d, with parching
throats to allay and hunger that was never satisfied. A little action
and a cooling of the air revived them, and when night set in they were
comfortable round the campfire.

As Ladd had said, one of their greatest problems was the passing of
time. The nights were interminably long, but they had to be passed in
work or play or dream--anything except sleep. That was Ladd's most
inflexible command. He gave no reason. But not improbably the ranger
thought that the terrific heat of the day spend in slumber lessened a
wear and strain, if not a real danger of madness.

Accordingly, at first the occupations of this little group were many
and various. They worked if they had something to do, or could invent
a pretext. They told and retold stories until all were wearisome.
They sang songs. Mercedes taught Spanish. They played every game they
knew. They invented others that were so trivial children would
scarcely have been interested, and these they played seriously. In a
word, with intelligence and passion, with all that was civilized and
human, they fought the ever-infringing loneliness, the savage solitude
of their environment.

But they had only finite minds. It was not in reason to expect a
complete victory against this mighty Nature, this bounding horizon of
death and desolation and decay. Gradually they fell back upon fewer
and fewer occupations, until the time came when the silence was hard to
break.

Gale believed himself the keenest of the party, the one who thought
most, and he watched the effect of the desert upon his companions. He
imagined that he saw Ladd grow old sitting round the campfire. Certain
it was that the ranger's gray hair had turned white. What had been at
times hard and cold and grim about him had strangely vanished in sweet
temper and a vacant-mindedness that held him longer as the days passed.
For hours, it seemed, Ladd would bend over his checkerboard and never
make a move. It mattered not now whether or not he had a partner. He
was always glad of being spoken to, as if he were called back from
vague region of mind. Jim Lash, the calmest, coolest, most nonchalant,
best-humored Westerner Gale had ever met, had by slow degrees lost that
cheerful character which would have been of such infinite good to his
companions, and always he sat brooding, silently brooding. Jim had no
ties, few memories, and the desert was claiming him.

Thorne and Mercedes, however, were l