“He says yes,” she whispered.  “He answers he’ll save us; he’ll take us all back—­he knows!”

The Indian turned away to his tasks, and the silence that held the little group was finally broken by Ladd.

“Shore I said so.  Now all we’ve got to do is use sense.  Friends, I’m the commissary department of this outfit, an’ what I say goes.  You all won’t eat except when I tell you.  Mebbe it’ll not be so hard to keep our health.  Starved beggars don’t get sick.  But there’s the heat comin’, an’ we can all go loco, you know.  To pass the time!  Lord, that’s our problem.  Now if you all only had a hankerin’ for checkers.  Shore I’ll make a board an’ make you play.  Thorne, you’re the luckiest.  You’ve got your girl, an’ this can be a honeymoon.  Now with a few tools an’ little material see what a grand house you can build for your wife.  Dick, you’re lucky, too.  You like to hunt, an’ up there you’ll find the finest bighorn huntin’ in the West.  Take Yaqui and the .405.  We need the meat, but while you’re gettin’ it have your sport.  The same chance will never come again.  I wish we all was able to go.  But crippled men can’t climb the lava.  Shore you’ll see some country from the peaks.  There’s no wilder place on earth, except the poles.  An’ when you’re older, you an’ Nell, with a couple of fine boys, think what it’ll be to tell them about bein’ lost in the lava, an’ huntin’ sheep with a Yaqui.  Shore I’ve hit it.  You can take yours out in huntin’ an’ thinkin’.  Now if I had a girl like Nell I’d never go crazy.  That’s your game, Dick.  Hunt, an’ think of Nell, an’ how you’ll tell those fine boys about it all, an’ about the old cowman you knowed, Laddy, who’ll by then be long past the divide.  Rustle now, son.  Get some enthusiasm.  For shore you’ll need it for yourself an’ us.”

Gale climbed the lava slope, away round to the right of the arroyo, along an old trail that Yaqui said the Papagos had made before his own people had hunted there.  Part way it led through spiked, crested, upheaved lava that would have been almost impassable even without its silver coating of choya cactus.  There were benches and ledges and ridges bare and glistening in the sun.  From the crests of these Yaqui’s searching falcon gaze roved near and far for signs of sheep, and Gale used his glass on the reaches of lava that slanted steeply upward to the corrugated peaks, and down over endless heave and roll and red-waved slopes.  The heat smoked up from the lava, and this, with the red color and the shiny choyas, gave the impression of a world of smoldering fire.

Farther along the slope Yaqui halted and crawled behind projections to a point commanding a view over an extraordinary section of country.  The peaks were off to the left.  In the foreground were gullies, ridges, and canyons, arroyos, all glistening with choyas and some other and more numerous white bushes, and here and there towered a green cactus.  This region was only a splintered and more devastated part of the volcanic slope, but it was miles in extent.  Yaqui peeped over the top of a blunt block of lava and searched the sharp-billowed wilderness.  Suddenly he grasped Gale and pointed across a deep wide gully.