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Updated: May 5, 2025
Seated apart from the others, he had seen the affair from a distance, as it were, and now stepped to the bed to lay his hand on Gale's shoulder. "Brace up, John! Sacré bleu! Your face look lak' flour. Come outside an' get li'l' air." "It will do you good, father," urged Necia. The trader silently rose, picked up his hat, and shambled out into the night behind the Frenchman.
A shot from in front, a rip of bullet through the choya, a spat of something hitting Ladd's face, a steel missle hissing onward these inseparably blended sounds were all registered by Gale's sensitive ear. With a curse Ladd tumbled down into the hole. His face showed a great gray blotch, and starting blood. Gale felt a sickening assurance of desperate injury to the ranger.
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.
Sinister, evil, brooding, waiting, seemed that yawning abyss. Ladd staggered along the trail, at times he crawled. The Yaqui gained; he might have had wings; he leaped from jagged crust to jagged crust; his sure-footedness was a wonderful thing. But for Gale the marvel of that endless period of watching was the purpose of the bandit Rojas. He had now no weapon. Gale's glass made this fact plain.
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.
Those that struck the lava hissed away into the crater; those that came biting through the choyas made a sound which resembled a sharp ripping of silk. Bits of cactus stung Gale's face, and he dreaded the flying thorns more than he did the flying bullets. "Hold on, boys," called Ladd, as he crouched down to reload his rifle. "Save your shells.
Evidently that moment was one of boots, guns, and saddles for the raiders. Lowering the glass, Gale saw that Blanco Sol had started forward again. His gait was now a canter, and he had covered another quarter of a mile before horses and raiders appeared upon the outskirts of the mesquites. Then Blanco Sol stopped. His shrill, ringing whistle came distinctly to Gale's ears.
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.
"I bet you that lightship pitched up and down somethin' terrible, didn't it, Zach?" she asked. Zacheus looked at her solemnly. "Pitched?" he repeated, after a moment's contemplation. "No, no, she didn't pitch none." "Didn't? Didn't pitch up and down in such a gale's that? And with waves a hundred foot high? What kind of talk's that, Zach Bloomer!
The very corners whence came the winds seemed pierced by Gale's eyes. Yaqui spied a flock of sheep far under the curved broken rim of the main crater. Then began the stalk. Gale had taught the Yaqui something that speed might win as well as patient cunning. Keeping out of sight, Gale ran over the spike-crusted lava, leaving the Indian far behind.
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