d
face. It must have been a moment of intense feeling for the Spanish
girl. She owed it to him that she had life and love and happiness. She
held out those speaking slender hands. But Yaqui did not touch them.
Turning away, he mounted the broncho and rode down the trail toward the
river.

"He's going home," said Belding.

"Home!" whispered Ladd; and Dick knew the ranger felt the resurging
tide of memory. Home--across the cactus and lava, through solemn
lonely days, the silent, lonely nights, into the vast and red-hazed
world of desolation.

"Thorne, Mercedes, Nell, let's climb the foothill yonder and watch him
out of sight," said Dick.

They climbed while the others returned to the house. When they reached
the summit of the hill Yaqui was riding up the far bank of the river.

"He will turn to look--to wave good-by?" asked Nell.

"Dear he is an Indian," replied Gale.

From that height they watched him ride through the mesquites, up over
the river bank to enter the cactus. His mount showed dark against the
green and white, and for a long time he was plainly in sight. The sun
hung red in a golden sky. The last the watchers saw of Yaqui was when
he rode across a ridge and stood silhouetted against the gold of desert
sky--a wild, lonely, beautiful picture. Then he was gone.

Strangely it came to Gale then that he was glad. Yaqui had returned to
his own--the great spaces, the desolation, the solitude--to the trails
he had trodden when a child, trails haunted now by ghosts of his
people, and ever by his gods. Gale realized that in the Yaqui he had
known the spirit of the desert, that this spirit had claimed all which
was wild and primitive in him.

Tears glistened in Mercedes's magnificent black eyes, and Thorne kissed
them away--kissed the fire back to them and the flame to her cheeks.

That action recalled Gale's earlier mood, the joy of the present, and
he turned to Nell's sweet face. The desert was there, wonderful,
constructive, ennobling, beautiful, terrible, but it was not for him as
it was for the Indian. In the light of Nell's tremulous returning
smile that strange, deep, clutching shadow faded, lost its hold
forever; and he leaned close to her, whispering: "Lluvia
d'oro"--"Shower of Gold."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Desert Gold, by Zane Grey

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESERT GOLD ***

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