He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher.  He did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man.  And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale of a man’s values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him.  More of desert experience, Gale believe, would be too much for intellect.  The desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over a strange thought:  after all, was the civilized man inferior to the savage?

Yaqui was the answer to that.  When Gale acknowledged this he always remembered his present strange manner of thought.  The past, the old order of mind, seemed as remote as this desert world was from the haunts of civilized men.  A man must know a savage as Gale knew Yaqui before he could speak authoritatively, and then something stilled his tongue.  In the first stage of Gale’s observation of Yaqui he had marked tenaciousness of life, stoicism, endurance, strength.  These were the attributes of the desert.  But what of that second stage wherein the Indian had loomed up a colossal figure of strange honor, loyalty, love?  Gale doubted his convictions and scorned himself for doubting.

There in the gloom sat the silent, impassive, inscrutable Yaqui.  His dark face, his dark eyes were plain in the light of the stars.  Always he was near Gale, unobtrusive, shadowy, but there.  Why?  Gale absolutely could not doubt that the Indian had heart as well as mind.  Yaqui had from the very first stood between Gale and accident, toil, peril.  It was his own choosing.  Gale could not change him or thwart him.  He understood the Indian’s idea of obligation and sacred duty.  But there was more, and that baffled Gale.  In the night hours, alone on the slope, Gale felt in Yaqui, as he felt the mighty throb of that desert pulse, a something that drew him irresistibly to the Indian.  Sometimes he looked around to find the Indian, to dispel these strange, pressing thoughts of unreality, and it was never in vain.

Thus the nights passed, endlessly long, with Gale fighting for his old order of thought, fighting the fascination of the infinite sky, and the gloomy insulating whirl of the wide shadows, fighting for belief, hope, prayer, fighting against that terrible ever-recurring idea of being lost, lost, lost in the desert, fighting harder than any other thing the insidious, penetrating, tranquil, unfeeling self that was coming between him and his memory.

He was losing the battle, losing his hold on tangible things, losing his power to stand up under this ponderous, merciless weight of desert space and silence.

He acknowledged it in a kind of despair, and the shadows of the night seemed whirling fiends.  Lost!  Lost!  Lost!  What are you waiting for?  Rain!. . .  Lost!  Lost!  Lost in the desert!  So the shadows seemed to scream in voiceless mockery.