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along the trail, and, presently, on the pale sand under a cactus, there lay a
blanketed form, prone, outstretched, a carbine clutched in one hand, a
cigarette, still burning, in the other.
The cavalcade of white horses passed within five hundred yards of campfires,
around which dark forms moved in plain sight. Soft pads in sand, faint
metallic tickings of steel on thorns, low, regular breathing of horses--these
were all the sounds the fugitives made, and they could not have been heard at
one-fifth the distance.
The lights disappeared from time to time, grew dimmer, more flickering, and at
last they vanished altogether. Belding's fleet and tireless steeds were out
in front; the desert opened ahead wide, dark, vast. Rojas and his rebels were
behind, eating, drinking, careless.
The somber shadow lifted from Gale's heart. He held now an unquenchable
faith in the Yaqui. Belding would be listening back there along the river.
He would know of the escape. He would tell Nell, and then hide her safely.
As Gale accepted a strange and fatalistic foreshadowing of toil, blood, and
agony in this desert journey, so he believed in Mercedes's ultimate freedom
and happiness, and his own return to the girl who had grown dearer than life.
A cold, gray dawn was fleeing before a rosy sun when Yaqui halted the march at
Papago Well. The horses were taken to water, then led down the arroyo into
the grass. Here packs were slipped, saddles removed. Mercedes was cold,
lame, tired, but happy. It warmed Gale's blood to look at her. The shadow of
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fear still lay in her eyes, but it was passing. Hope and courage shone there,
and affection for her ranger protectors and the Yaqui, and unutterable love
for the cavalryman. Jim Lash remarked how cleverly they had fooled the
rebels.
"Shore they'll be comin' along," replied Ladd.
They built a fire, cooked and ate. The Yaqui spoke only one word: "Sleep."
Blankets were spread. Mercedes dropped into a deep slumber, her head on
Thorne's shoulder. Excitement kept
Throne awake. The two rangers dozed beside the fire. Gale shared the Yaqui's
watch. The sun began to climb and the icy edge of dawn to wear away. Rabbits
bobbed their cotton tails under the mesquite. Gale climbed a rocky wall above
the arroyo bank, and there, with command over the miles of the back-trail, he
watched.
It was a sweeping, rolling, wrinkled, and streaked range of desert that he
saw, ruddy in the morning sunlight, with patches of cactus and mesquite
rough-etched in shimmering gloom. No Name Mountains split the eastern sky,
towering high, gloomy, grand, with purple veils upon their slopes. They were
forty miles away and looked five.
Gale thought of the girl who was there under their shadow.
Yaqui kept the horses bunched, and he led them from one little park of galleta
grass to another. At the end of three hours he took them to water. Upon his
return Gale clambered down from his outlook, the rangers grew active.
Mercedes was awakened; and soon the party faced westward, their long shadows
moving before them.
Yaqui led with Blanco Diablo in a long, easy lope. The arroyo washed itself
out into flat desert, and the greens began to shade
into gray, and then the gray into red. Only sparse cactus and weathered
ledges dotted the great low roll of a rising escarpment.
Yaqui suited the gait of his horse to the lay of the land, and his followers
accepted his pace. There were canter and trot, and swift walk and slow climb,
and long swing--miles up and down and forward. The sun soared hot. The
heated air lifted, and incoming currents from the west swept low and hard over
the barren earth. In the distance, all around the horizon, accumulations of
dust seemed like ranging, mushrooming yellow clouds.
Yaqui was the only one of the fugitives who never looked back.
Mercedes did it the most. Gale felt what compelled her, he could not resist
it himself. But it was a vain search. For a thousand puffs of white and
yellow dust rose from that backward sweep of desert, and any one of them might
have been blown from under horses' hoofs. Gale had a conviction that when
Yaqui gazed back toward the well and the shining plain beyond, there would be
reason for it. But when the sun lost its heat and the wind died down Yaqui
took long and careful surveys westward from the high points on the trail.
Sunset was not far off, and there in a bare, spotted valley lay Coyote Tanks,
the only waterhole between Papago Well and the Sonoyta Oasis. Gale used his
glass, told Yaqui there was no smoke, no sign of life; still the Indian fixed
his falcon eyes on distant spots looked long. It was as if his vision could
not detect what reason or cunning or intuition, perhaps an instinct, told him
was there. Presently in a sheltered spot, where blown sand had not
obliterated the trail, Yaqui found the tracks of horses. The curve of the
iron shoes pointed westward.
An intersecting trail from the north came in here. Gale thought the tracks
either one or two days old. Ladd said they were one day.
The Indian shook his head.
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No farther advance was undertaken. The Yaqui headed south and traveled
slowly, climbing to the brow of a bold height of weathered mesa. There he sat
his horse and waited. No one questioned him.
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