s he'll save us; he'll take us
all back--he knows!"

The Indian turned away to his tasks, and the silence that held the
little group was finally broken by Ladd.

"Shore I said so. Now all we've got to do is use sense. Friends, I'm
the commissary department of this outfit, an' what I say goes. You all
won't eat except when I tell you. Mebbe it'll not be so hard to keep
our health. Starved beggars don't get sick. But there's the heat
comin', an' we can all go loco, you know. To pass the time! Lord,
that's our problem. Now if you all only had a hankerin' for checkers.
Shore I'll make a board an' make you play. Thorne, you're the
luckiest. You've got your girl, an' this can be a honeymoon. Now with
a few tools an' little material see what a grand house you can build
for your wife. Dick, you're lucky, too. You like to hunt, an' up
there you'll find the finest bighorn huntin' in the West. Take Yaqui
and the .405. We need the meat, but while you're gettin' it have your
sport. The same chance will never come again. I wish we all was able
to go. But crippled men can't climb the lava. Shore you'll see some
country from the peaks. There's no wilder place on earth, except the
poles. An' when you're older, you an' Nell, with a couple of fine boys,
think what it'll be to tell them about bein' lost in the lava, an'
huntin' sheep with a Yaqui. Shore I've hit it. You can take yours out
in huntin' an' thinkin'. Now if I had a girl like Nell I'd never go
crazy. That's your game, Dick. Hunt, an' think of Nell, an' how
you'll tell those fine boys about it all, an' about the old cowman you
knowed, Laddy, who'll by then be long past the divide. Rustle now,
son. Get some enthusiasm. For shore you'll need it for yourself an'
us."

Gale climbed the lava slope, away round to the right of the arroyo,
along an old trail that Yaqui said the Papagos had made before his own
people had hunted there. Part way it led through spiked, crested,
upheaved lava that would have been almost impassable even without its
silver coating of choya cactus. There were benches and ledges and
ridges bare and glistening in the sun. From the crests of these
Yaqui's searching falcon gaze roved near and far for signs of sheep,
and Gale used his glass on the reaches of lava that slanted steeply
upward to the corrugated peaks, and down over endless heave and roll
and red-waved slopes. The heat smoked up from the lava, and this, with
the red c