At the moment he was alone on the promontory.  The night was far spent.  A ghastly moon haunted the black volcanic spurs.  The winds blew silently.  Was he alone?  No, he did not seem to be alone.  The Yaqui was there.  Suddenly a strange, cold sensation crept over Gale.  It was new.  He felt a presence.  Turning, he expected to see the Indian, but instead, a slight shadow, pale, almost white, stood there, not close nor yet distant.  It seemed to brighten.  Then he saw a woman who resembled a girl he had seemed to know long ago.  She was white-faced, golden-haired, and her lips were sweet, and her eyes were turning black.  Nell!  He had forgotten her.  Over him flooded a torrent of memory.  There was tragic woe in this sweet face.  Nell was holding out her arms—­she was crying aloud to him across the sand and the cactus and the lava.  She was in trouble, and he had been forgetting.

That night he climbed the lava to the topmost cone, and never slipped on a ragged crust nor touched a choya thorn.  A voice called to him.  He saw Nell’s eyes in the stars, in the velvet blue of sky, in the blackness of the engulfing shadows.  She was with him, a slender shape, a spirit, keeping step with him, and memory was strong, sweet, beating, beautiful.  Far down in the west, faintly golden with light of the sinking moon, he saw a cloud that resembled her face.  A cloud on the desert horizon!  He gazed and gazed.  Was that a spirit face like the one by his side?  No—­he did not dream.

In the hot, sultry morning Yaqui appeared at camp, after long hours of absence, and he pointed with a long, dark arm toward the west.  A bank of clouds was rising above the mountain barrier.

“Rain!” he cried; and his sonorous voice rolled down the arroyo.

Those who heard him were as shipwrecked mariners at sight of a distant sail.

Dick Gale, silent, grateful to the depths of his soul, stood with arm over Blanco Sol and watched the transforming west, where clouds of wonderous size and hue piled over one another, rushing, darkening, spreading, sweeping upward toward that white and glowing sun.

When they reached the zenish and swept round to blot out the blazing orb, the earth took on a dark, lowering aspect.  The red of sand and lava changed to steely gray.  Vast shadows, like ripples on water, sheeted in from the gulf with a low, strange moan.  Yet the silence was like death.  The desert was awaiting a strange and hated visitation—­storm!  If all the endless torrid days, the endless mystic nights had seemed unreal to Gale, what, then, seemed this stupendous spectacle?

“Oh!  I felt a drop of rain on my face!” cried Mercedes; and whispering the name of a saint, she kissed her husband.

The white-haired Ladd, gaunt, old, bent, looked up at the maelstrom of clouds, and he said, softly, “Shore we’ll get in the hosses, an’ pack light, an’ hit the trail, an’ make night marches!”