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 nor