And like
a shadow the faithful Yaqui tried ever to keep at his heels.

One morning the rising sun greeted him as he surmounted the higher cone
of the volcano. He saw the vastness of the east aglow with a glazed
rosy whiteness, like the changing hue of an ember. At this height
there was a sweeping wind, still cool. The western slopes of lava lay
dark, and all that world of sand and gulf and mountain barrier beyond
was shrouded in the mystic cloud of distance. Gale had assimilated
much of the loneliness and the sense of ownership and the love of lofty
heights that might well belong to the great condor of the peak. Like
this wide-winged bird, he had an unparalleled range of vision. The
very corners whence came the winds seemed pierced by Gale's eyes.

Yaqui spied a flock of sheep far under the curved broken rim of the
main crater. Then began the stalk. Gale had taught the Yaqui
something--that speed might win as well as patient cunning. Keeping
out of sight, Gale ran over the spike-crusted lava, leaving the Indian
far behind. His feet were magnets, attracting supporting holds and he
passed over them too fast to fall. The wind, the keen air of the
heights, the red lava, the boundless surrounding blue, all seemed to
have something to do with his wildness. Then, hiding, slipping,
creeping, crawling, he closed in upon his quarry until the long rifle
grew like stone in his grip, and the whipping "spang" ripped the
silence, and the strange echo boomed deep in the crater, and rolled
around, as if in hollow mockery at the hopelessness of escape.

Gale's exultant yell was given as much to free himself of some bursting
joy of action as it was to call the slower Yaqui. Then he liked the
strange echoes. It was a maddening whirl of sound that bored deeper
and deeper along the whorled and caverned walls of the crater. It was
as if these aged walls resented the violating of their silent sanctity.
Gale felt himself a man, a thing alive, something superior to all this
savage, dead, upflung world of iron, a master even of all this grandeur
and sublimity because he had a soul.

He waited beside his quarry, and breathed deep, and swept the long
slopes with searching eyes of habit.

When Yaqui came up they set about the hardest task of all, to pack the
best of that heavy sheep down miles of steep, ragged, choya-covered
lava. But even in this Gale rejoiced. The heat was nothing, the
millions of little pits which could hol