Please tell her--an' hurry."

Dick took the caps, 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