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