iving, wonderful proof that spirit,
mind, and heart were free--free to soar in scorn of the colossal
barrenness and silence and space of that terrible hedging prison of
lava. They were young; they loved; they were together; and the oasis
was almost a paradise. Gale believe he helped himself by watching them.
Imagination had never pictured real happiness to him. Thorne and
Mercedes had forgotten the outside world. If they had been existing on
the burned-out desolate moon they could hardly have been in a harsher,
grimmer, lonelier spot than this red-walled arroyo. But it might have
been a statelier Eden than that of the primitive day.

Mercedes grew thinner, until she was a slender shadow of her former
self. She became hard, brown as the rangers, lithe and quick as a
panther. She seemed to live on water and the air--perhaps, indeed, on
love. For of the scant fare, the best of which was continually urged
upon her, she partook but little. She reminded Gale of a wild brown
creature, free as the wind on the lava slopes. Yet, despite the great
change, her beauty remained undiminished. Her eyes, seeming so much
larger now in her small face, were great black, starry gulfs. She was
the life of that camp. Her smiles, her rapid speech, her low laughter,
her quick movements, her playful moods with the rangers, the dark and
passionate glance, which rested so often on her lover, the whispers in
the dusk as hand in hand they paced the campfire beat--these helped
Gale to retain his loosening hold on reality, to resist the lure of a
strange beckoning life where a man stood free in the golden open, where
emotion was not, nor trouble, nor sickness, nor anything but the
savage's rest and sleep and action and dream.

Although the Yaqui was as his shadow, Gale reached a point when he
seemed to wander alone at twilight, in the night, at dawn. Far down
the arroyo, in the deepening red twilight, when the heat rolled away on
slow-dying wind, Blanco Sol raised his splendid head and whistled for
his master. Gale reproached himself for neglect of the noble horse.
Blanco Sol was always the same. He loved four things--his master, a
long drink of cool water, to graze at will, and to run. Time and
place, Gale thought, meant little to Sol if he could have those four
things. Gale put his arm over the great arched neck and laid his cheek
against the long white mane, and then even as he stood there forgot the
horse. What was the dull, red