He felt a slight touch on his arm, felt it move down, felt Mercedes slip a trembling cold little hand into his.  Dick looked at her.  She seemed a white-faced girl now, with staring, frightened black eyes that flashed up at him.  If the loneliness, the silence, the desert, the unknown dangers of the night affected him, what must they be to this hunted, driven girl?  Gale’s heart swelled.  He was alone with her.  He had no weapon, no money, no food, no drink, no covering, nothing except his two hands.  He had absolutely no knowledge of the desert, of the direction or whereabouts of the boundary line between the republics; he did not know where to find the railroad, or any road or trail, or whether or not there were towns near or far.  It was a critical, desperate situation.  He thought first of the girl, and groaned in spirit, prayed that it would be given him to save her.  When he remembered himself it was with the stunning consciousness that he could conceive of no situation which he would have exchanged for this one—­where fortune had set him a perilous task of loyalty to a friend, to a helpless girl.

“Senor, senor!” suddenly whispered Mercedes, clinging to him.  “Listen!  I hear horses coming!”

III

A FLIGHT INTO THE DESERT

Uneasy and startled, Gale listened and, hearing nothing, wondered if Mercedes’s fears had not worked upon her imagination.  He felt a trembling seize her, and he held her hands tightly.

“You were mistaken, I guess,” he whispered.

“No, no, senor.”

Dick turned his ear to the soft wind.  Presently he heard, or imagined he heard, low beats.  Like the first faint, far-off beats of a drumming grouse, they recalled to him the Illinois forests of his boyhood.  In a moment he was certain the sounds were the padlike steps of hoofs in yielding sand.  The regular tramp was not that of grazing horses.

On the instant, made cautious and stealthy by alarm, Gale drew Mercedes deeper into the gloom of the shrubbery.  Sharp pricks from thorns warned him that he was pressing into a cactus growth, and he protected Mercedes as best he could.  She was shaking as one with a sever chill.  She breathed with little hurried pants and leaned upon him almost in collapse.  Gale ground his teeth in helpless rage at the girl’s fate.  If she had not been beautiful she might still have been free and happy in her home.  What a strange world to live in—­how unfair was fate!

The sounds of hoofbeats grew louder.  Gale made out a dark moving mass against a background of dull gray.  There was a line of horses.  He could not discern whether or not all the horses carried riders.  The murmur of a voice struck his ear—­then a low laugh.  It made him tingle, for it sounded American.  Eagerly he listened.  There was an interval when only the hoofbeats could be heard.

“It shore was, Laddy, it shore was,” came a voice out of the darkness.  “Rough house!  Laddy, since wire fences drove us out of Texas we ain’t seen the like of that.  An’ we never had such a call.”