There seemed a lull in the battle.  Gale ventured to stand high, and screened behind choyas, he swept the three-quarter circle of lava with his glass.  In the distance he saw horses, but no riders.  Below him, down the slope along the crater rim and the trail, the lava was bare of all except tufts of choya.  Gale gathered assurance.  It looked as if the day was favoring his side.  Then Thorne, coming partly to consciousness, engaged Gale’s care.  The cavalryman stirred and moaned, called for water, and then for Mercedes.  Gale held him back with a strong hand, and presently he was once more quiet.

For the first time in hours, as it seemed, Gale took note of the physical aspect of his surroundings.  He began to look upon them without keen gaze strained for crouching form, or bobbing head, or spouting carbine.  Either Gale’s sense of color and proportion had become deranged during the fight, or the encompassing air and the desert had changed.  Even the sun had changed.  It seemed lowering, oval in shape, magenta in hue, and it had a surface that gleamed like oil on water.  Its red rays shone through red haze.  Distances that had formerly been clearly outlined were now dim, obscured.  The yawning chasm was not the same.  It circled wider, redder, deeper.  It was a weird, ghastly mouth of hell.  Gale stood fascinated, unable to tell how much he saw was real, how much exaggeration of overwrought emotions.  There was no beauty here, but an unparalleled grandeur, a sublime scene of devastation and desolation which might have had its counterpart upon the burned-out moon.  The mood that gripped Gale now added to its somber portent an unshakable foreboding of calamity.

He wrestled with the spell as if it were a physical foe.  Reason and intelligence had their voices in his mind; but the moment was not one wherein these things could wholly control.  He felt life strong within his breast, yet there, a step away, was death, yawning, glaring, smoky, red.  It was a moment—­an hour for a savage, born, bred, developed in this scarred and blasted place of jagged depths and red distances and silences never meant to be broken.  Since Gale was not a savage he fought that call of the red gods which sent him back down the long ages toward his primitive day.  His mind combated his sense of sight and the hearing that seemed useless; and his mind did not win all the victory.  Something fatal was here, hanging in the balance, as the red haze hung along the vast walls of that crater of hell.

Suddenly harsh, prolonged yells brought him to his feet, and the unrealities vanished.  Far down the trails where the crater rims closed in the deep fissure he saw moving forms.  They were three in number.  Two of them ran nimbly across the lava bridge.  The third staggered far behind.  It was Ladd.  He appeared hard hit.  He dragged at the heavy rifle which he seemed unable to raise.  The yells came from him.  He was calling the Yaqui.