," concluded Yaqui, and now as never before he spoke as
one with authority. "If no rain--" Silently he lifted his hand.

XVI

MOUNTAIN SHEEP

WHAT Gale might have thought an appalling situation, if considered from
a safe and comfortable home away from the desert, became, now that he
was shut in by the red-ribbed lava walls and great dry wastes, a matter
calmly accepted as inevitable. So he imagined it was accepted by the
others. Not even Mercedes uttered a regret. No word was spoken of
home. If there was thought of loved one, it was locked deep in their
minds. In Mercedes there was no change in womanly quality, perhaps
because all she had to love was there in the desert with her.

Gale had often pondered over this singular change in character. He had
trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in the
desert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidious
primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all,
merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the need now of
redoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in drifting. Not
only was it easy to forget, it was hard to remember. His idea was that
a man laboring under a great wrong, a great crime, a great passion
might find the lonely desert a fitting place for either remembrance or
oblivion, according to the nature of his soul. But an ordinary,
healthy, reasonably happy mortal who loved the open with its blaze of
sun and sweep of wind would have a task to keep from going backward to
the natural man as he was before civilization.

By tacit agreement Ladd again became the leader of the party. Ladd was
a man who would have taken all the responsibility whether or not it was
given him. In moments of hazard, of uncertainty, Lash and Gale, even
Belding, unconsciously looked to the ranger. He had that kind of power.

The first thing Ladd asked was to have the store of food that remained
spread out upon a tarpaulin. Assuredly, it was a slender enough
supply. The ranger stood for long moments gazing down at it. He was
groping among past experiences, calling back from his years of life on
range and desert that which might be valuable for the present issue.
It was impossible to read the gravity of Ladd's face, for he still
looked like a dead man, but the slow shake of his head told Gale much.
There was a grain of hope, however, in the significance with which he
touched the bags of salt and said, "Shore i