a break into a trot by him and Wrath of God, and Firio was saying
to Nogales:

"You went right through the sand!"

"_Si_!" answered Pedro, with a grin.

Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack,
nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack
reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing.
Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins
hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on
the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the
peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might
have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish
removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have
preferred to retain.

Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was
no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping
with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's
hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In
the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would
look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the
silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided
for bringing his faculties under control.

"How do you do?" he said at last, pleasantly.

Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his
own course in the now unavoidable interview. He looked around slowly, and
he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the
elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of
a keen glance. And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were
still as the sky.

"How do you do?" he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a
point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he
added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any
physical violence.

"Brother! Brother! Yes!" repeated Jack, with dry lips.

This shaping of conviction into fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the
desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and
gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands
gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain
of nervous tension had come to an end with a crack. Prather's smile took
a turn of deeper satisf