserter!... Better hurry. Leave
the girl to me till tomorrow."

Mercedes embraced her lover, begged him to go.  Thorne wavered.

"Dick, I'm up against it," he said.  "You're right.  If only I can get
back in time.  But, oh, I hate to leave her!  Old fellow, you've saved
her!  I already owe you everlasting gratitude.  Keep out of Casita,
Dick.  The U.S. side might be safe, but I'm afraid to trust it at
night.  Go out in the desert, up in the mountains, in some safe place.
Then come to me in camp.  We'll plan.  I'll have to confide in Colonel
Weede.  Maybe he'll help us.  Hide her from the rebels--that's all."

He wrung Dick's hand, clasped Mercedes tightly in his arms, kissed her,
and murmured low over her, then released her to rush off into the
darkness.  He disappeared in the gloom.  The sound of his dull
footfalls gradually died away.

For a moment the desert silence oppressed Gale.  He was unaccustomed to
such strange stillness.  There was a low stir of sand, a rustle of
stiff leaves in the wind.  How white the stars burned!  Then a coyote
barked, to be bayed by a dog.  Gale realized that he was between the
edge of an unknown desert and the edge of a hostile town. He had to
choose the desert, because, though he had no doubt that in Casita there
were many Americans who might befriend him, he could not chance the
risks of seeking them at night.

He felt a slight touch on his arm, felt it move down, felt Mercedes
slip a trembling cold little hand into his.  Dick looked at her. She
seemed a white-faced girl now, with staring, frightened black eyes that
flashed up at him.  If the loneliness, the silence, the desert, the
unknown dangers of the night affected him, what must they be to this
hunted, driven girl?  Gale's heart swelled.  He was alone with her.  He
had no weapon, no money, no food, no drink, no covering, nothing except
his two hands.  He had absolutely no knowledge of the desert, of the
direction or whereabouts of the boundary line between the republics; he
did not know where to find the railroad, or any road or trail, or
whether or not there were towns near or far.  It was a critical,
desperate situation.  He thought first of the girl, and groaned in
spirit, prayed that it would be given him to save her.  When he
remembered himself it was with the stunning consciousness that he could
conceive of no situation which he would have exchanged for this
one--where fortune had set him a perilous task of loyalty to a friend,
to a helpless girl.

"Senor, senor!" suddenly whispered Mercedes, clinging to him. "Listen!
I hear horses coming!"



III

A FLIGHT INTO THE DESERT

UNEASY and startled, Gale listened and, hearing nothing, wondered if
Mercedes's fears had not worked upon her imagination.  He felt a
trembling seize her, and he held her hands tightly.

"You were mistaken, I guess," he whispered.

"No, no, senor."

Dick turned his ear to the soft wind.  Presently he heard, or imagined
he heard, low beats.  Like the first faint, far-off beats of a drumming
grouse, they recalled to him the Illinois forests of his boyhood.  In a
moment he was certain the sounds were the padlike steps of hoofs in
yielding sand.  The regular tramp was not that of grazing horses.

On the instant, made cautious and stealthy by alarm, Gale drew Mercedes
deeper into the gloom of the shrubbery.  Sharp pricks from thorns
warned him that he was pressing into a cactus growth, and he protected
Mercedes as best he could.  She was shaking as one with a severe chill.
She breathed with little hurried pants and leaned upon him almost in
collapse.  Gale ground his teeth in helpless rage at the girl's fate.
If she had not been beautiful she might still have been free and happy
in her home.  What a strange world to live in--how unfair was fate!

The sounds of hoofbeats grew louder.  Gale made out a dark moving mass
against a background of dull gray.  There was a line of horses. He
could not discern whether or not all the horses carried riders. The
murmur of a voice struck his ear--then a low laugh.  It made him
tingle, for it sounded American.  Eagerly he listened.  There was an
interval when only the hoofbeats could be heard.

"It shore was, Laddy, it shore was," came a voice out of the darkness.
"Rough house!  Laddy, since wire fences drove us out of Texas we ain't
seen the like of that.  An' we never had such a call."

"Call?  It was a burnin' roast," replied another voice.  "I felt low
down.  He vamoosed some sudden, an' I hope he an' his friends shook the
dust of Casita.  That's a rotten town Jim."

Gale jumped up in joy.  What luck!  The speakers were none other than
the two cowboys whom he had accosted in the Mexican hotel.

"Hold on, fellows," he called out, and strode into the road.

The horses snorted and stamped.  Then followed swift rustling sounds--a
clinking of spurs, then silence.  The figures loomed clearer in the
gloom.. Gale saw five or six horses, two with riders, and one other, at
least, carrying a pack.  When Gale got within fifteen feet of the group
the foremost horseman said:

"I reckon that's close enough, stranger."

Something in the cowboy's hand glinted darkly bright in the starlight.

"You'd recognize me, if it wasn't so dark," replied Gale, halting. "I
spoke to you a little while ago--in the saloon back there."

"Come over an' let's see you," said the cowboy curtly.

Gale advanced till he was close to the horse.  The cowboy leaned over
the saddle and peered into Gale's face.  Then, without a word, he
sheathed the gun and held out his hand.  Gale met a grip of steel that
warmed his blood.  The other cowboy got off his nervous, spirited horse
and threw the bridle.  He, too, peered closely into Gale's face.

"My name's Ladd," he said.  "Reckon I'm some glad to meet you again."

Gale felt another grip as hard and strong as the other had been.  He
realized he had found friends who belonged to a class of men whom he
had despaired of ever knowing.

"Gale--Dick Gale is my name," he began, swiftly.  "I dropped into
Casita to-night hardly knowing where I was.  A boy took me to that
hotel.  There I met an old friend whom I had not seen for years. He
belongs to the cavalry stationed here.  He had befriended a Spanish
girl--fallen in love with her.  Rojas had killed this girl's
father--tried to abduct her.... You know what took place at the hotel.
Gentlemen, if it's ever possible, I'll show you how I appreciate what
you did for me there.  I got away, found my friend with the girl.  We
hurried out here beyond the edge of town.  Then Thorne had to make a
break for camp.  We heard bugle calls, shots, and he was away without
leave.  That left the girl with me.  I don't know what to do.  Thorne
swears Casita is no place for Mercedes at night."

"The girl ain't no peon, no common Greaser?" interrupted Ladd.

"No.  Her name is Castaneda.  She belongs to an old Spanish family,
once rich and influential."

"Reckoned as much," replied the cowboy.  "There's more than Rojas's
wantin' to kidnap a pretty girl.  Shore he does that every day or so.
Must be somethin' political or feelin' against class.  Well, Casita
ain't no place for your friend's girl at night or day, or any time.
Shore, there's Americans who'd take her in an' fight for her, if
necessary.  But it ain't wise to risk that.  Lash, what do you say?"

"It's been gettin' hotter round this Greaser corral for some weeks,"
replied the other cowboy.  "If that two-bit of a garrison surrenders,
there's no tellin' what'll happen.  Orozco is headin' west from Agua
Prieta with his guerrillas.  Campo is burnin' bridges an' tearin' up
the railroad south of Nogales.  Then there's all these bandits callin'
themselves revolutionists just for an excuse to steal, burn, kill, an'
ride off with women.  It's plain facts, Laddy, an' bein' across the
U.S. line a few inches or so don't make no hell of a difference.  My
advice is, don't let Miss Castaneda ever set foot in Casita again."

"Looks like you've shore spoke sense," said Ladd.  "I reckon, Gale, you
an' the girl ought to come with us.  Casita shore would be a little
warm for us to-morrow.  We didn't kill anybody, but I shot a Greaser's
arm off, an' Lash strained friendly relations by destroyin' property.
We know people who'll take care of the senorita till your friend can
come for her."

Dick warmly spoke his gratefulness, and, inexpressibly relieved and
happy for Mercedes, he went toward the clump of cactus where he had
left her.  She stood erect, waiting, and, dark as it was, he could tell
she had lost the terror that had so shaken her.

"Senor Gale, you are my good angel," she said, tremulously.

"I've been lucky to fall in with these men, and I'm glad with all my
heart," he replied.  "Come."

He led her into the road up to the cowboys, who now stood bareheaded in
the starlight.  They seemed shy, and Lash was silent while Ladd made
embarrassed, unintelligible reply to Mercedes's thanks.

There were five horses--two saddled, two packed, and the remaining one
carried only a blanket.  Ladd shortened the stirrups on his mount, and
helped Mercedes up into the saddle.  From the way she settled herself
and took the few restive prances of the mettlesome horse Gale judged
that she could ride.  Lash urged Gale to take his horse.  But this Gale
refused to do.

"I'll walk," he said.  "I'm used to walking.  I know cowboys are not."

They tried again to persuade him, without avail.  Then Ladd started
off, riding bareback.  Mercedes fell in behind, with Gale walking
beside her. The two pack animals came next, and Lash brought up the
rear.

Once started with protection assured for the girl and a real objective
point in view, Gale relaxed from the tense strain he had been laboring
under.  How glad he would have been to acquaint Thorne with their good
fortune!  Later, of course, there would be some way to get word to the
cavalryman.  But till then what torments his friend would suffer!

It seemed to Dick that a very long time had elapsed since he stepped
off the train; and one by one he went over every detail of incident
which had occurred between that arrival and the present moment.
Strange as the facts were, he had no doubts.  He realized that before
that night he had never known the deeps of wrath undisturbed in him; he
had never conceived even a passing idea that it was possible for him to
try to kill a man.  His right hand was swollen stiff, so sore that he
could scarcely close it.  His knuckles were bruised and bleeding, and
ached with a sharp pain.  Considering the thickness of his heavy glove,
Gale was of the opinion that so to bruise his hand he must have struck
Rojas a powerful blow.  He remembered that for him to give or take a
blow had been nothing.  This blow to Rojas, however, had been a
different matter.  The hot wrath which had been his motive was not
puzzling; but the effect on him after he had cooled off, a subtle
difference, something puzzled and eluded him. The more it baffled him
the more he pondered.  All those wandering months of his had been
filled with dissatisfaction, yet he had been too apathetic to
understand himself.  So he had not been much of a person to try.
Perhaps it had not been the blow to Rojas any more than other things
that had wrought some change in him.

His meeting with Thorne; the wonderful black eyes of a Spanish girl;
her appeal to him; the hate inspired by Rojas, and the rush, the blow,
the action; sight of Thorne and  Mercedes hurrying safely away; the
girl's hand pressing his to her heaving breast; the sweet fire of her
kiss; the fact of her being alone with him, dependent upon him--all
these things Gale turned over and over in his mind, only to fail of any
definite conclusion as to which had affected him so remarkably, or to
tell what had really happened to him.

Had he fallen in love with Thorne's sweetheart?  The idea came in a
flash.  Was he, all in an instant, and by one of those incomprehensible
reversals of  character, jealous of his friend?  Dick was almost afraid
to look up at Mercedes.  Still he forced himself to do so, and as it
chanced Mercedes was looking down at him.  Somehow the light was
better, and he clearly saw her white face, her black and starry eyes,
her perfect mouth.  With a quick, graceful impulsiveness she put her
hand upon his shoulder.  Like her appearance, the action was new,
strange, striking to Gale; but it brought home suddenly to him the
nature of gratitude and affection in a girl of her blood.  It was sweet
and sisterly.  He knew then that he had not fallen in love with her.
The feeling that was akin to jealousy seemed to be of the beautiful
something for which Mercedes stood in Thorne's life. Gale then grasped
the bewildering possibilities, the infinite wonder of what a girl could
mean to a man.

The other haunting intimations of change seemed to be elusively blended
with sensations--the heat and thrill of action, the sense of something
done and more to do, the utter vanishing of an old weary hunt for he
knew not what.  Maybe it had been a hunt for work, for energy, for
spirit, for love, for his real self. Whatever it might be, there
appeared to be now some hope of finding it.

The desert began to lighten.  Gray openings in the border of shrubby
growths changed to paler hue.  The road could be seen some rods ahead,
and it had become a stony descent down, steadily down. Dark, ridged
backs of mountains bounded the horizon, and all seemed near at hand,
hemming in the plain.  In the east a white glow grew brighter and
brighter, reaching up to a line of cloud, defined sharply below by a
rugged notched range.  Presently a silver circle rose behind the black
mountain, and the gloom of the desert underwent a transformation. From
a gray mantle it changed to a transparent haze.  The moon was rising.

"Senor I am cold," said Mercedes.

Dick had been carrying his coat upon his arm.  He had felt warm, even
hot, and had imagined that the steady walk had occasioned it.  But his
skin was cool.  The heat came from an inward burning. He stopped the
horse and raised the coat up, and helped Mercedes put it on.

"I should have thought of you," he said.  "But I seemed to feel warm...
The coat's a little large; we might wrap it round you twice."

Mercedes smiled and lightly thanked him in Spanish.  The flash of mood
was in direct contrast to the appealing, passionate, and tragic states
in which he had successively viewed her; and it gave him a vivid
impression of what vivacity and charm she might possess under happy
conditions.  He was about to start when he observed that Ladd had
halted and was peering ahead in evident caution.  Mercedes' horse began
to stamp impatiently, raised his ears and head, and acted as if he was
about to neigh.

A warning "hist!" from Ladd bade Dick to put a quieting hand on the
horse.  Lash came noiselessly forward to join his companion. The two
then listened and watched.

An uneasy yet thrilling stir ran through Gale's veins.  This scene was
not fancy.  These men of the ranges had heard or seen or scented
danger.  It was all real, as tangible and sure as the touch of
Mercedes's hand upon his arm.  Probably for her the night had terrors
beyond Gale's power to comprehend.  He looked down into the desert, and
would have felt no surprise at anything hidden away among the bristling
cactus, the dark, winding arroyos, the shadowed rocks with their
moonlit tips, the ragged plain leading to the black bold mountains.
The wind appeared to blow softly, with an almost imperceptible moan,
over the desert.  That was a new sound to Gale. But he heard nothing
more.

Presently Lash went to the rear and Ladd started ahead.  The progress
now, however, was considerably slower, not owing to a road--for that
became better--but probably owing to caution exercised by the cowboy
guide.  At the end of a half hour this marked deliberation changed, and
the horses followed Ladd's at a gait that put Gale to his best
walking-paces.

Meanwhile the moon soared high above the black corrugated peaks. The
gray, the gloom, the shadow whitened.  The clearing of the dark
foreground appeared to lift a distant veil and show endless aisles of
desert reaching down between dim horizon-bounding ranges.

Gale gazed abroad, knowing that as this night was the first time for
him to awake to consciousness of a vague, wonderful other self, so it
was one wherein he began to be aware of an encroaching presence of
physical things--the immensity of the star-studded sky, the soaring
moon, the bleak, mysterious mountains, and limitless slope, and plain,
and ridge, and valley.  These things in all their magnificence had not
been unnoticed by him before; only now they spoke a different meaning.
A voice that he had never heard called him to see, to feel the vast
hard externals of heaven and earth, all that represented the open, the
free, silence and solitude and space.

Once more his thoughts, like his steps, were halted by Ladd's actions.
The cowboy reined in his horse, listened a moment, then swung down out
of the saddle.  He raised a cautioning hand to the others, then slipped
into the gloom and disappeared.  Gale marked that the halt had been
made in a ridged and cut-up pass between low mesas. He could see the
columns of cactus standing out black against the moon-white sky.  The
horses were evidently tiring, for they showed no impatience.  Gale
heard their panting breaths, and also the bark of some animal--a dog or
a coyote.  It sounded like a dog, and this led Gale to wonder if there
was any house near at hand.  To the right, up under the ledges some
distance away, stood two square black objects, too uniform, he thought,
to be rocks.  While he was peering at them, uncertain what to think,
the shrill whistle of a horse pealed out, to be followed by the
rattling of hoofs on hard stone.  Then a dog barked.  At the same
moment that Ladd hurriedly appeared in the road a light shone out and
danced before one of the square black objects.

"Keep close an' don't make no noise," he whispered, and led his horse
at right angles off the road.

Gale followed, leading Mercedes's horse.  As he turned he observed that
Lash also had dismounted.

To keep closely at Ladd's heels without brushing the cactus or
stumbling over rocks and depressions was a task Gale found impossible.
After he had been stabbed several times by the bayonetlike spikes,
which seemed invisible, the matter of caution became equally one of
self-preservation.  Both the cowboys, Dick had observed, wore leather
chaps.  It was no easy matter to lead a spirited horse through the
dark, winding lanes walled by thorns.  Mercedes horse often balked and
had to be coaxed and carefully guided.  Dick concluded that Ladd was
making a wide detour.  The position of certain stars grown familiar
during the march veered round from one side to another.  Dick saw that
the travel was fast, but by no means noiseless.  The pack animals at
times crashed and ripped through the narrow places.  It seemed to Gale
that any one within a mile could have heard these sounds.  From the
tops of knolls or ridges he looked back, trying to locate the mesas
where the light had danced and the dog had barked alarm.  He could not
distinguish these two rocky eminences from among many rising in the
background.

Presently Ladd let out into a wider lane that appeared to run straight.
The cowboy mounted his horse, and this fact convinced Gale that they
had circled back to the road.  The march proceeded then once more at a
good, steady, silent walk.  When Dick consulted his watch he was amazed
to see that the hour was still early.  How much had happened in little
time!  He now began to be aware that the night was growing colder; and,
strange to him, he felt something damp that in a country he knew he
would have recognized as dew. He had not been aware there was dew on
the desert.  The wind blew stronger, the stars shone whiter, the sky
grew darker, and the moon climbed toward the zenith.  The road
stretched level for miles, then crossed arroyos and ridges, wound
between mounds of broken ruined rock, found a level again, and then
began a long ascent. Dick asked Mercedes if she was cold, and she
answered that she was, speaking especially of her feet, which were
growing numb. Then she asked to be helped down to walk awhile.  At
first she was cold and lame, and accepted the helping hand Dick
proffered.  After a little, however, she recovered and went on without
assistance. Dick could scarcely believe his eyes, as from time to time
he stole a sidelong glance at this silent girl, who walked with lithe
and rapid stride.  She was wrapped in his long coat, yet it did not
hide her slender grace.  He could not see her face, which was concealed
by the black mantle.

A low-spoken word from Ladd recalled Gale to the question of
surroundings and of possible dangers.  Ladd had halted a few yards
ahead.  They had reached the summit of what was evidently a high ridge
which sloped with much greater steepness on the far side. It was only
after a few more forward steps, however, that Dick could see down the
slope.  Then full in view flashed a bright campfire around which
clustered a group of dark figures.  They were encamped in a wide
arroyo, where horses could be seen grazing in black patches of grass
between clusters of trees.  A second look at the campers told Gale they
were Mexicans.  At this moment Lash came forward to join Ladd, and the
two spent a long, uninterrupted moment studying the arroyo.  A hoarse
laugh, faint yet distinct, floated up on the cool wind.

"Well, Laddy, what're you makin' of that outfit?" inquired Lash,
speaking softly.

"Same as any of them raider outfits," replied Ladd.  "They're across
the line for beef.  But they'll run off any good stock.  As hoss
thieves these rebels have got 'em all beat.  That outfit is waitin'
till it's late.  There's a ranch up the arroyo."

Gale heard the first speaker curse under his breath.

"Sure, I feel the same," said Ladd.  "But we've got a girl an' the
young man to look after, not to mention our pack outfit. An' we're
huntin' for a job, not a fight, old hoss.  Keep on your chaps!"

"Nothin' to it but head south for the Rio Forlorn."

"You're talkin' sense now, Jim.  I wish we'd headed that way long ago.
But it ain't strange I'd want to travel away from the border, thinkin'
of the girl.  Jim, we can't go round this Greaser outfit an' strike the
road again.  Too rough.  So we'll have to give up gettin' to San
Felipe."

"Perhaps it's just as well, Laddy.  Rio Forlorn is on the border line,
but it's country where these rebels ain't been yet."

"Wait till they learn of the oasis an' Beldin's hosses!" exclaimed
Laddy.  "I'm not anticipatin' peace anywhere along the border, Jim.
But we can't go ahead; we can't go back."

"What'll we do, Laddy?  It's a hike to Beldin's ranch.  An' if we get
there in daylight some Greaser will see the girl before Beldin' can
hide her.  It'll get talked about.  The news'll travel to Casita like
sage balls before the wind."

"Shore we won't ride into Rio Forlorn in the daytime.  Let's slip the
packs, Jim.  We can hid them off in the cactus an' come back after
them.  With the young man ridin' we--"

The whispering was interrupted by a loud ringing neigh that whistled up
from the arroyo.  One of the horses had scented the travelers on the
ridge top.  The indifference of the Mexicans changed to attention.

Ladd and Lash turned back and led the horses into the first opening on
the south side of the road.  There was nothing more said at the moment,
and manifestly the cowboys were in a hurry.  Gale had to run in the
open places to keep up.  When they did stop it was welcome to Gale, for
he had begun to fall behind.

The packs were slipped, securely tied and hidden in a mesquite clump.
Ladd strapped a blanket around one of the horses.  His next move was to
take off his chaps.

"Gale, you're wearin' boots, an' by liftin' your feet you can beat the
cactus," he whispered.  "But the--the--Miss Castaneda, she'll be torn
all to pieces unless she puts these on.  Please tell her--an' hurry."

Dick took the chaps, and, going up to Mercedes, he explained the
situation.  She laughed, evidently at his embarrassed earnestness, and
slipped out of the saddle.

"Senor, chapparejos and I are not strangers," she said.

Deftly and promptly she equipped herself, and then Gale helped her into
the saddle, called to her horse, and started off.  Lash directed Gale
to mount the other saddled horse and go next.

Dick had not ridden a hundred yards behind the trotting leaders before
he had sundry painful encounters with reaching cactus arms. The horse
missed these by a narrow margin.  Dick's knees appeared to be in line,
and it became necessary for him to lift them high and let his boots
take the onslaught of the spikes.  He was at home in the saddle, and
the accomplishment was about the only one he possessed that had been of
any advantage during his sojourn in the West.

Ladd pursued a zigzag course southward across the desert, trotting down
the aisles, cantering in wide, bare patches, walking through the clumps
of cacti.  The desert seemed all of a sameness to Dick--a wilderness of
rocks and jagged growths hemmed in by lowering ranges, always looking
close, yet never growing any nearer. The moon slanted back toward the
west, losing its white radiance, and the gloom of the earlier evening
began to creep into the washes and to darken under the mesas.  By and
by Ladd entered an arroyo, and here the travelers turned and twisted
with the meanderings of a dry stream bed.  At the head of a canyon they
had to take once more to the rougher ground.  Always it led down,
always it grew rougher, more rolling, with wider bare spaces, always
the black ranges loomed close.

Gale became chilled to the bone, and his clothes were damp and cold.
His knees smarted from the wounds of the poisoned thorns, and his right
hand was either swollen stiff or too numb to move.  Moreover, he was
tiring.  The excitement, the long walk, the miles on miles of jolting
trot--these had wearied him.  Mercedes must be made of steel, he
thought, to stand all that she had been subjected to and yet, when the
stars were paling and dawn perhaps not far away, stay in the saddle.

So Dick Gale rode on, drowsier for each mile, and more and more giving
the horse a choice of ground.  Sometimes a prod from a murderous spine
roused Dick.  A grayness had blotted out the waning moon in the west
and the clear, dark, starry sky overhead.  Once when Gale, thinking to
fight his weariness, raised his head, he saw that one of the horses in
the lead was riderless.  Ladd was carrying Mercedes.  Dick marveled
that her collapse had not come sooner. Another time, rousing himself
again, he imagined they were now on a good hard road.

It seemed that hours passed, though he knew only little time had
elapsed, when once more he threw off the spell of weariness.  He heard
a dog bark.  Tall trees lined the open lane down which he was riding.
Presently in the gray gloom he saw low, square houses with flat roofs.
Ladd turned off to the left down another lane, gloomy between trees.
Every few rods there was one of the squat houses.  This lane opened
into wider, lighter space.  The cold air bore a sweet perfume--whether
of flowers or fruit Dick could not tell.  Ladd rode on for perhaps a
quarter of a mile, though it seemed interminably long to Dick.  A grove
of trees loomed dark in the gray morning.  Ladd entered it and was lost
in the shade.  Dick rode on among trees.  Presently he heard voices,
and soon another house, low and flat like the others, but so long he
could not see the farther end, stood up blacker than the trees.  As he
dismounted, cramped and sore, he could scarcely stand.  Lash came
alongside. He spoke, and some one with a big, hearty voice replied to
him. Then it seemed to Dick that he was led into blackness like pitch,
where, presently, he felt blankets thrown on him and then his drowsy
faculties faded.



IV

FORLORN RIVER

WHEN Dick opened his eyes a flood of golden sunshine streamed in at the
open window under which he lay.  His first thought was one of blank
wonder as to where in the world he happened to be.  The room was large,
square, adobe-walled.  It was littered with saddles, harness, blankets.
Upon the floor was a bed spread out upon a tarpaulin.  Probably this
was where some one had slept.  The sight of huge dusty spurs, a gun
belt with sheath and gun, and a pair of leather chaps bristling with
broken cactus thorns recalled to Dick the cowboys, the ride, Mercedes,
and the whole strange adventure that had brought him there.

He did not recollect having removed his boots; indeed, upon second
thought, he knew he had not done so.  But there they stood upon the
floor.  Ladd and Lash must have taken them off when he was so exhausted
and sleepy that he could not tell what was happening. He felt a dead
weight of complete lassitude, and he did not want to move.  A sudden
pain in his hand caused him to hold it up.  It was black and blue,
swollen to almost twice its normal size, and stiff as a board.  The
knuckles were skinned and crusted with dry blood. Dick soliloquized
that it was the worst-looking hand he had seen since football days, and
that it would inconvenience him for some time.

A warm, dry, fragrant breeze came through the window.  Dick caught
again the sweet smell of flowers or fruit.  He heard the fluttering of
leaves, the murmur of running water, the twittering of birds, then the
sound of approaching footsteps and voices.  The door at the far end of
the room was open.  Through it he saw poles of peeled wood upholding a
porch roof, a bench, rose bushes in bloom, grass, and beyond these
bright-green foliage of trees.

"He shore was sleepin' when I looked in an hour ago," said a voice that
Dick recognized as Ladd's.

"Let him sleep," came the reply in deep, good-natured tones.  "Mrs. B.
says the girl's never moved.  Must have been a tough ride for them
both.  Forty miles through cactus!"

"Young Gale hoofed darn near half the way," replied Ladd.  "We tried to
make him ride one of our hosses.  If we had, we'd never got here.  A
walk like that'd killed me an' Jim."

"Well, Laddy, I'm right down glad to see you boys, and I'll do all I
can for the young couple," said the other.  "But I'm doing some worry
here; don't mistake me."

"About your stock?"

"I've got only a few head of cattle at the oasis now, I'm worrying
some, mostly about my horses.  The U. S. is doing some worrying, too,
don't mistake me.  The rebels have worked west and north as far as
Casita.  There are no cavalrymen along the line beyond Casita, and
there can't be.  It's practically waterless desert.  But these rebels
are desert men.  They could cross the line beyond the Rio Forlorn and
smuggle arms into Mexico.  Of course, my job is to keep tab on Chinese
and Japs trying to get into the U.S. from Magdalena Bay.  But I'm
supposed to patrol the border line.  I'm going to hire some rangers.
Now, I'm not so afraid of being shot up, though out in this lonely
place there's danger of it; what I'm afraid of most is losing that
bunch of horses.  If any rebels come this far, or if they ever hear of
my horses, they're going to raid me.  You know what those guerrilla
Mexicans will do for horses. They're crazy on horse flesh.  They know
fine horses.  They breed the finest in the world.  So I don't sleep
nights any more."

"Reckon me an' Jim might as well tie up with your for a spell, Beldin'.
We've been ridin' up an' down Arizona tryin' to keep out of sight of
wire fences."

"Laddy, it's open enough around Forlorn River to satisfy even an
old-time cowpuncher like you," laughed Belding.  "I'd take your staying
on as some favor, don't mistake me.  Perhaps I can persuade the young
man Gale to take a job with me."

"That's shore likely.  He said he had no money, no friends.  An' if a
scrapper's all you're lookin' for he'll do," replied Ladd, with a dry
chuckle.

"Mrs. B. will throw some broncho capers round this ranch when she hears
I'm going to hire a stranger."

"Why?"

"Well, there's Nell-- And you said this Gale was a young American. My
wife will be scared to death for fear Nell will fall in love with him."

Laddy choked off a laugh, then evidently slapped his knee or Belding's,
for there was a resounding smack.

"He's a fine-spoken, good-looking chap, you said?" went on Belding.

"Shore he is," said Laddy, warmly.  "What do you say, Jim?"

By this time Dick Gale's ears began to burn and he was trying to make
himself deaf when he wanted to hear every little word.

"Husky young fellow, nice voice, steady, clear eyes, kinda proud, I
thought, an' some handsome, he was," replied Jim Lash.

"Maybe I ought to think twice before taking a stranger into my family,"
said Belding, seriously.  "Well, I guess he's all right, Laddy, being
the cavalryman's friend.  No bum or lunger?  He must be all right?"

"Bum?  Lunger?  Say, didn't I tell you I shook hands with this boy an'
was plumb glad to meet him?" demanded Laddy, with considerable heat.
Manifestly he had been affronted. "Tom Beldin', he's a gentleman, an'
he could lick you in--in half a second.  How about that, Jim?"

"Less time," replied Lash.  "Tom, here's my stand.  Young Gale can have
my hoss, my gun, anythin' of mine."

"Aw, I didn't mean to insult you, boys, don't mistake me," said
Belding. "Course he's all right."

The object of this conversation lay quiet upon his bed, thrilling and
amazed at being so championed by the cowboys, delighted with Belding's
idea of employing him, and much amused with the quaint seriousness of
the three.

"How's the young man?" called a woman's voice.  It was kind and mellow
and earnest.

Gale heard footsteps on flagstones.

"He's asleep yet, wife," replied Belding.  "Guess he was pretty much
knocked out.... I'll close the door there so we won't wake him."

There were slow, soft steps, then the door softly closed.  But the fact
scarcely made a perceptible difference in the sound of the voices
outside.

"Laddy and Jim are going to stay," went on Belding.  "It'll be like the
old Panhandle days a little.  I'm powerful glad to have the boys,
Nellie.  You know I meant to sent to Casita to ask them. We'll see some
trouble before the revolution is ended.  I think I'll make this young
man Gale an offer."

"He isn't a cowboy?" asked Mrs. Belding, quickly.

"No."

"Shore he'd make a darn good one," put in Laddy.

"What is he?  Who is he?  Where did he come from?  Surely you must be--"

"Laddy swears he's all right," interrupted the husband.  "That's enough
reference for me.  Isn't it enough for you?"

"Humph!  Laddy knows a lot about young men, now doesn't he, especially
strangers from the East?... Tom, you must be careful!"

"Wife, I'm only too glad to have a nervy young chap come along. What
sense is there in your objection, if Jim and Laddy stick up for him?"

"But, Tom--he'll fall in love with Nell!" protested Mrs. Belding.

"Well, wouldn't that be regular?  Doesn't every man who comes along
fall in love with Nell?  Hasn't it always happened?  When she was a
schoolgirl in Kansas didn't it happen?  Didn't she have a hundred
moon-eyed ninnies after her in Texas?  I've had some peace out here in
the desert, except when a Greaser or a prospector or a Yaqui would come
along.  Then same old story--in love with Nell!"

"But, Tom, Nell might fall in love with this young man!" exclaimed the
wife, in distress.

"Laddy, Jim, didn't I tell you?" cried Belding.  "I knew she'd say
that.... My dear wife, I would be simply overcome with joy if Nell did
fall in love once.  Real good and hard!  She's wilder than any antelope
out there on the desert.  Nell's nearly twenty now, and so far as we
know she's never cared a rap for any fellow.  And she's just as gay and
full of the devil as she was at fourteen. Nell's as good and lovable as
she is pretty, but I'm afraid she'll never grow into a woman while we
live out in this lonely land. And you've always hated towns where there
was a chance for the girl--just because you were afraid she'd fall in
love.  You've always been strange, even silly, about that.  I've done
my best for Nell--loved her as if she were my own daughter.  I've
changed many business plans to suit your whims.  There are rough times
ahead, maybe.  I need men.  I'll hire this chap Gale if he'll stay. Let
Nell take her chance with him, just as she'll have to take chances with
men when we get out of the desert.  She'll be all the better for it."

"I hope Laddy's not mistaken in his opinion of this newcomer," replied
Mrs. Belding, with a sigh of resignation.

"Shore I never made a mistake in my life figger'n' people," said Laddy,
stoutly.

"Yes, you have, Laddy," replied Mrs. Belding.  "You're wrong about
Tom.... Well, supper is to be got.  That young man and the girl will be
starved.  I'll go in now.  If Nell happens around don't--don't flatter
her, Laddy, like you did at dinner.  Don't make her think of her looks."

Dick heard Mrs. Belding walk away.

"Shore she's powerful particular about that girl," observed Laddy.
"Say, Tom, Nell knows she's pretty, doesn't she?"

"She's liable to find it out unless you shut up, Laddy.  When you
visited us out here some weeks ago, you kept paying cowboy compliments
to her."

"An' it's your idea that cowboy compliments are plumb bad for girls?"

"Downright bad, Laddy, so my wife says."

"I'll be darned if I believe any girl can be hurt by a little sweet
talk.  It pleases 'em.... But say, Beldin', speaking of looks, have you
got a peek yet at the Spanish girl?"

"Not in the light."

"Well, neither have I in daytime.  I had enough by moonlight. Nell is
some on looks, but I'm regretful passin' the ribbon to the lady from
Mex.  Jim, where are you?"

"My money's on Nell," replied Lash.  "Gimme a girl with flesh an'
color, an' blue eyes a-laughin'.  Miss Castaneda is some peach, I'll
not gainsay.  But her face seemed too white.  An' when she flashed
those eyes on me, I thought I was shot!  When she stood up there at
first, thankin' us, I felt as if a--a princess was round somewhere.
Now, Nell is kiddish an' sweet an'--"

"Chop it," interrupted Belding.  "Here comes Nell now."

Dick's tingling ears took in the pattering of light footsteps, the rush
of some one running.

"Here you are," cried a sweet, happy voice.  "Dad, the Senorita is
perfectly lovely.  I've been peeping at her.  She sleeps like--like
death.  She's so white.  Oh, I hope she won't be ill."

"Shore she's only played out," said Laddy.  "But she had spunk while it
lasted.... I was just arguin' with Jim an' Tom about Miss Castaneda."

"Gracious!  Why, she's beautiful.  I never saw any one so beautiful....
How strange and sad, that about her!  Tell me more, Laddy.  You
promised.  I'm dying to know.  I never hear anything in this awful
place.  Didn't you say the Senorita had a sweetheart?"

"Shore I did."

"And he's a cavalryman?"

"Yes."

"Is he the young man who came with you?"

"Nope.  That fellow's the one who saved the girl from Rojas."

"Ah!  Where is he, Laddy?"

"He's in there asleep."

"Is he hurt?"

"I reckon not.  He walked about fifteen miles."

"Is he--nice, Laddy?"

"Shore."

"What is he like?"

"Well, I'm not long acquainted, never saw him by day, but I was some
tolerable took with him.  An' Jim here, Jim says the young man can have
his gun an' his hoss."

"Wonderful!  Laddy, what on earth did this stranger do to win you
cowboys in just one night?"

"I'll shore have to tell you.  Me an' Jim were watchin' a game of cards
in the Del Sol saloon in Casita.  That's across the line. We had
acquaintances--four fellows from the Cross Bar outfit, where we worked
a while back.  This Del Sol is a billiard hall, saloon, restaurant, an'
the like.  An' it was full of Greasers. Some of Camp's rebels were
there drinkin' an' playin' games. Then pretty soon in come Rojas with
some of his outfit. They were packin' guns an' kept to themselves off
to one side. I didn't give them a second look till Jim said he reckoned
there was somethin' in the wind.  Then, careless-like, I began to peek
at Rojas.  They call Rojas the 'dandy rebel,' an' he shore looked the
part.  It made me sick to see him in all that lace an' glitter, knowin'
him to be the cutthroat robber he is. It's no oncommon sight to see
excited Greasers.  They're all crazy. But this bandit was shore some
agitated.  He kept his men in a tight bunch round a table.  He talked
an' waved his hands.  He was actually shakin'.  His eyes had a wild
glare.  Now I figgered that trouble was brewin', most likely for the
little Casita garrison. People seemed to think Campo an' Rojas would
join forces to oust the federals.  Jim thought Rojas's excitement was
at the hatchin' of some plot.  Anyway, we didn't join no card games,
an' without pretendin' to, we was some watchful.

"A little while afterward I seen a fellow standin' in the restaurant
door.  He was a young American dressed in corduroys and boots, like a
prospector.  You know it's no onusual fact to see prospectors in these
parts.  What made me think twice about this one was how big he seemed,
how he filled up that door.  He looked round the saloon, an' when he
spotted Rojas he sorta jerked up.  Then he pulled his slouch hat
lopsided an' began to stagger down, down the steps.  First off I made
shore he was drunk.  But I remembered he didn't seem drunk before.  It
was some queer.  So I watched that young man.

"He reeled around the room like a fellow who was drunker'n a lord.
Nobody but me seemed to notice him.  Then he began to stumble over
pool-players an' get his feet tangled up in chairs an' bump against
tables. He got some pretty hard looks.  He came round our way, an' all
of a sudden he seen us cowboys.  He gave another start, like the one
when he first seen Rojas, then he made for us.  I tipped Jim off that
somethin' was doin'.

"When he got close he straightened up, put back his slouch hat, an'
looked at us.  Then I saw his face.  It sorta electrified yours truly.
It was white, with veins standin' out an' eyes flamin'--a face of fury.
I was plumb amazed, didn't know what to think. Then this queer young
man shot some cool, polite words at me an' Jim.

"He was only bluffin' at bein' drunk--he meant to rush Rojas, to start
a rough house.  The bandit was after a girl.  This girl was in the
hotel, an' she was the sweetheart of a soldier, the young fellow's
friend.  The hotel was watched by Rojas's guards, an' the plan was to
make a fuss an' get the girl away in the excitement. Well, Jim an' me
got a hint of our bein' Americans--that cowboys generally had a name
for loyalty to women.  Then this amazin' chap--you can't imagine how
scornful--said for me an' Jim to watch him.

"Before I could catch my breath an' figger out what he meant by 'rush'
an' 'rough house' he had knocked over a table an' crowded some Greaser
half off the map.  One little funny man leaped up like a wild monkey
an' began to screech.  An' in another second he was in the air upside
down.  When he lit, he laid there.  Then, quicker'n I can tell you, the
young man dove at Rojas.  Like a mad steer on the rampage he charged
Rojas an' his men.  The whole outfit went down--smash!  I figgered then
what 'rush' meant.  The young fellow came up out of the pile with
Rojas, an' just like I'd sling an empty sack along the floor he sent
the bandit.  But swift as that went he was on top of Rojas before the
chairs an' tables had stopped rollin'.

"I woke up then, an' made for the center of the room. Jim with me. I
began to shoot out the lamps.  Jim throwed his guns on the crazy
rebels, an' I was afraid there'd be blood spilled before I could get
the room dark.  Bein's shore busy, I lost sight of the young fellow for
a second or so, an' when I got an eye free for him I seen a Greaser
about to knife him.  Think I was some considerate of the Greaser by
only shootin' his arm off.  Then I cracked the last lamp, an' in the
hullabaloo me an' Jim vamoosed.

"We made tracks for our hosses an' packs, an' was hittin' the San
Felipe road when we run right plumb into the young man.  Well, he said
his name was Gale--Dick Gale.  The girl was with him safe an' well; but
her sweetheart, the soldier, bein' away without leave, had to go back
sudden.  There shore was some trouble, for Jim an' me heard shootin'.
Gale said he had no money, no friends, was a stranger in a desert
country; an' he was distracted to know how to help the girl.  So me an'
Jim started off with them for San Felipe, got switched, and' then we
headed for the Rio Forlorn."

"Oh, I think he was perfectly splendid!" exclaimed the girl.

"Shore he was.  Only, Nell, you can't lay no claim to bein' the
original discoverer of that fact."

"But, Laddy, you haven't told me what he looks like."

At this juncture Dick Gale felt it absolutely impossible for him to
play the eavesdropper any longer.  Quietly he rolled out of bed. The
voices still sounded close outside, and it was only by effort that he
kept from further listening.  Belding's kindly interest, Laddy's blunt
and sincere cowboy eulogy, the girl's sweet eagerness and praise--these
warmed Gale's heart.  He had fallen among simple people, into whose
lives the advent of an unknown man was welcome. He found himself in a
singularly agitated mood.  The excitement, the thrill, the difference
felt in himself, experienced the preceding night, had extended on into
his present.  And the possibilities suggested by the conversation he
had unwittingly overheard added sufficiently to the other feelings to
put him into a peculiarly receptive state of mind.  He was wild to be
one of the Belding rangers.  The idea of riding a horse in the open
desert, with a dangerous duty to perform, seemed to strike him with an
appealing force.  Something within him went out to the cowboys, to this
blunt and kind Belding. He was afraid to meet the girl.  If every man
who came along fell in love with this sweet-voiced Nell, then what hope
had he to escape--now, when his whole inner awakening betokened a
change of spirit, hope, a finding of real worth, real good, real power
in himself?  He did not understand wholly, yet he felt ready to ride,
to fight, to love the desert, to love these outdoor men, to love a
woman.  That beautiful Spanish girl had spoken to something dead in him
and it had quickened to life.  The sweet voice of an audacious, unseen
girl warned him that presently a still more wonderful thing would
happen to him.

Gale imagined he made noise enough as he clumsily pulled on his boots,
yet the voices, split by a merry laugh, kept on murmuring outside the
door.  It was awkward for him, having only one hand available to lace
up his boots.  He looked out of the window. Evidently this was at the
end of the house.  There was a flagstone walk, beside which ran a ditch
full of swift, muddy water.  It made a pleasant sound.  There were
trees strange of form and color to to him.  He heard bees, birds,
chickens, saw the red of roses and green of grass.  Then he saw, close
to the wall, a tub full of water, and a bench upon which lay basin,
soap, towel, comb, and brush.  The window was also a door, for under it
there was a step.

Gale hesitated a moment, then went out.  He stepped naturally, hoping
and expecting that the cowboys would hear him.  But nobody came.
Awkwardly, with left hand, he washed his face.  Upon a nail in the wall
hung a little mirror, by the aid of which Dick combed and brushed his
hair.  He imagined he looked a most haggard wretch.  With that he faced
forward, meaning to go round the corner of the house to greet the
cowboys and these new-found friends.

Dick had taken but one step when he was halted by laugher and the
patter of light feet.

From close around the corner pealed out that sweet voice.  "Dad, you'll
have your wish, and mama will be wild!"

Dick saw a little foot sweep into view, a white dress, then the swiftly
moving form of a girl.  She was looking backward.

"Dad, I shall fall in love with your new ranger.  I will--I have--"

Then she plumped squarely into Dick's arms.

She started back violently.

Dick saw a fair face and dark-blue, audaciously flashing eyes. Swift as
lightning their expression changed to surprise, fear, wonder.  For an
instant they were level with Dick's grave questioning. Suddenly,
sweetly, she blushed.

"Oh-h!" she faltered.

Then the blush turned to a scarlet fire.  She whirled past him, and
like a white gleam was gone.

Dick became conscious of the quickened beating of his heart.  He
experienced a singular exhilaration.  That moment had been the one for
which he had been ripe, the event upon which strange circumstances had
been rushing him.

With a couple of strides he turned the corner.  Laddy and Lash were
there talking to a man of burly form.  Seen by day, both cowboys were
gray-haired, red-skinned, and weather-beaten, with lean, sharp
features, and gray eyes so much alike that they might have been
brothers.

"Hello, there's the young fellow," spoke up the burly man.  "Mr. Gale,
I'm glad to meet you.  My name's Belding."

His greeting was as warm as his handclasp was long and hard. Gale saw a
heavy man of medium height.  His head was large and covered with
grizzled locks.  He wore a short-cropped mustache and chin beard.  His
skin was brown, and his dark eyes beamed with a genial light.

The cowboys were as cordial as if Dick had been their friend for years.

"Young man, did you run into anything as you came out?" asked Belding,
with twinkling eyes.

"Why, yes, I met something white and swift flying by," replied Dick.

"Did she see you?" asked Laddy.

"I think so; but she didn't wait for me to introduce myself."

"That was Nell Burton, my girl--step-daughter, I should say," said
Belding.  "She's sure some whirlwind, as Laddy calls her.  Come, let's
go in and meet the wife."

The house was long, like a barracks, with porch extending all the way,
and doors every dozen paces.  When Dick was ushered into a
sitting-room, he was amazed at the light and comfort.  This room had
two big windows and a door opening into a patio, where there were
luxuriant grass, roses in bloom, and flowering trees.  He heard a slow
splashing of water.

In Mrs. Belding, Gale found a woman of noble proportions and striking
appearance.  Her hair was white.  She had a strong, serious, well-lined
face that bore haunting evidences of past beauty.  The gaze she bent
upon him was almost piercing in its intensity.  Her greeting, which
seemed to Dick rather slow in coming, was kind though not cordial.
Gale's first thought, after he had thanked these good people for their
hospitality, was to inquire about Mercedes.  He was informed that the
Spanish girl had awakened with a considerable fever and nervousness.
When, however, her anxiety had been allayed and her thirst relieved,
she had fallen asleep again.  Mrs. Belding said the girl had suffered
no great hardship, other than mental, and would very soon be rested and
well.

"Now, Gale," said Belding, when his wife had excused herself to get
supper, "the boys, Jim and Laddy, told me about you and the mix-up at
Casita.  I'll be glad to take care of the girl till it's safe for your
soldier friend to get her out of the country.  That won't be very soon,
don't mistake me.... I don't want to seem over-curious about you--Laddy
has interested me in you--and straight out I'd like to know what you
propose to do now."

"I haven't any plans," replied Dick; and, taking the moment as
propitious, he decided to speak frankly concerning himself.  "I just
drifted down here.  My home is in Chicago.  When I left school some
years ago--I'm twenty-five now--I went to work for my father. He's--he
has business interests there.  I tried all kinds of inside jobs.  I
couldn't please my father.  I guess I put no real heart in my work.
The fact was I didn't know how to work.  The governor and I didn't
exactly quarrel; but he hurt my feelings, and I quit. Six months or
more ago I came West, and have knocked about from Wyoming southwest to
the border.  I tried to find congenial work, but nothing came my way.
To tell you frankly, Mr. Belding, I suppose I didn't much care.  I
believe, though, that all the time I didn't know what I wanted.  I've
learned--well, just lately--"

"What do you want to do?" interposed Belding.

"I want a man's job.  I want to do things with my hands.  I want
action.  I want to be outdoors."

Belding nodded his head as if he understood that, and he began to speak
again, cut something short, then went on, hesitatingly:

"Gale--you could go home again--to the old man--it'd be all right?"

"Mr. Belding, there's nothing shady in my past.  The governor would be
glad to have me home.  That's the only consolation I've got. But I'm
not going.  I'm broke.  I won't be a tramp.  And it's up to me to do
something."

"How'd you like to be a border ranger?" asked Belding, laying a hand on
Dick's knee.  "Part of my job here is United States Inspector of
Immigration.  I've got that boundary line to patrol--to keep out Chinks
and Japs.  This revolution has added complications, and I'm looking for
smugglers and raiders here any day.  You'll not be hired by the U. S.
You'll simply be my ranger, same as Laddy and Jim, who have promised to
work for me.  I'll pay you well, give you a room here, furnish
everything down to guns, and the finest horse you ever saw in your
life.  Your job won't be safe and healthy, sometimes, but it'll be a
man's job--don't mistake me! You can gamble on having things to do
outdoors.  Now, what do you say?"

"I accept, and I thank you--I can't say how much," replied Gale,
earnestly.

"Good!  That's settled.  Let's go out and tell Laddy and Jim."

Both boys expressed satisfaction at the turn of affairs, and then with
Belding they set out to take Gale around the ranch.  The house and
several outbuildings were constructed of adobe, which, according to
Belding, retained the summer heat on into winter, and the winter cold
on into summer.  These gray-red mud habitations were hideous to look
at, and this fact, perhaps, made their really comfortable interiors
more vividly a contrast.  The wide grounds were covered with luxuriant
grass and flowers and different kinds of trees.  Gale's interest led
him to ask about fig trees and pomegranates, and especially about a
beautiful specimen that Belding called palo verde.

Belding explained that the luxuriance of this desert place was owing to
a few springs and the dammed-up waters of the Rio Forlorn. Before he
had come to the oasis it had been inhabited by a Papago Indian tribe
and a few peon families.  The oasis lay in an arroyo a mile wide, and
sloped southwest for some ten miles or more. The river went dry most of
the year; but enough water was stored in flood season to irrigate the
gardens and alfalfa fields.

"I've got one never-failing spring on my place," said Belding.  "Fine,
sweet water!  You know what that means in the desert.  I like this
oasis.  The longer I live here the better I like it.  There's not a
spot in southern Arizona that'll compare with this valley for water or
grass or wood.  It's beautiful and healthy.  Forlorn and lonely, yes,
especially for women like my wife and Nell; but I like it.... And
between you and me, boys, I've got something up my sleeve.  There's
gold dust in the arroyos, and there's mineral up in the mountains. If
we only had water!  This hamlet has steadily grown since I took up a
station here.  Why, Casita is no place beside Forlorn River. Pretty
soon the Southern Pacific will shoot a railroad branch out here.  There
are possibilities, and I want you boys to stay with me and get in on
the ground floor.  I wish this rebel war was over.... Well, here are
the corrals and the fields.  Gale, take a look at that bunch of horses!"

Belding's last remark was made as he led his companions out of shady
gardens into the open.  Gale saw an adobe shed and a huge pen fenced by
strangely twisted and contorted branches or trunks of mesquite, and,
beyond these, wide, flat fields, green--a dark, rich green--and dotted
with beautiful horses.  There were whites and blacks, and bays and
grays.  In his admiration Gale searched his memory to see if he could
remember the like of these magnificent animals, and had to admit that
the only ones he could compare with them were the Arabian steeds.

"Every ranch loves his horses," said Belding.  "When I was in the
Panhandle I had some fine stock.  But these are Mexican.  They came
from Durango, where they were bred.  Mexican horses are the finest in
the world, bar none."

"Shore I reckon I savvy why you don't sleep nights," drawled Laddy. "I
see a Greaser out there--no, it's an Indian."

"That's my Papago herdsman.  I keep watch over the horses now day and
night.  Lord, how I'd hate to have Rojas or Salazar--any of those
bandit rebels--find my horses!... Gale, can you ride?"

Dick modestly replied that he could, according to the Eastern idea of
horsemanship.

"You don't need to be half horse to ride one of that bunch.  But over
there in the other field I've iron-jawed broncos I wouldn't want you to
tackle--except to see the fun.  I've an outlaw I'll gamble even Laddy
can't ride."

"So.  How much'll you gamble?" asked Laddy, instantly.

The ringing of a bell, which Belding said was a call to supper, turned
the men back toward the house.  Facing that way, Gale saw dark,
beetling ridges rising from the oasis and leading up to bare, black
mountains.  He had heard Belding call them No Name Mountains, and
somehow the appellation suited those lofty, mysterious, frowning peaks.

It was not until they reached the house and were about to go in that
Belding chanced to discover Gale's crippled hand.

"What an awful hand!" he exclaimed.  "Where the devil did you get that?"

"I stove in my knuckles on Rojas," replied Dick.

"You did that in one punch?  Say, I'm glad it wasn't me you hit! Why
didn't you tell me?  That's a bad hand.  Those cuts are full of dirt
and sand.  Inflammation's setting in.  It's got to be dressed.  Nell!"
he called.

There was no answer.  He called again, louder.

"Mother, where's the girl?"

"She's there in the dining-room," replied Mrs. Belding.

"Did she hear me?" he inquired, impatiently.

"Of course."

"Nell!" roared Belding.

This brought results.  Dick saw a glimpse of golden hair and a white
dress in the door.  But they were not visible longer than a second.

"Dad, what's the matter?" asked a voice that was still as sweet as
formerly, but now rather small and constrained.

"Bring the antiseptics, cotton, bandages--and things out here. Hurry
now."

Belding fetched a pail of water and a basin from the kitchen.  His wife
followed him out, and, upon seeing Dick's hand, was all solicitude.
Then Dick heard light, quick footsteps, but he did not look up.

"Nell, this is Mr. Gale--Dick Gale, who came with the boys last last
night," said Belding.  "He's got an awful hand.  Got it punching that
greaser Rojas.  I want you to dress it.... Gale, this is my
step-daughter, Nell Burton, of whom I spoke.  She's some good when
there's somebody sick or hurt.  Shove out your fist, my boy, and let
her get at it.  Supper's nearly ready."

Dick felt that same strange, quickening heart throb, yet he had never
been cooler in his life.  More than anything else in the world he
wanted to look at Nell Burton; however, divining that the situation
might be embarrassing to her, he refrained from looking up.  She began
to bathe his injured knuckles.  He noted the softness, the deftness of
her touch, and then it seemed her fingers were not quite as steady as
they might have been.  Still, in a moment they appeared to become surer
in their work.  She had beautiful hands, not too large, though
certainly not small, and they were strong, brown, supple.  He observed
next, with stealthy, upward-stealing glance, that she had rolled up her
sleeves, exposing fine, round arms graceful in line.  Her skin was
brown--no, it was more gold than brown.  It had a wonderful clear tint.
Dick stoically lowered his eyes then, putting off as long as possible
the alluring moment when he was to look into her face.  That would be a
fateful moment.  He played with a certain strange joy of anticipation.
When, however, she sat down beside him and rested his injured hand in
her lap as she cut bandages, she was so thrillingly near that he
yielded to an irrepressible desire to look up.  She had a sweet, fair
face warmly tinted with that same healthy golden-brown sunburn.  Her
hair was light gold and abundant, a waving mass.  Her eyes were shaded
by long, downcast lashes, yet through them he caught a gleam of blue.

Despite the stir within him, Gale, seeing she was now absorbed in her
task, critically studied her with a second closer gaze. She was a
sweet, wholesome, joyous, pretty girl.

"Shore it musta hurt?" replied Laddy, who sat an interested spectator.

"Yes, I confess it did," replied Dick, slowly, with his eyes on Nell's
face.  "But I didn't mind."

The girl's lashes swept up swiftly in surprise.  She had taken his
words literally.  But the dark-blue eyes met his for only a fleeting
second.  Then the warm tint in her cheeks turned as red as her lips.
Hurriedly she finished tying the bandage and rose to her feet.

"I thank you," said Gale, also rising.

With that Belding appeared in the doorway, and finding the operation
concluded, called them in to supper.  Dick had the use of only one arm,
and he certainly was keenly aware of the shy, silent girl across the
table; but in spite of these considerable handicaps he eclipsed both
hungry cowboys in the assault upon Mrs. Belding's bounteous supper.
Belding talked, the cowboys talked more or less.  Mrs. Belding put in a
word now and then, and Dick managed to find brief intervals when it was
possible for him to say yes or no.  He observed gratefully that no one
round the table seemed to be aware of his enormous appetite.

After supper, having a favorable opportunity when for a moment no one
was at hand, Dick went out through the yard, past the gardens and
fields, and climbed the first knoll.  From that vantage point he looked
out over the little hamlet, somewhat to his right, and was surprised at
its extent, its considerable number of adobe houses.  The overhanging
mountains, ragged and darkening, a great heave of splintered rock,
rather chilled and affronted him.

Westward the setting sun gilded a spiked, frost-colored, limitless
expanse of desert.  It awed Gale.  Everywhere rose blunt, broken ranges
or isolated groups of mountains.  Yet the desert stretched away down
between and beyond them.  When the sun set and Gale could not see so
far, he felt a relief.

That grand and austere attraction of distance gone, he saw the desert
nearer at hand--the valley at his feet.  What a strange gray, somber
place!  There was a lighter strip of gray winding down between darker
hues.  This he realized presently was the river bed, and he saw how the
pools of water narrowed and diminished in size till they lost
themselves in gray sand.  This was the rainy season, near its end, and
here a little river struggled hopelessly, forlornly to live in the
desert.  He received a potent impression of the nature of that blasted
age-worn waste which he had divined was to give him strength and work
and love.



V

A DESERT ROSE

BELDING assigned Dick to a little room which had no windows but two
doors, one opening into the patio, the other into the yard on the west
side of the house.  It contained only the barest necessities for
comfort.  Dick mentioned the baggage he had left in the hotel at
Casita, and it was Belding's opinion that to try to recover his
property would be rather risky; on the moment Richard Gale was probably
not popular with the Mexicans at Casita.  So Dick bade good-by to fine
suits of clothes and linen with a feeling that, as he had said farewell
to an idle and useless past, it was just as well not to have any old
luxuries as reminders.  As he possessed, however, not a thing save the
clothes on his back, and not even a handkerchief, he expressed regret
that he had come to Forlorn River a beggar.

"Beggar hell!" exploded Belding, with his eyes snapping in the
lamplight.  "Money's the last thing we think of out here.  All the
same, Gale, if you stick you'll be rich."

"It wouldn't surprise me," replied Dick, thoughtfully.  But he was not
thinking of material wealth.  Then, as he viewed his stained and torn
shirt, he laughed and said "Belding, while I'm getting rich I'd like to
have some respectable clothes."

"We've a little Mex store in town, and what you can't get there the
women folks will make for you."

When Dick lay down he was dully conscious of pain and headache, that he
did not feel well.  Despite this, and a mind thronging with memories
and anticipations, he succumbed to weariness and soon fell asleep.

It was light when he awoke, but a strange brightness seen through what
seemed blurred eyes.  A moment passed before his mind worked clearly,
and then he had to make an effort to think.  He was dizzy. When he
essayed to lift his right arm, an excruciating pain made him desist.
Then he discovered that his arm was badly swollen, and the hand had
burst its bandages.  The injured member was red, angry, inflamed, and
twice its normal size.  He felt hot all over, and a raging headache
consumed him.

Belding came stamping into the room.

"Hello, Dick.  Do you know it's late?  How's the busted fist this
morning?"

Dick tried to sit up, but his effort was a failure.  He got about half
up, then felt himself weakly sliding back.

"I guess--I'm pretty sick," he said.

He saw Belding lean over him, feel his face, and speak, and then
everything seemed to drift, not into darkness, but into some region
where he had dim perceptions of gray moving things, and of voices that
were remote.  Then there came an interval when all was blank. He knew
not whether it was one of minutes or hours, but after it he had a
clearer mind.  He slept, awakened during night-time, and slept again.
When he again unclosed his eyes the room was sunny, and cool with a
fragrant breeze that blew through the open door. Dick felt better; but
he had no particular desire to move or talk or eat.  He had, however, a
burning thirst.  Mrs. Belding visited him often; her husband came in
several times, and once Nell slipped in noiselessly.  Even this last
event aroused no interest in Dick.

On the next day he was very much improved.

"We've been afraid of blood poisoning," said Belding.  "But my wife
thinks the danger's past.  You'll have to rest that arm for a while."

Ladd and Jim came peeping in at the door.

"Come in, boys.  He can have company--the more the better--if it'll
keep him content.  He mustn't move, that's all."

The cowboys entered, slow, easy, cool, kind-voiced.

"Shore it's tough," said Ladd, after he had greeted Dick.  "You look
used up."

Jim Lash wagged his half-bald, sunburned head, "Musta been more'n tough
for Rojas."

"Gale, Laddy tells me one of our neighbors, fellow named Carter, is
going to Casita," put in Belding.  "Here's a chance to get word to your
friend the soldier."

"Oh, that will be fine!" exclaimed Dick.  "I declare I'd forgotten
Thorne.... How is Miss Castaneda?  I hope--"

"She's all right, Gale.  Been up and around the patio for two days.
Like all the Spanish--the real thing--she's made of Damascus steel.
We've been getting acquainted.  She and Nell made friends at once. I'll
call them in."

He closed the door leading out into the yard, explaining that he did
not want to take chances of Mercedes's presence becoming known to
neighbors.  Then he went to the patio and called.

Both girls came in, Mercedes leading.  Like Nell, she wore white, and
she had a red rose in her hand.  Dick would scarcely have recognized
anything about her except her eyes and the way she carried her little
head, and her beauty burst upon him strange and anew.  She was swift,
impulsive in her movements to reach his side.

"Senor, I am so sorry you were ill--so happy you are better."

Dick greeted her, offering his left hand, gravely apologizing for the
fact that, owing to a late infirmity, he could not offer the right.
Her smile exquisitely combined sympathy, gratitude, admiration.  Then
Dick spoke to Nell, likewise offering his hand, which she took shyly.
Her reply was a murmured, unintelligible one; but her eyes were glad,
and the tint in her cheeks threatened to rival the hue of the rose she
carried.

Everybody chatted then, except Nell, who had apparently lost her voice.
Presently Dick remembered to speak of the matter of getting news to
Thorne.

"Senor, may I write to him?  Will some one take a letter?... I shall
hear from him!" she said; and her white hands emphasized her words.

"Assuredly.  I guess poor Thorne is almost crazy.  I'll write to
him.... No, I can't with this crippled hand."

"That'll be all right, Gale," said Belding.  "Nell will write for you.
She writes all my letters."

So Belding arranged it; and Mercedes flew away to her room to write,
while Nell fetched pen and paper and seated herself beside Gale's bed
to take his dictation.

What with watching Nell and trying to catch her glance, and listening
to Belding's talk with the cowboys, Dick was hard put to it to dictate
any kind of a creditable letter.  Nell met his gaze once, then no more.
The color came and went in her cheeks, and sometimes, when he told her
to write so and so, there was a demure smile on her lips.  She was
laughing at him.  And Belding was talking over the risks involved in a
trip to Casita.

"Shore I'll ride in with the letters," Ladd said.

"No you won't," replied Belding.  "That bandit outfit will be laying
for you."

"Well, I reckon if they was I wouldn't be oncommon grieved."

"I'll tell you, boys, I'll ride in myself with Carter.  There's
business I can see to, and I'm curious to know what the rebels are
doing.  Laddy, keep one eye open while I'm gone.  See the horses are
locked up.... Gale, I'm going to Casita myself.  Ought to get back
tomorrow some time.  I'll be ready to start in an hour.  Have your
letter ready.  And say--if you want to write home it's a chance.
Sometimes we don't go to the P. O. in a month."

He tramped out, followed by the tall cowboys, and then Dick was enabled
to bring his letter to a close.  Mercedes came back, and her eyes were
shining.  Dick imagined a letter received from her would be something
of an event for a fellow.  Then, remembering Belding's suggestion, he
decided to profit by it.

"May I trouble you to write another for me?" asked Dick, as he received
the letter from Nell.

"It's no trouble, I'm sure--I'd be pleased," she replied.

That was altogether a wonderful speech of hers, Dick thought, because
the words were the first coherent ones she had spoken to him.

"May I stay?" asked Mercedes, smiling.

"By all means," he answered, and then he settled back and began.

Presently Gale paused, partly because of genuine emotion, and stole a
look from under his hand at Nell.  She wrote swiftly, and her downcast
face seemed to be softer in its expression of sweetness.  If she had in
the very least been drawn to him--  But that was absurd--impossible!

When Dick finished dictating, his eyes were upon Mercedes, who sat
smiling curious and sympathetic.  How responsive she was! He heard the
hasty scratch of Nell's pen.  He looked at Nell. Presently she rose,
holding out his letter.  He was just in time to see a wave of red
recede from her face.  She gave him one swift gaze, unconscious,
searching, then averted it and turned away.  She left the room with
Mercedes before he could express his thanks.

But that strange, speaking flash of eyes remained to haunt and torment
Gale.  It was indescribably sweet, and provocative of thoughts that he
believed were wild without warrant.  Something within him danced for
very joy, and the next instant he was conscious of wistful doubt, a
gravity that he could not understand. It dawned upon him that for the
brief instant when Nell had met his gaze she had lost her shyness.  It
was a woman's questioning eyes that had pierced through him.

During the rest of the day Gale was content to lie still on his bed
thinking and dreaming, dozing at intervals, and watching the lights
change upon the mountain peaks, feeling the warm, fragrant desert wind
that blew in upon him.  He seemed to have lost the faculty of
estimating time.  A long while, strong in its effect upon him, appeared
to have passed since he had met Thorne.  He accepted things as he felt
them, and repudiated his intelligence. His old inquisitive habit of
mind returned.  Did he love Nell? Was he only attracted for the moment?
What was the use of worrying about her or himself?  He refused to
answer, and deliberately gave himself up to dreams of her sweet face
and of that last dark-blue glance.

Next day he believed he was well enough to leave his room; but Mrs.
Belding would not permit him to do so.  She was kind, soft-handed,
motherly, and she was always coming in to minister to his comfort. This
attention was sincere, not in the least forced; yet Gale felt that the
friendliness so manifest in the others of the household did not extend
to her.  He was conscious of something that a little thought persuaded
him was antagonism.  It surprised and hurt him.  He had never been much
of a success with girls and young married women, but their mothers and
old people had generally been fond of him.  Still, though Mrs.
Belding's hair was snow-white, she did not impress him as being old.
He reflected that there might come a time when it would be desirable,
far beyond any ground of every-day friendly kindliness, to have Mrs.
Belding be well disposed toward him.  So he thought about her, and
pondered how to make her like him.  It did not take very long for Dick
to discover that he liked her.  Her face, except when she smiled, was
thoughtful and sad.  It was a face to make one serious.  Like a
haunting shadow, like a phantom of happier years, the sweetness of
Nell's face was there, and infinitely more of beauty than had been
transmitted to the daughter.  Dick believed Mrs. Belding's friendship
and motherly love were worth striving to win, entirely aside from any
more selfish motive.  He decided both would be hard to get.  Often he
felt her deep, penetrating gaze upon him; and, though this in no wise
embarrassed him--for he had no shameful secrets of past or present--it
showed him how useless it would be to try to conceal anything from her.
Naturally, on first impulse, he wanted to hide his interest in the
daughter; but he resolved to be absolutely frank and true, and through
that win or lose.  Moreover, if Mrs. Belding asked him any questions
about his home, his family, his connections, he would not avoid direct
and truthful answers.

Toward evening Gale heard the tramp of horses and Belding's hearty
voice.  Presently the rancher strode in upon Gale, shaking the gray
dust from his broad shoulders and waving a letter.

"Hello, Dick!  Good news and bad!" he said, putting the letter in
Dick's hand.  "Had no trouble finding your friend Thorne.  Looked like
he'd been drunk for a week!  Say, he nearly threw a fit.  I never saw a
fellow so wild with joy.  He made sure you and Mercedes were lost in
the desert.  He wrote two letters which I brought. Don't mistake me,
boy, it was some fun with Mercedes just now. I teased her, wouldn't
give her the letter.  You ought to have seen her eyes.  If ever you see
a black-and-white desert hawk swoop down upon a quail, then you'll know
how Mercedes pounced upon her letter... Well, Casita is one hell of a
place these days.  I tried to get your baggage, and I think I made a
mistake.  We're going to see travel toward Forlorn River.  The federal
garrison got reinforcements from somewhere, and is holding out.
There's been fighting for three days.  The rebels have a string of flat
railroad cars, all iron, and they ran this up within range of the
barricades.  They've got some machine guns, and they're going to lick
the federals sure.  There are dead soldiers in the ditches, Mexican
non-combatants lying dead in the streets--and buzzards everywhere! It's
reported that Campo, the rebel leader, is on the way up from Sinaloa,
and Huerta, a federal general, is coming to relieve the garrison. I
don't take much stock in reports.  But there's hell in Casita, all
right."

"Do you think we'll have trouble out here?" asked Dick, excitedly.

"Sure.  Some kind of trouble sooner or later," replied Belding,
gloomily.  "Why, you can stand on my ranch and step over into Mexico.
Laddy says we'll lose horses and other stock in night raids. Jim Lash
doesn't look for any worse.  But Jim isn't as well acquainted with
Greasers as I am.  Anyway, my boy, as soon as you can hold a bridle and
a gun you'll be on the job, don't mistake me."

"With Laddy and Jim?" asked Dick, trying to be cool.

"Sure.  With them and me, and by yourself."

Dick drew a deep breath, and even after Belding had departed he forgot
for a moment about the letter in his hand.  Then he unfolded the paper
and read:


Dear Dick,--You've more than saved my life.  To the end of my days
you'll be the one man to whom I owe everything.  Words fail to express
my feelings.

This must be a brief note.  Belding is waiting, and I used up most of
the time writing to Mercedes.  I like Belding.  He was not unknown to
me, though I never met or saw him before.  You'll be interested to
learn that he's the unadulterated article, the real Western goods.
I've heard of some of his stunts, and they made my hair curl.  Dick,
your luck is staggering.  The way Belding spoke of you was great.  But
you deserve it, old man.

I'm leaving Mercedes in your charge, subject, of course, to advice from
Belding.  Take care of her, Dick, for my life is wrapped up in her.  By
all means keep her from being seen by Mexicans.  We are sitting tight
here--nothing doing.  If some action doesn't come soon, it'll be darned
strange.  Things are centering this way. There's scrapping right along,
and people have begun to move. We're still patrolling the line eastward
of Casita.  It'll be impossible to keep any tab on the line west of
Casita, for it's too rough.  That cactus desert is awful. Cowboys or
rangers with desert-bred horses might keep raiders and smugglers from
crossing. But if cavalrymen could stand that waterless wilderness,
which I doubt much, their horses would drop under them.

If things do quiet down before my commission expires, I'll get leave of
absence, run out to Forlorn River, marry my beautiful Spanish princess,
and take her to a civilized country, where, I opine, every son of a gun
who sees her will lose his head, and drive me mad.  It's my great luck,
old pal, that you are a fellow who never seemed to care about pretty
girls.  So you won't give me the double cross and run off with
Mercedes--carry her off, like the villain in the play, I mean.

That reminds me of Rojas.  Oh, Dick, it was glorious!  You didn't do
anything to the Dandy Rebel!  Not at all!  You merely caressed
him--gently moved him to one side.  Dick, harken to these glad words:
Rojas is in the hospital.  I was interested to inquire. He had a
smashed finger, a dislocated collar bone, three broken ribs, and a
fearful gash on his face.  He'll be in the hospital for a month.  Dick,
when I meet that pig-headed dad of yours I'm going to give him the
surprise of his life.

Send me a line whenever any one comes in from F. R., and inclose
Mercedes's letter in yours.  Take care of her, Dick, and may the future
hold in store for you some of the sweetness I know now!

Faithfully yours, Thorne.


Dick reread the letter, then folded it and placed it under his pillow.

"Never cared for pretty girls, huh?" he soliloquized.  "George, I never
saw any till I struck Southern Arizona! Guess I'd better make up for
lost time."

While he was eating his supper, with appetite rapidly returning to
normal, Ladd and Jim came in, bowing their tall heads to enter the
door.  Their friendly advances were singularly welcome to Gale, but he
was still backward.  He allowed himself to show that he was glad to see
them, and he listened.  Jim Lash had heard from Belding the result of
the mauling given to Rojas by Dick.  And Jim talked about what a grand
thing that was.  Ladd had a good deal to say about Belding's horses.
It took no keen judge of human nature to see that horses constituted
Ladd's ruling passion.

"I've had wimmen go back on me, but never no hoss!" declared Ladd, and
manifestly that was a controlling truth with him.

"Shore it's a cinch Beldin' is agoin' to lose some of them hosses," he
said.  "You can search me if I don't think there'll be more doin' on
the border here than along the Rio Grande.  We're just the same as on
Greaser soil.  Mebbe we don't stand no such chance of bein' shot up as
we would across the line.  But who's goin' to give up his hosses
without a fight?  Half the time when Beldin's stock is out of the
alfalfa it's grazin' over the line.  He thinks he's careful about them
hosses, but he ain't."

"Look a-here, Laddy; you cain't believe all you hear," replied Jim,
seriously.  "I reckon we mightn't have any trouble."

"Back up, Jim.  Shore you're standin' on your bridle.  I ain't goin'
much on reports.  Remember that American we met in Casita, the
prospector who'd just gotten out of Sonora?  He had some story, he had.
Swore he'd killed seventeen Greasers breakin' through the rebel line
round the mine where he an' other Americans were corralled.  The next
day when I met him again, he was drunk, an' then he told me he'd shot
thirty Greasers.  The chances are he did kill some.  But reports are
exaggerated.  There are miners fightin' for life down in Sonora, you
can gamble on that.  An' the truth is bad enough.  Take Rojas's
harryin' of the Senorita, for instance.  Can you beat that?  Shore,
Jim, there's more doin' than the raidin' of a few hosses.  An' Forlorn
River is goin' to get hers!"

Another dawn found Gale so much recovered that he arose and looked
after himself, not, however, without considerable difficulty and rather
disheartening twinges of pain.

Some time during the morning he heard the girls in the patio and called
to ask if he might join them.  He received one response, a mellow, "Si,
Senor."  It was not as much as he wanted, but considering that it was
enough, he went out.  He had not as yet visited the patio, and surprise
and delight were in store for him.  He found himself lost in a
labyrinth of green and rose-bordered walks.  He strolled around,
discovering that the patio was a courtyard, open at an end; but he
failed to discover the young ladies.  So he called again.  The answer
came from the center of the square.  After stooping to get under shrubs
and wading through bushes he entered an open sandy circle, full of
magnificent and murderous cactus plants, strange to him.  On the other
side, in the shade of a beautiful tree, he found the girls. Mercedes
sitting in a hammock, Nell upon a blanket.

"What a beautiful tree!" he exclaimed.  "I never saw one like that.
What is it?"

"Palo verde," replied Nell.

"Senor, palo verde means 'green tree,'" added Mercedes.

This desert tree, which had struck Dick as so new and strange and
beautiful, was not striking on account of size, for it was small,
scarcely reaching higher than the roof; but rather because of its
exquisite color of green, trunk and branch alike, and owing to the odd
fact that it seemed not to possess leaves.  All the tree from ground to
tiny flat twigs was a soft polished green.  It bore no thorns.

Right then and there began Dick's education in desert growths; and he
felt that even if he had not had such charming teachers he would still
have been absorbed.  For the patio was full of desert wonders.  A
twisting-trunked tree with full foliage of small gray leaves Nell
called a mesquite.  Then Dick remembered the name, and now he saw where
the desert got its pale-gray color. A huge, lofty, fluted column of
green was a saguaro, or giant cactus.  Another oddshaped cactus,
resembling the legs of an inverted devil-fish, bore the name ocatillo.
Each branch rose high and symmetrical, furnished with sharp blades that
seemed to be at once leaves and thorns.  Yet another cactus interested
Gale, and it looked like a huge, low barrel covered with green-ribbed
cloth and long thorns.  This was the bisnaga, or barrel cactus.
According to Nell and Mercedes, this plant was a happy exception to its
desert neighbors, for it secreted water which had many times saved the
lives of men.  Last of the cacti to attract Gale, and the one to make
him shiver, was a low plant, consisting of stem and many rounded
protuberances of a frosty, steely white, and covered with long
murderous spikes. From this plant the desert got its frosty glitter.
It was as stiff, as unyielding as steel, and bore the name choya.

Dick's enthusiasm was contagious, and his earnest desire to learn was
flattering to his teachers.  When it came to assimilating Spanish,
however, he did not appear to be so apt a pupil.  He managed, after
many trials, to acquire "buenos dias" and "buenos tardes," and
"senorita" and "gracias," and a few other short terms. Dick was indeed
eager to get a little smattering of Spanish, and perhaps he was not
really quite so stupid as he pretended to be. It was delightful to be
taught by a beautiful Spaniard who was so gracious and intense and
magnetic of personality, and by a sweet American girl who moment by
moment forgot her shyness.  Gale wished to prolong the lessons.

So that was the beginning of many afternoons in which he learned desert
lore and Spanish verbs, and something else that he dared not name.

Nell Burton had never shown to Gale that daring side of her character
which had been so suggestively defined in Belding's terse description
and Ladd's encomiums, and in her own audacious speech and merry laugh
and flashing eye of that never-to-be-forgotten first meeting.  She
might have been an entirely different girl. But Gale remembered; and
when the ice had been somewhat broken between them, he was always
trying to surprise her into her real self. There were moments that
fairly made him tingle with expectation. Yet he saw little more than a
ghost of her vivacity, and never a gleam of that individuality which
Belding had called a devil. On the few occasions that Dick had been
left alone with her in the patio Nell had grown suddenly unresponsive
and restrained, or she had left him on some transparent pretext. On the
last occasion Mercedes returned to find Dick staring disconsolately at
the rose-bordered path, where Nell had evidently vanished.  The Spanish
girl was wonderful in her divination.

"Senor Dick!" she cried.

Dick looked at her, soberly nodded his head, and then he laughed.
Mercedes had seen through him in one swift glance.  Her white hand
touched his in wordless sympathy and thrilled him.  This Spanish girl
was all fire and passion and love.  She understood him, she was his
friend, she pledged him what he felt would be the most subtle and
powerful influence.

Little by little he learned details of Nell's varied life.  She had
lived in many places.  As a child she remembered moving from town to
town, of going to school among schoolmates whom she never had time to
know.  Lawrence, Kansas, where she studied for several years, was the
later exception to this changeful nature of her schooling.  Then she
moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, from there to Austin, Texas, and on to
Waco, where her mother met and married Belding.  They lived in New
Mexico awhile, in Tucson, Arizona, in Douglas, and finally had come to
lonely Forlorn River.

"Mother could never live in one place any length of time," said Nell.
"And since we've been in the Southwest she has never ceased trying to
find some trace of her father.  He was last heard of in Nogales
fourteen years ago.  She thinks grandfather was lost in the Sonora
Desert.... And every place we go is worse.  Oh, I love the desert.  But
I'd like to go back to Lawrence--or to see Chicago or New York--some of
the places Mr. Gale speaks of.... I remember the college at Lawrence,
though I was only twelve. I saw races--and once real football.  Since
then I've read magazines and papers about big football games, and I was
always fascinated .... Mr. Gale, of course, you've seen games?

"Yes, a few," replied Dick; and he laughed a little.  It was on his
lips then to tell her about some of the famous games in which he had
participated.  But he refrained from exploiting himself. There was
little, however, of the color and sound and cheer, of the violent
action and rush and battle incidental to a big college football game
that he did not succeed in making Mercedes and Nell feel just as if
they had been there.  They hung breathless and wide-eyed upon his words.

Some one else was present at the latter part of Dick's narrative. The
moment he became aware of Mrs. Belding's presence he remembered
fancying he had heard her call, and now he was certain she had done so.
Mercedes and Nell, however, had been and still were oblivious to
everything except Dick's recital.  He saw Mrs. Belding cast a strange,
intent glance upon Nell, then turn and go silently through the patio.
Dick concluded his talk, but the brilliant beginning was not sustained.

Dick was haunted by the strange expression he had caught on Mrs.
Belding's face, especially the look in her eyes.  It had been one of
repressed pain liberated in a flash of certainty.  The mother had seen
just as quickly as Mercedes how far he had gone on the road of love.
Perhaps she had seen more--even more than he dared hope.  The incident
roused Gale.  He could not understand Mrs. Belding, nor why that look
of hers, that seeming baffled, hopeless look of a woman who saw the
inevitable forces of life and could not thwart them, should cause him
perplexity and distress.  He wanted to go to her and tell her how he
felt about Nell, but fear of absolute destruction of his hopes held him
back.  He would wait. Nevertheless, an instinct that was perhaps akin
to self-preservation prompted him to want to let Nell know the state of
his mind. Words crowded his brain seeking utterance.  Who and what he
was, how he loved her, the work he expected to take up soon, his
longings, hopes, and plans--there was all this and more.  But something
checked him.  And the repression made him so thoughtful and quiet, even
melancholy, that he went outdoors to try to throw off the mood. The sun
was yet high, and a dazzling white light enveloped valleys and peaks.
He felt that the wonderful sunshine was the dominant feature of that
arid region.  It was like white gold.  It had burned its color in a
face he knew.  It was going to warm his blood and brown his skin.  A
hot, languid breeze, so dry that he felt his lips shrink with its
contact, came from the desert; and it seemed to smell of wide-open,
untainted places where sand blew and strange, pungent plants gave a
bitter-sweet tang to the air.

When he returned to the house, some hours later, his room had been put
in order.  In the middle of the white coverlet on his table lay a fresh
red rose.  Nell had dropped it there.  Dick picked it up, feeling a
throb in his breast.  It was a bud just beginning to open, to show
between its petals a dark-red, unfolding heart. How fragrant it was,
how exquisitely delicate, how beautiful its inner hue of red, deep and
dark, the crimson of life blood!

Had Nell left it there by accident or by intent?  Was it merely
kindness or a girl's subtlety?  Was it a message couched elusively, a
symbol, a hope in a half-blown desert rose?



VI

THE YAQUI

TOWARD evening of a lowering December day, some fifty miles west of
Forlorn River, a horseman rode along an old, dimly defined trail. From
time to time he halted to study the lay of the land ahead. It was bare,
somber, ridgy desert, covered with dun-colored greasewood and stunted
prickly pear.  Distant mountains hemmed in the valley, raising black
spurs above the round lomas and the square-walled mesas.

This lonely horseman bestrode a steed of magnificent build, perfectly
white except for a dark bar of color running down the noble head from
ears to nose.  Sweatcaked dust stained the long flanks.  The horse had
been running.  His mane and tail were laced and knotted to keep their
length out of reach of grasping cactus and brush.  Clumsy home-made
leather shields covered the front of his forelegs and ran up well to
his wide breast.  What otherwise would have been muscular symmetry of
limb was marred by many a scar and many a lump.  He was lean, gaunt,
worn, a huge machine of muscle and bone, beautiful only in head and
mane, a weight-carrier, a horse strong and fierce like the desert that
had bred him.

The rider fitted the horse as he fitted the saddle.  He was a young man
of exceedingly powerful physique, wide-shouldered, long-armed,
big-legged.  His lean face, where it was not red, blistered and
peeling, was the hue of bronze.  He had a dark eye, a falcon gaze,
roving and keen.  His jaw was prominent and set, mastiff-like; his lips
were stern.  It was youth with its softness not yet quite burned and
hardened away that kept the whole cast of his face from being ruthless.

This young man was Dick Gale, but not the listless traveler, nor the
lounging wanderer who, two months before, had by chance dropped into
Casita.  Friendship, chivalry, love--the deep-seated, unplumbed
emotions that had been stirred into being with all their incalculable
power for spiritual change, had rendered different the meaning of life.
In the moment almost of their realization the desert had claimed Gale,
and had drawn him into its crucible.  The desert had multiplied weeks
into years.  Heat, thirst, hunger, loneliness, toil, fear, ferocity,
pain--he knew them all.  He had felt them all--the white sun, with its
glazed, coalescing, lurid fire; the caked split lips and rasping,
dry-puffed tongue; the sickening ache in the pit of his stomach; the
insupportable silence, the empty space, the utter desolation, the
contempt of life; the weary ride, the long climb, the plod in sand, the
search, search, search for water; the sleepless night alone, the watch
and wait, the dread of ambush, the swift flight; the fierce pursuit of
men wild as Bedouins and as fleet, the willingness to deal sudden
death, the pain of poison thorn, the stinging tear of lead through
flesh; and that strange paradox of the burning desert, the cold at
night, the piercing icy wind, the dew that penetrated to the marrow,
the numbing desert cold of the dawn.

Beyond any dream of adventure he had ever had, beyond any wild story he
had ever read, had been his experience with those hard-riding rangers,
Ladd and Lash.  Then he had traveled alone the hundred miles of desert
between Forlorn River and the Sonoyta Oasis.  Ladd's prophecy of
trouble on the border had been mild compared to what had become the
actuality.  With rebel occupancy of the garrison at Casita, outlaws,
bandits, raiders in rioting bands had spread westward.  Like troops of
Arabs, magnificently mounted, they were here, there, everywhere along
the line; and if murder and worse were confined to the Mexican side,
pillage and raiding were perpetrated across the border.  Many a
dark-skinned raider bestrode one of Belding's fast horses, and indeed
all except his selected white thoroughbreds had been stolen.  So the
job of the rangers had become more than a patrolling of the boundary
line to keep Japanese and Chinese from being smuggled into the United
States.  Belding kept close at home to protect his family and to hold
his property. But the three rangers, in fulfilling their duty had
incurred risks on their own side of the line, had been outraged,
robbed, pursued, and injured on the other.  Some of the few waterholes
that had to be reached lay far across the border in Mexican territory.
Horses had to drink, men had to drink; and Ladd and Lash were not of
the stripe that forsook a task because of danger.  Slow to wrath at
first, as became men who had long lived peaceful lives, they had at
length revolted; and desert vultures could have told a gruesome story.
Made a comrade and ally of these bordermen, Dick Gale had leaped at the
desert action and strife with an intensity of heart and a rare physical
ability which accounted for the remarkable fact that he had not yet
fallen by the way.

On this December afternoon the three rangers, as often, were separated.
Lash was far to the westward of Sonoyta, somewhere along Camino del
Diablo, that terrible Devil's Road, where many desert wayfarers had
perished.  Ladd had long been overdue in a prearranged meeting with
Gale.  The fact that Ladd had not shown up miles west of the Papago
Well was significant.

The sun had hidden behind clouds all the latter part of that day, an
unusual occurrence for that region even in winter.  And now, as the
light waned suddenly, telling of the hidden sunset, a cold dry,
penetrating wind sprang up and blew in Gale's face.  Not at first, but
by imperceptible degrees it chilled him.  He untied his coat from the
back of the saddle and put it on.  A few cold drops of rain touched his
cheek.

He halted upon the edge of a low escarpment.  Below him the narrowing
valley showed bare, black ribs of rock, long, winding gray lines
leading down to a central floor where mesquite and cactus dotted the
barren landscape.  Moving objects, diminutive in size, gray and white
in color, arrested Gale's roving sight. They bobbed away for a while,
then stopped.  They were antelope, and they had seen his horse.  When
he rode on they started once more, keeping to the lowest level.  These
wary animals were often desert watchdogs for the ranger, they would
betray the proximity of horse or man.  With them trotting forward, he
made better time for some miles across the valley.  When he lost them,
caution once more slowed his advance.

The valley sloped up and narrowed, to head into an arroyo where grass
began to show gray between the clumps of mesquite.  Shadows formed
ahead in the hollows, along the walls of the arroyo, under the trees,
and they seemed to creep, to rise, to float into a veil cast by the
background of bold mountains, at last to claim the skyline.  Night was
not close at hand, but it was there in the east, lifting upward,
drooping downward, encroaching upon the west.

Gale dismounted to lead his horse, to go forward more slowly.  He had
ridden sixty miles since morning, and he was tired, and a not entirely
healed wound in his hip made one leg drag a little.  A mile up the
arroyo, near its head, lay the Papago Well.  The need of water for his
horse entailed a risk that otherwise he could have avoided.  The well
was on Mexican soil.  Gale distinguished a faint light flickering
through the thin, sharp foliage.  Campers were at the well, and,
whoever they were, no doubt they had prevented Ladd from meeting Gale.
Ladd had gone back to the next waterhole, or maybe he was hiding in an
arroyo to the eastward, awaiting developments.

Gale turned his horse, not without urge of iron arm and persuasive
speech, for the desert steed scented water, and plodded back to the
edge of the arroyo, where in a secluded circle of mesquite he halted.
The horse snorted his relief at the removal of the heavy, burdened
saddle and accoutrements, and sagging, bent his knees, lowered himself
with slow heave, and plunged down to roll in the sand.  Gale poured the
contents of his larger canteen into his hat and held it to the horse's
nose.

"Drink, Sol," he said.

It was but a drop for a thirsty horse.  However, Blanco Sol rubbed a
wet muzzle against Gale's hand in appreciation.  Gale loved the horse,
and was loved in return.  They had saved each other's lives, and had
spent long days and nights of desert solitude together. Sol had known
other masters, though none so kind as this new one; but it was certain
that Gale had never before known a horse.

The spot of secluded ground was covered with bunches of galleta grass
upon which Sol began to graze.  Gale made a long halter of his lariat
to keep the horse from wandering in search of water. Next Gale kicked
off the cumbersome chapparejos, with their flapping, tripping folds of
leather over his feet, and drawing a long rifle from its leather
sheath, he slipped away into the shadows.

The coyotes were howling, not here and there, but in concerted volume
at the head of the arroyo.  To Dick this was no more reassuring than
had been the flickering light of the campfire.  The wild desert dogs,
with their characteristic insolent curiosity, were baying men round a
campfire.  Gale proceeded slowly, halting every few steps, careful not
to brush against the stiff greasewood.  In the soft sand his steps made
no sound.  The twinkling light vanished occasionally, like a
Jack-o'lantern, and when it did show it seemed still a long way off.
Gale was not seeking trouble or inviting danger.  Water was the thing
that drove him.  He must see who these campers were, and then decide
how to give Blanco Sol a drink.

A rabbit rustled out of brush at Gale's feet and thumped away over the
sand.  The wind pattered among dry, broken stalks of dead ocatilla.
Every little sound brought Gale to a listening pause.  The gloom was
thickening fast into darkness.  It would be a night without starlight.
He moved forward up the pale, zigzag aisles between the mesquite.  He
lost the light for a while, but the coyotes' chorus told him he was
approaching the campfire.  Presently the light danced through the black
branches, and soon grew into a flame.  Stooping low, with bushy
mesquites between him and the fire, Gale advanced.  The coyotes were in
full cry.  Gale heard the tramping, stamping thumps of many hoofs.  The
sound worried him.  Foot by foot he advanced, and finally began to
crawl.  The wind favored his position, so that neither coyotes nor
horses could scent him.  The nearer he approached the head of the
arroyo, where the well was located, the thicker grew the desert
vegetation.  At length a dead palo verde, with huge black clumps of its
parasite mistletoe thick in the branches, marked a distance from the
well that Gale considered close enough.  Noiselessly he crawled here
and there until he secured a favorable position, and then rose to peep
from behind his covert.

He saw a bright fire, not a cooking-fire, for that would have been low
and red, but a crackling blaze of mesquite.  Three men were in sight,
all close to the burning sticks.  They were Mexicans and of the coarse
type of raiders, rebels, bandits that Gale expected to see.  One stood
up, his back to the fire; another sat with shoulders enveloped in a
blanket, and the third lounged in the sand, his feet almost in the
blaze.  They had cast off belts and weapons.  A glint of steel caught
Gale's eye.  Three short, shiny carbines leaned against a rock.  A
little to the left, within the circle of light, stood a square house
made of adobe bricks. Several untrimmed poles upheld a roof of brush,
which was partly fallen in.  This house was a Papago Indian habitation,
and a month before had been occupied by a family that had been murdered
or driven off by a roving band of outlaws.  A rude corral showed dimly
in the edge of firelight, and from a black mass within came the snort
and stamp and whinney of horses.

Gale took in the scene in one quick glance, then sank down at the foot
of the mesquite.  He had naturally expected to see more men. But the
situation was by no means new.  This was one, or part of one, of the
raider bands harrying the border.  They were stealing horses, or
driving a herd already stolen.  These bands were more numerous than the
waterholes of northern Sonora; they never camped long at one place;
like Arabs, they roamed over the desert all the way from Nogales to
Casita.  If Gale had gone peaceably up to this campfire there were a
hundred chances that the raiders would kill and rob him to one chance
that they might not.  If they recognized him as a ranger comrade of
Ladd and Lash, if they got a glimpse of Blanco Sol, then Gale would
have no chance.

These Mexicans had evidently been at the well some time.  Their horses
being in the corral meant that grazing had been done by day.  Gale
revolved questions in mind.  Had this trio of outlaws run across Ladd?
It was not likely, for in that event they might not have been so
comfortable and care-free in camp.  Were they waiting for more members
of their gang?  That was very probable. With Gale, however, the most
important consideration was how to get his horse to water.  Sol must
have a drink if it cost a fight. There was stern reason for Gale to
hurry eastward along the trail. He thought it best to go back to where
he had left his horse and not make any decisive move until daylight.

With the same noiseless care he had exercised in the advance, Gale
retreated until it was safe for him to rise and walk on down the
arroyo.  He found Blanco Sol contentedly grazing.  A heavy dew was
falling, and, as the grass was abundant, the horse did not show the
usual restlessness and distress after a dry and exhausting day. Gale
carried his saddle blankets and bags into the lee of a little
greasewood-covered mound, from around which the wind had cut the soil,
and here, in a wash, he risked building a small fire. By this time the
wind was piercingly cold.  Gale's hands were numb and he moved them to
and fro in the little blaze.  Then he made coffee in a cup, cooked some
slices of bacon on the end of a stick, and took a couple of hard
biscuits from a saddlebag.  Of these his meal consisted.  After that he
removed the halter from Blanco Sol, intending to leave him free to
graze for a while.

Then Gale returned to his little fire, replenished it with short sticks
of dead greasewood and mesquite, and, wrapping his blanket round his
shoulders he sat down to warm himself and to wait till it was time to
bring in the horse and tie him up.

The fire was inadequate and Gale was cold and wet with dew. Hunger and
thirst were with him.  His bones ached, and there was a dull,
deep-seated pain throbbing in his unhealed wound.  For days unshaven,
his beard seemed like a million pricking needles in his blistered skin.
He was so tired that once having settled himself, he did not move hand
or foot.  The night was dark, dismal, cloudy, windy, growing colder.  A
moan of wind in the mesquite was occasionally pierced by the high-keyed
yelp of a coyote.  There were lulls in which the silence seemed to be a
thing of stifling, encroaching substance--a thing that enveloped,
buried the desert.

Judged by the great average of ideals and conventional standards of
life, Dick Gale was a starved, lonely, suffering, miserable wretch.
But in his case the judgment would have hit only externals, would have
missed the vital inner truth.  For Gale was happy with a kind of
strange, wild glory in the privations, the pains, the perils, and the
silence and solitude to be endured on this desert land. In the past he
had not been of any use to himself or others; and he had never know
what it meant to be hungry, cold, tired, lonely.  He had never worked
for anything.  The needs of the day had been provided, and to-morrow
and the future looked the same. Danger, peril, toil--these had been
words read in books and papers.

In the present he used his hands, his senses, and his wits.  He had a
duty to a man who relied on his services.  He was a comrade, a friend,
a valuable ally to riding, fighting rangers.  He had spent endless
days, weeks that seemed years, alone with a horse, trailing over,
climbing over, hunting over a desert that was harsh and hostile by
nature, and perilous by the invasion of savage men.  That horse had
become human to Gale.  And with him Gale had learned to know the simple
needs of existence.  Like dead scales the superficialities, the
falsities, the habits that had once meant all of life dropped off,
useless things in this stern waste of rock and sand.

Gale's happiness, as far as it concerned the toil and strife, was
perhaps a grim and stoical one.  But love abided with him, and it had
engendered and fostered other undeveloped traits--romance and a feeling
for beauty, and a keen observation of nature.  He felt pain, but he was
never miserable.  He felt the solitude, but he was never lonely.

As he rode across the desert, even though keen eyes searched for the
moving black dots, the rising puffs of white dust that were warnings,
he saw Nell's face in every cloud.  The clean-cut mesas took on the
shape of her straight profile, with its strong chin and lips, its fine
nose and forehead.  There was always a glint of gold or touch of red or
graceful line or gleam of blue to remind him of her.  Then at night her
face shone warm and glowing, flushing and paling, in the campfire.

To-night, as usual, with a keen ear to the wind, Gale listened as one
on guard; yet he watched the changing phantom of a sweet face in the
embers, and as he watched he thought.  The desert developed and
multiplied thought.  A thousand sweet faces glowed in the pink and
white ashes of his campfire, the faces of other sweethearts or wives
that had gleamed for other men.  Gale was happy in his thought of Nell,
for Nell, for something, when he was alone this way in the wilderness,
told him she was near him, she thought of him, she loved him.  But
there were many men alone on that vast southwestern plateau, and when
they saw dream faces, surely for some it was a fleeting flash, a gleam
soon gone, like the hope and the name and the happiness that had been
and was now no more.  Often Gale thought of those hundreds of desert
travelers, prospectors, wanderers who had ventured down the Camino del
Diablo, never to be heard of again.  Belding had told him of that most
terrible of all desert trails--a trail of shifting sands.  Lash had
traversed it, and brought back stories of buried waterholes, of bones
bleaching white in the sun, of gold mines as lost as were the
prospectors who had sought them, of the merciless Yaqui and his hatred
for the Mexican.  Gale thought of this trail and the men who had camped
along it.  For many there had been one night, one campfire that had
been the last.  This idea seemed to creep in out of the darkness, the
loneliness, the silence, and to find a place in Gale's mind, so that it
had strange fascination for him. He knew now as he had never dreamed
before how men drifted into the desert, leaving behind graves, wrecked
homes, ruined lives, lost wives and sweethearts.  And for every
wanderer every campfire had a phantom face.  Gale measured the agony of
these men at their last campfire by the joy and promise he traced in
the ruddy heart of his own.

By and by Gale remembered what he was waiting for; and, getting up, he
took the halter and went out to find Blanco Sol.  It was pitch-dark
now, and Gale could not see a rod ahead.  He felt his way, and
presently as he rounded a mesquite he saw Sol's white shape outlined
against the blackness.  The horse jumped and wheeled, ready to run.  It
was doubtful if any one unknown to Sol could ever have caught him.
Gale's low call reassured him, and he went on grazing.  Gale haltered
him in the likeliest patch of grass and returned to his camp.  There he
lifted his saddle into a protected spot under a low wall of the mound,
and, laying one blanket on the sand, he covered himself with the other
and stretched himself for the night.

Here he was out of reach of the wind; but he heard its melancholy moan
in the mesquite.  There was no other sound.  The coyotes had ceased
their hungry cries.  Gale dropped to sleep, and slept soundly during
the first half of the night; and after that he seemed always to be
partially awake, aware of increasing cold and damp. The dark mantle
turned gray, and then daylight came quickly.  The morning was clear and
nipping cold.  He threw off the wet blanket and got up cramped and half
frozen.  A little brisk action was all that was necessary to warm his
blood and loosen his muscles, and then he was fresh, tingling, eager.
The sun rose in a golden blaze, and the descending valley took on
wondrous changing hues.  Then he fetched up Blanco Sol, saddled him,
and tied him to the thickest clump of mesquite.

"Sol, we'll have a drink pretty soon," he said, patting the splendid
neck.

Gale meant it.  He would not eat till he had watered his horse. Sol had
gone nearly forty-eight hours without a sufficient drink, and that was
long enough, even for a desert-bred beast.  No three raiders could keep
Gale away from that well.  Taking his rifle in hand, he faced up the
arroyo.  Rabbits were frisking in the short willows, and some were so
tame he could have kicked them.  Gale walked swiftly for a goodly part
of the distance, and then, when he saw blue smoke curling up above the
trees, he proceeded slowly, with alert eye and ear.  From the lay of
the land and position of trees seen by daylight, he found an easier and
safer course that the one he had taken in the dark.  And by careful
work he was enabled to get closer to the well, and somewhat above it.

The Mexicans were leisurely cooking their morning meal.  They had two
fires, one for warmth, the other to cook over.  Gale had an idea these
raiders were familiar to him.  It seemed all these border hawks
resembled one another--being mostly small of build, wiry, angular,
swarthy-faced, and black-haired, and they wore the oddly styled Mexican
clothes and sombreros.  A slow wrath stirred in Gale as he watched the
trio.  They showed not the slightest indication of breaking camp.  One
fellow, evidently the leader, packed a gun at his hip, the only weapon
in sight.  Gale noted this with speculative eyes.  The raiders had
slept inside the little adobe house, and had not yet brought out the
carbines. Next Gale swept his gaze to the corral, in which he saw more
than a dozen horses, some of them fine animals.  They were stamping and
whistling, fighting one another, and pawing the dirt.  This was
entirely natural behavior for desert horses penned in when they wanted
to get at water and grass.

But suddenly one of the blacks, a big, shaggy fellow, shot up his ears
and pointed his nose over the top of the fence.  He whistled. Other
horses looked in the same direction, and their ears went up, and they,
too, whistled.  Gale knew that other horses or men, very likely both,
were approaching.  But the Mexicans did not hear the alarm, or show any
interest if they did.  These mescal-drinking raiders were not scouts.
It was notorious how easily they could be surprised or ambushed.
Mostly they were ignorant, thick-skulled peons.  They were wonderful
horsemen, and could go long without food or water; but they had not
other accomplishments or attributes calculated to help them in desert
warfare.  They had poor sight, poor hearing, poor judgment, and when
excited they resembled crazed ants running wild.

Gale saw two Indians on burros come riding up the other side of the
knoll upon which the adobe house stood; and apparently they were not
aware of the presence of the Mexicans, for they came on up the path.
One Indian was a Papago.  The other, striking in appearance for other
reasons than that he seemed to be about to fall from the burro, Gale
took to be a Yaqui.  These travelers had absolutely nothing for an
outfit except a blanket and a half-empty bag.  They came over the knoll
and down the path toward the well, turned a corner of the house, and
completely surprised the raiders.

Gale heard a short, shrill cry, strangely high and wild, and this came
from one of the Indians.  It was answered by hoarse shouts. Then the
leader of the trio, the Mexican who packed a gun, pulled it and fired
point-blank.  He missed once--and again.  At the third shot the Papago
shrieked and tumbled off his burro to fall in a heap.  The other Indian
swayed, as if the taking away of the support lent by his comrade had
brought collapse, and with the fourth shot he, too, slipped to the
ground.

The reports had frightened the horses in the corral; and the vicious
black, crowding the rickety bars, broke them down.  He came plunging
out.  Two of the Mexicans ran for him, catching him by nose and mane,
and the third ran to block the gateway.

Then, with a splendid vaulting mount, the Mexican with the gun leaped
to the back of the horse.  He yelled and waved his gun, and urged the
black forward.  The manner of all three was savagely jocose.  They were
having sport.  The two on the ground began to dance and jabber.  The
mounted leader shot again, and then stuck like a leech upon the bare
back of the rearing black.  It was a vain show of horsemanship.  Then
this Mexican, by some strange grip, brought the horse down, plunging
almost upon the body of the Indian that had fallen last.

Gale stood aghast with his rifle clutched tight.  He could not divine
the intention of the raider, but suspected something brutal. The horse
answered to that cruel, guiding hand, yet he swerved and bucked. He
reared aloft, pawing the air, wildly snorting, then he plunged down
upon the prostrate Indian.  Even in the act the intelligent animal
tried to keep from striking the body with his hoofs.  But that was not
possible. A yell, hideous in its passion, signaled this feat of
horsemanship.

The Mexican made no move to trample the body of the Papago. He turned
the black to ride again over the other Indian.  That brought into
Gale's mind what he had heard of a Mexican's hate for a Yaqui.  It
recalled the barbarism of these savage peons, and the war of
extermination being waged upon the Yaquis.

Suddenly Gale was horrified to see the Yaqui writhe and raise a feeble
hand.  The action brought renewed and more savage cries from the
Mexicans.  The horse snorted in terror.

Gale could bear no more.  He took a quick shot at the rider.  He missed
the moving figure, but hit the horse.  There was a bound, a horrid
scream, a mighty plunge, then the horse went down, giving the Mexican a
stunning fall.  Both beast and man lay still.

Gale rushed from his cover to intercept the other raiders before they
could reach the house and their weapons.  One fellow yelled and ran
wildly in the opposite directi

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