Ladd fed his cruel longing with Thorne’s poignant recollections, with the keen, clear, never-to-be-forgotten shocks to Gale’s eye and ear.  Jim Lash, for one at least, never tired of telling how he had seen and heard the tragedy, and every time in the telling it gathered some more tragic and gruesome detail.  Jim believed in satiating the ranger.  Then in the twilight, when the campfire burned, Ladd would try to get the Yaqui to tell his side of the story.  But this the Indian would never do.  There was only the expression of his fathomless eyes and the set passion of his massive face.

Those waiting days grew into weeks.  Ladd gained very slowly.  Nevertheless, at last he could walk about, and soon he averred that, strapped to a horse, he could last out the trip to Forlorn River.

There was rejoicing in camp, and plans were eagerly suggested.  The Yaqui happened to be absent.  When he returned the rangers told him they were now ready to undertake the journey back across lava and cactus.

Yaqui shook his head.  They declared again their intention.

“No!” replied the Indian, and his deep, sonorous voice rolled out upon the quiet of the arroyo.  He spoke briefly then.  They had waited too long.  The smaller waterholes back in the trail were dry.  The hot summer was upon them.  There could be only death waiting down in the burning valley.  Here was water and grass and wood and shade from the sun’s rays, and sheep to be killed on the peaks.  The water would hold unless the season was that dreaded ano seco of the Mexicans.

“Wait for rain,” concluded Yaqui, and now as never before he spoke as one with authority.  “If no rain—­” Silently he lifted his hand.

XVI

MOUNTAIN SHEEP

What Gale might have thought an appalling situation, if considered from a safe and comfortable home away from the desert, became, now that he was shut in by the red-ribbed lava walls and great dry wastes, a matter calmly accepted as inevitable.  So he imagined it was accepted by the others.  Not even Mercedes uttered a regret.  No word was spoken of home.  If there was thought of loved one, it was locked deep in their minds.  In Mercedes there was no change in womanly quality, perhaps because all she had to love was there in the desert with her.

Gale had often pondered over this singular change in character.  He had trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in the desert’s influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidious primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all, merely a savage’s instinct of sight and sound.  He felt the need now of redoubled effort.  For there was a sheer happiness in drifting.  Not only was it easy to forget, it was hard to remember.  His idea was that a man laboring under a great wrong, a great crime, a great passion might find the lonely desert a fitting place for either remembrance or oblivion, according to the nature of his soul.  But an ordinary, healthy, reasonably happy mortal who loved the open with its blaze of sun and sweep of wind would have a task to keep from going backward to the natural man as he was before civilization.