stant. It seemed to brighten. Then he saw a woman who
resembled a girl he had seemed to know long ago. She was white-faced,
golden-haired, and her lips were sweet, and her eyes were turning
black. Nell! He had forgotten her. Over him flooded a torrent of
memory. There was tragic woe in this sweet face. Nell was holding out
her arms--she was crying aloud to him across the sand and the cactus
and the lava. She was in trouble, and he had been forgetting.

That night he climbed the lava to the topmost cone, and never slipped
on a ragged crust nor touched a choya thorn. A voice called to him.
He saw Nell's eyes in the stars, in the velvet blue of sky, in the
blackness of the engulfing shadows. She was with him, a slender shape,
a spirit, keeping step with him, and memory was strong, sweet, beating,
beautiful. Far down in the west, faintly golden with light of the
sinking moon, he saw a cloud that resembled her face. A cloud on the
desert horizon! He gazed and gazed. Was that a spirit face like the
one by his side? No--he did not dream.

In the hot, sultry morning Yaqui appeared at camp, after long hours of
absence, and he pointed with a long, dark arm toward the west. A bank
of clouds was rising above the mountain barrier.

"Rain!" he cried; and his sonorous voice rolled down the arroyo.

Those who heard him were as shipwrecked mariners at sight of a distant
sail.

Dick Gale, silent, grateful to the depths of his soul, stood with arm
over Blanco Sol and watched the transforming west, where clouds of
wonderous size and hue piled over one another, rushing, darkening,
spreading, sweeping upward toward that white and glowing sun.

When they reached the zenith and swept round to blot out the blazing
orb, the earth took on a dark, lowering aspect. The red of sand and
lava changed to steely gray. Vast shadows, like ripples on water,
sheeted in from the gulf with a low, strange moan. Yet the silence was
like death. The desert was awaiting a strange and hated
visitation--storm! If all the endless torrid days, the endless mystic
nights had seemed unreal to Gale, what, then, seemed this stupendous
spectacle?

"Oh! I felt a drop of rain on my face!" cried Mercedes; and whispering
the name of a saint, she kissed her husband.

The white-haired Ladd, gaunt, old, bent, looked up at the maelstrom of
clouds, and he said, softly, "Shore we'll get in the hosses, an' pack
light, an' hit the trail, an' make night mar