So rapidly were they gaining that, when past the sand and they turned back westward, it was only a question of half an hour or so to come up with Prather and Nogales.  Nogales had been riding ahead; but now Prather, after gazing over his shoulder for some time at his pursuers, took the lead.  He was urging his horse as if he would avoid being overtaken.  Evidently Nogales did not share that desire, for he let Prather go on alone.  But Prather’s horse was too tired after its effort in the sand and he halted and waited until Nogales, at a slow walk, closed up the gap between them, when they proceeded at their old, weary gait.

As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side.  The absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was strangely unlike the average desert meeting.  Prather and Nogales did not look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near.  A neigh by P.D., a break into a trot by him and Wrath of God, and Firio was saying to Nogales: 

“You went right through the sand!”

“Si!” answered Pedro, with a grin.

Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack, nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack’s presence when Jack reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing.  Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins hanging loose, almost out of hand.  His horse was about spent, if not on the point of foundering.  Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might have touched it.  After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have preferred to retain.

Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent.  There was no sound except Jag Ear’s bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping with the slow progress of Prather’s beaten horse.  Looking at Prather’s hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them.  In the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided for bringing his faculties under control.

“How do you do?” he said at last, pleasantly.

Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his own course in the now unavoidable interview.  He looked around slowly, and he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of a keen glance.  And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were still as the sky.

“How do you do?” he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a point of steel home into a scabbard.  “How do you do, brother?” he added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any physical violence.