--these had been
words read in books and papers.

In the present he used his hands, his senses, and his wits. He had a
duty to a man who relied on his services. He was a comrade, a friend,
a valuable ally to riding, fighting rangers. He had spent endless
days, weeks that seemed years, alone with a horse, trailing over,
climbing over, hunting over a desert that was harsh and hostile by
nature, and perilous by the invasion of savage men. That horse had
become human to Gale. And with him Gale had learned to know the simple
needs of existence. Like dead scales the superficialities, the
falsities, the habits that had once meant all of life dropped off,
useless things in this stern waste of rock and sand.

Gale's happiness, as far as it concerned the toil and strife, was
perhaps a grim and stoical one. But love abided with him, and it had
engendered and fostered other undeveloped traits--romance and a feeling
for beauty, and a keen observation of nature. He felt pain, but he was
never miserable. He felt the solitude, but he was never lonely.

As he rode across the desert, even though keen eyes searched for the
moving black dots, the rising puffs of white dust that were warnings,
he saw Nell's face in every cloud. The clean-cut mesas took on the
shape of her straight profile, with its strong chin and lips, its fine
nose and forehead. There was always a glint of gold or touch of red or
graceful line or gleam of blue to remind him of her. Then at night her
face shone warm and glowing, flushing and paling, in the campfire.

To-night, as usual, with a keen ear to the wind, Gale listened as one
on guard; yet he watched the changing phantom of a sweet face in the
embers, and as he watched he thought. The desert developed and
multiplied thought. A thousand sweet faces glowed in the pink and
white ashes of his campfire, the faces of other sweethearts or wives
that had gleamed for other men. Gale was happy in his thought of Nell,
for Nell, for something, when he was alone this way in the wilderness,
told him she was near him, she thought of him, she loved him. But
there were many men alone on that vast southwestern plateau, and when
they saw dream faces, surely for some it was a fleeting flash, a gleam
soon gone, like the hope and the name and the happiness that had been
and was now no more. Often Gale thought of those hundreds of desert
travelers, prospectors, wanderers who had ventured down the Camino del
Diablo,