When he returned to the house, some hours later, his room had been put in order.  In the middle of the white coverlet on his table lay a fresh red rose.  Nell had dropped it there.  Dick picked it up, feeling a throb in his breast.  It was a bud just beginning to open, to show between its petals a dark-red, unfolding heart.  How fragrant it was, how exquisitely delicate, how beautiful its inner hue of red, deep and dark, the crimson of life blood!

Had Nell left it there by accident or by intent?  Was it merely kindness or a girl’s subtlety?  Was it a message couched elusively, a symbol, a hope in a half-blown desert rose?

VI

THE YAQUI

Toward evening of a lowering December day, some fifty miles west of Forlorn River, a horseman rode along an old, dimly defined trail.  From time to time he halted to study the lay of the land ahead.  It was bare, somber, ridgy desert, covered with dun-colored greasewood and stunted prickly pear.  Distant mountains hemmed in the valley, raising black spurs above the round lomas and the square-walled mesas.

This lonely horseman bestrode a steed of magnificent build, perfectly white except for a dark bar of color running down the noble head from ears to nose.  Sweatcaked dust stained the long flanks.  The horse had been running.  His mane and tail were laced and knotted to keep their length out of reach of grasping cactus and brush.  Clumsy home-made leather shields covered the front of his forelegs and ran up well to his wide breast.  What otherwise would have been muscular symmetry of limb was marred by many a scar and many a lump.  He was lean, gaunt, worn, a huge machine of muscle and bone, beautiful only in head and mane, a weight-carrier, a horse strong and fierce like the desert that had bred him.

The rider fitted the horse as he fitted the saddle.  He was a young man of exceedingly powerful physique, wide-shouldered, long-armed, big-legged.  His lean face, where it was not red, blistered and peeling, was the hue of bronze.  He had a dark eye, a falcon gaze, roving and keen.  His jaw was prominent and set, mastiff-like; his lips were stern.  It was youth with its softness not yet quite burned and hardened away that kept the whole cast of his face from being ruthless.

This young man was Dick Gale, but not the listless traveler, nor the lounging wanderer who, two months before, had by chance dropped into Casita.  Friendship, chivalry, love—­the deep-seated, unplumbed emotions that had been stirred into being with all their incalculable power for spiritual change, had rendered different the meaning of life.  In the moment almost of their realization the desert had claimed Gale, and had drawn him into its crucible.  The desert had multiplied weeks into years.  Heat, thirst, hunger, loneliness, toil, fear, ferocity, pain—­he knew them all.  He had felt