A cold, gray dawn was fleeing before a rosy sun when Yaqui halted the march at Papago Well.  The horses were taken to water, then led down the arroyo into the grass.  Here packs were slipped, saddles removed.  Mercedes was cold, lame, tired, but happy.  It warmed Gale’s blood to look at her.  The shadow of fear still lay in her eyes, but it was passing.  Hope and courage shone there, and affection for her ranger protectors and the Yaqui, and unutterable love for the cavalryman.  Jim Lash remarked how cleverly they had fooled the rebels.

“Shore they’ll be comin’ along,” replied Ladd.

They built a fire, cooked and ate.  The Yaqui spoke only one word:  “Sleep.”  Blankets were spread.  Mercedes dropped into a deep slumber, her head on Thorne’s shoulder.  Excitement kept Throne awake.  The two rangers dozed beside the fire.  Gale shared the Yaqui’s watch.  The sun began to climb and the icy edge of dawn to wear away.  Rabbits bobbed their cotton tails under the mesquite.  Gale climbed a rocky wall above the arroyo bank, and there, with command over the miles of the back-trail, he watched.

It was a sweeping, rolling, wrinkled, and streaked range of desert that he saw, ruddy in the morning sunlight, with patches of cactus and mesquite rough-etched in shimmering gloom.  No Name Mountains split the eastern sky, towering high, gloomy, grand, with purple veils upon their slopes.  They were forty miles away and looked five.  Gale thought of the girl who was there under their shadow.

Yaqui kept the horses bunched, and he led them from one little park of galleta grass to another.  At the end of three hours he took them to water.  Upon his return Gale clambered down from his outlook, the rangers grew active.  Mercedes was awakened; and soon the party faced westward, their long shadows moving before them.  Yaqui led with Blanco Diablo in a long, easy lope.  The arroyo washed itself out into flat desert, and the greens began to shade into gray, and then the gray into red.  Only sparse cactus and weathered ledges dotted the great low roll of a rising escarpment.  Yaqui suited the gait of his horse to the lay of the land, and his followers accepted his pace.  There were canter and trot, and swift walk and slow climb, and long swing—­miles up and down and forward.  The sun soared hot.  The heated air lifted, and incoming currents from the west swept low and hard over the barren earth.  In the distance, all around the horizon, accumulations of dust seemed like ranging, mushrooming yellow clouds.

Yaqui was the only one of the fugitives who never looked back.  Mercedes did it the most.  Gale felt what compelled her, he could not resist it himself.  But it was a vain search.  For a thousand puffs of white and yellow dust rose from that backward sweep of desert, and any one of them might have been blown from under horses’ hoofs.  Gale had a conviction that when Yaqui gazed back