animals was well founded.  If he worked directly toward a flock, crawling over the sharp lava, always a sentinel ram espied him before he got within range.  The only method of attack that he found successful was to locate sheep with his glass, work round to windward of them, and then, getting behind a ridge or buttress, crawl like a lizard to a vantage point.  He failed often.  The stalk called forth all that was in him of endurance, cunning, speed.  As the days grew hotter he hunted in the early morning hours and a while before the sun went down.  More than one night he lay out on the lava, with the great stars close overhead and the immense void all beneath him.  This pursuit he learned to love.  Upon those scarred and blasted slopes the wild spirit that was in him had free rein.  And like a shadow the faithful Yaqui tried ever to keep at his heels.

One morning the rising sun greeted him as he surmounted the higher cone of the volcano.  He saw the vastness of the east algow with a glazed rosy whiteness, like the changing hue of an ember.  At this height there was a sweeping wind, still cool.  The western slopes of lava lay dark, and all that world of sand and gulf and mountain barrier beyond was shrouded in the mystic cloud of distance.  Gale had assimilated much of the loneliness and the sense of ownership and the love of lofty heights that might well belong to the great condor of the peak.  Like this wide-winged bird, he had an unparalleled range of vision.  The very corners whence came the winds seemed pierced by Gale’s eyes.

Yaqui spied a flock of sheep far under the curved broken rim of the main crater.  Then began the stalk.  Gale had taught the Yaqui something—­that speed might win as well as patient cunning.  Keeping out of sight, Gale ran over the spike-crusted lava, leaving the Indian far behind.  His feet were magnets, attracting supporting holds and he passed over them too fast to fall.  The wind, the keen air of the heights, the red lava, the boundless surrounding blue, all seemed to have something to do with his wildness.  Then, hiding, slipping, creeping, crawling, he closed in upon his quarry until the long rifle grew like stone in his grip, and the whipping “spang” ripped the silence, and the strange echo boomed deep in the crater, and rolled around, as if in hollow mockery at the hopelessness of escape.

Gale’s exultant yell was given as much to free himself of some bursting joy of action as it was to call the slower Yaqui.  Then he liked the strange echoes.  It was a maddening whirl of sound that bored deeper and deeper along the whorled and caverned walls of the crater.  It was as if these aged walls resented the violating of their silent sanctity.  Gale felt himself a man, a thing alive, something superior to all this savage, dead, upflung world of iron, a master even of all this grandeur and sublimity because he had a soul.

He waited beside his quarry, and breathed deep, and swept the long slopes with searching eyes of habit.