Thirty miles of easy stages brought the fugitives to another waterhole, a little round pocket under the heaved-up edge of lava.  There was spare, short, bleached grass for the horses, but no wood for a fire.  This night there was question and reply, conjecture, doubt, opinion, and conviction expressed by the men of the party.  But the Indian, who alone could have told where they were, where they were going, what chance they had to escape, maintained his stoical silence.  Gale took the early watch, Ladd the midnight one, and Lash that of the morning.

The day broke rosy, glorious, cold as ice.  Action was necessary to make useful benumbed hands and feet.  Mercedes was fed while yet wrapped in blankets.  Then, while the packs were being put on and horses saddled, she walked up and down, slapping her hands, warming her ears.  The rose color of the dawn was in her cheeks, and the wonderful clearness of desert light in her eyes.  Thorne’s eyes sought her constantly.  The rangers watched her.  The Yaqui bent his glance upon her only seldom; but when he did look it seemed that his strange, fixed, and inscrutable face was about to break into a smile.  Yet that never happened.  Gale himself was surprised to find how often his own glance found the slender, dark, beautiful Spaniard.  Was this because of her beauty? he wondered.  He thought not altogether.  Mercedes was a woman.  She represented something in life that men of all races for thousands of years had loved to see and own, to revere and debase, to fight and die for.

It was a significant index to the day’s travel that Yaqui should keep a blanket from the pack and tear it into strips to bind the legs of the horses.  It meant the dreaded choya and the knife-edged lava.  That Yaqui did not mount Diablo was still more significant.  Mercedes must ride; but the others must walk.

The Indian led off into one of the gray notches between the tumbled streams of lava.  These streams were about thirty feet high, a rotting mass of splintered lava, rougher than any other kind of roughness in the world.  At the apex of the notch, where two streams met, a narrow gully wound and ascended.  Gale caught sight of the dim, pale shadow of a one-time trail.  Near at hand it was invisible; he had to look far ahead to catch the faint tracery.  Yaqui led Diablo into it, and then began the most laborious and vexatious and painful of all slow travel.

Once up on top of that lava bed, Gale saw stretching away, breaking into millions of crests and ruts, a vast, red-black field sweeping onward and upward, with ragged, low ridges and mounds and spurs leading higher and higher to a great, split escarpment wall, above which dim peaks shone hazily blue in the distance.

He looked no more in that direction.  To keep his foothold, to save his horse, cost him all energy and attention.  The course was marked out for him in the tracks of the other horses.  He had only to follow.  But nothing could have been more difficult.  The disintegrating surface of a lava bed was at once the roughest, the hardest, the meanest, the cruelest, the most deceitful kind of ground to travel.