As Ladd had said, one of their greatest problems was the passing of time.  The nights were interminably long, but they had to be passed in work or play or dream—­anything except sleep.  That was Ladd’s most inflexible command.  He gave no reason.  But not improbably the ranger thought that the terrific heat of the day spend in slumber lessened a wear and strain, if not a real danger of madness.

Accordingly, at first the occupations of this little group were many and various.  They worked if they had something to do, or could invent a pretext.  They told and retold stories until all were wearisome.  They sang songs.  Mercedes taught Spanish.  They played every game they knew.  They invented others that were so trivial children would scarcely have been interested, and these they played seriously.  In a word, with intelligence and passion, with all that was civilized and human, they fought the ever-infringing loneliness, the savage solitude of their environment.

But they had only finite minds.  It was not in reason to expect a complete victory against this mighty Nature, this bounding horizon of death and desolation and decay.  Gradually they fell back upon fewer and fewer occupations, until the time came when the silence was hard to break.

Gale believed himself the keenest of the party, the one who thought most, and he watched the effect of the desert upon his companions.  He imagined that he saw Ladd grow old sitting round the campfire.  Certain it was that the ranger’s gray hair had turned white.  What had been at times hard and cold and grim about him had strangely vanished in sweet temper and a vacant-mindedness that held him longer as the days passed.  For hours, it seemed, Ladd would bend over his checkerboard and never make a move.  It mattered not now whether or not he had a partner.  He was always glad of being spoken to, as if he were called back from vague region of mind.  Jim Lash, the calmest, coolest, most nonchalant, best-humored Westerner Gale had ever met, had by slow degrees lost that cheerful character which would have been of such infinite good to his companions, and always he sat broding, silently brooding.  Jim had no ties, few memories, and the desert was claiming him.

Thorne and Mercedes, however, were living, wonderful proof that spirit, mind, and heart were free—­free to soar in scorn of the colossal barrenness and silence and space of that terrible hedging prison of lava.  They were young; they loved; they were together; and the oasis was almost a paradise.  Gale believe he helped himself by watching them.  Imagination had never pictured real happiness to him.  Thorne and Mercedes had forgotten the outside world.  If they had been existing on the burned-out desolate moon they could hardly have been in a harsher, grimmer, lonelier spot than this red-walled arroyo.  But it might have been a statelier Eden than that of the primitive day.