nd
which Ladd had gone. The firing had become desultory, and the light
carbine shots outnumbered the sharp rifle shots five to one. Gale made
a note of the fact that for some little time he had not heard the
unmistakable report of Jim Lash's automatic. Then ensued a long
interval in which the desert silence seemed to recover its grip. The
.405 ripped it asunder--spang--spang--spang. Gale fancied he heard
yells. There were a few pattering shots still farther down the trail.
Gale had an uneasy conviction that Rojas and some of his band might go
straight to the waterhole. It would be hard to dislodge even a few men
from that retreat.

There seemed a lull in the battle. Gale ventured to stand high, and
screened behind choyas, he swept the three-quarter circle of lava with
his glass. In the distance he saw horses, but no riders. Below him,
down the slope along the crater rim and the trail, the lava was bare of
all except tufts of choya. Gale gathered assurance. It looked as if
the day was favoring his side. Then Thorne, coming partly to
consciousness, engaged Gale's care. The cavalryman stirred and moaned,
called for water, and then for Mercedes. Gale held him back with a
strong hand, and presently he was once more quiet.

For the first time in hours, as it seemed, Gale took note of the
physical aspect of his surroundings. He began to look upon them
without keen gaze strained for crouching form, or bobbing head, or
spouting carbine. Either Gale's sense of color and proportion had
become deranged during the fight, or the encompassing air and the
desert had changed. Even the sun had changed. It seemed lowering,
oval in shape, magenta in hue, and it had a surface that gleamed like
oil on water. Its red rays shone through red haze. Distances that had
formerly been clearly outlined were now dim, obscured. The yawning
chasm was not the same. It circled wider, redder, deeper. It was a
weird, ghastly mouth of hell. Gale stood fascinated, unable to tell
how much he saw was real, how much exaggeration of overwrought
emotions. There was no beauty here, but an unparalleled grandeur, a
sublime scene of devastation and desolation which might have had its
counterpart upon the burned-out moon. The mood that gripped Gale now
added to its somber portent an unshakable foreboding of calamity.

He wrestled with the spell as if it were a physical foe. Reason and
intelligence had their voices in his mind; but the moment w