Gale thrilled with the meaning of it all—­the night—­the silence —­the flight—­and the wonderful Indian stealing with the slow inevitableness of doom upon another sentinel.  An hour passed and Gale seemed to have become deadened to all sense of hearing.  There were no more sounds in the world.  The desert was as silent as it was black.  Yet again came that strange change in the tensity of Gale’s ear-strain, a check, a break, a vibration—­and this time the sound did not go nameless.  It might have been moan of wind or wail of far-distant wolf, but Gale imagined it was the strangling death-cry of another guard, or that strange, involuntary utterance of the Yaqui.  Blanco Sol trembled in all his great frame, and then Gale was certain the sound was not imagination.

That certainty, once for all, fixed in Gale’s mind the mood of his flight.  The Yaqui dominated the horses and the rangers.  Thorne and Mercedes were as persons under a spell.  The Indian’s strange silence, the feeling of mystery and power he seemed to create, all that was incomprehensible about him were emphasized in the light of his slow, sure, and ruthless action.  If he dominated the others, surely he did more for Gale—­colored his thoughts—­presage the wild and terrible future of that flight.  If Rojas embodied all the hatred and passion of the peon—­scourged slave for a thousand years—­then Yaqui embodied all the darkness, the cruelty, the white, sun-heated blood, the ferocity, the tragedy of the desert.

Suddenly the Indian stalked out of the gloom.  He mounted Diablo and headed across the river.  Once more the line of moving white shadows stretched out.  The soft sand gave forth no sound at all.  The glimmering campfires sank behind the western bank.  Yaqui led the way into the willows, and there was faint swishing of leaves; then into the mesquite, and there was faint rustling of branches.  The glimmering lights appeared again, and grotesque forms of saguaros loomed darkly.  Gale peered sharply along the trail, and, presently, on the pale sand under a cactus, there lay a blanketed form, prone, outstretched, a carbine clutched in one hand, a cigarette, still burning, in the other.

The cavalcade of white horses passed within five hundred yards of campfires, around which dark forms moved in plain sight.  Soft pads in sand, faint metallic tickings of steel on thorns, low, regular breathing of horses—­these were all the sounds the fugitives made, and they could not have been heard at one-fifth the distance.  The lights disappeared from time to time, grew dimmer, more flickering, and at last they vanished altogether.  Belding’s fleet and tireless steeds were out in front; the desert opened ahead wide, dark, vast.  Rojas and his rebels were behind, eating, drinking, careless.  The somber shadow lifted from Gale’s heart.  He held now an unquenchable faith in the Yaqui.  Belding would be listening back there along the river.  He would know of the escape.  He would tell Nell, and then hide her safely.  As Gale accepted a strange and fatalistic foreshadowing of toil, blood, and agony in this desert journey, so he believed in Mercedes’s ultimate freedom and happiness, and his own return to the girl who had grown dearer than life.