Jim Lash crawled into a little strip of shade and bided the time tranquilly.  Ladd was restless and impatient and watchful, every little while rising to look up the far-reaching slope, and then to the right, where Yaqui’s dark figure stood out from a high point of the rim.  Thorne grew silent, and seemed consumed by a slow, sullen rage.  Gale was neither calm nor free of a gnawing suspense nor of a waiting wrath.  But as best he could he put the pending action out of mind.

It came over him all of a sudden that he had not grasped the stupendous nature of this desert setting.  There was the measureless red slope, its lower ridges finally sinking into white sand dunes toward the blue sea.  The cold, sparkling light, the white sun, the deep azure of sky, the feeling of boundless expanse all around him—­these meant high altitude.  Southward the barren red simply merged into distance.  The field of craters rose in high, dark wheels toward the dominating peaks.  When Gale withdrew his gaze from the magnitude of these spaces and heights the crater beneath him seemed dwarfed.  Yet while he gazed it spread and deepened and multiplied its ragged lines.  No, he could not grasp the meaning of size or distance here.  There was too much to stun the sight.  But the mood in which nature had created this convulsed world of lava seized hold upon him.

Meanwhile the hours passed.  As the sun climbed the clear, steely lights vanished, the blue hazes deepened, and slowly the glistening surfaces of lava turned redder.  Ladd was concerned to discover that Yaqui was missing from his outlook upon the high point.  Jim Lash came out of the shady crevice, and stood up to buckle on his cartridge belt.  His narrow, gray glance slowly roved from the height of lava down along the slope, paused in doubt, and then swept on to resurvey the whole vast eastern dip of the plateau.

“I reckon my eyes are pore,” he said.  “Mebbe it’s this damn red glare.  Anyway, what’s them creepin’ spots up there?”

“Shore I seen them.  Mountain sheep,” replied Ladd.

“Guess again, Laddy.  Dick, I reckon you’d better flash the glass up the slope.”

Gale adjusted the field glass and began to search the lava, beginning close at hand and working away from him.  Presently the glass became stationary.

“I see half a dozen small animals, brown in color.  They look like sheep.  But I couldn’t distinguish mountain sheep from antelope.”

“Shore they’re bighorn,” said Laddy.

“I reckon if you’ll pull around to the east an’ search under that long wall of lava—­there—­you’ll see what I see,” added Jim.

The glass climbed and circled, wavered an instant, then fixed steady as a rock.  There was a breathless silence.

“Fourteen horses—­two packed—­some mounted—­others without riders, and lame,” said Gale, slowly.

Yaqui appeared far up the trail, coming swiftly.  Presently he saw the rangers and halted to wave his arms and point.  Then he vanished as if the lava had opened beneath him.