He halted upon the edge of a low escarpment.  Below him the narrowing valley showed bare, black ribs of rock, long, winding gray lines leading down to a central floor where mesquite and cactus dotted the barren landscape.  Moving objects, diminutive in size, gray and white in color, arrested Gale’s roving sight.  They bobbed away for a while, then stopped.  They were antelope, and they had seen his horse.  When he rode on they started once more, keeping to the lowest level.  These wary animals were often desert watchdogs for the ranger, they would betray the proximity of horse or man.  With them trotting forward, he made better time for some miles across the valley.  When he lost them, caution once more slowed his advance.

The valley sloped up and narrowed, to head into an arroyo where grass began to show gray between the clumps of mesquite.  Shadows formed ahead in the hollows, along the walls of the arroyo, under the trees, and they seemed to creep, to rise, to float into a veil cast by the background of bold mountains, at last to claim the skyline.  Night was not close at hand, but it was there in the east, lifting upward, drooping downward, encroaching upon the west.

Gale dismounted to lead his horse, to go forward more slowly.  He had ridden sixty miles since morning, and he was tired, and a not entirely healed wound in his hip made one leg drag a little.  A mile up the arroyo, near its head, lay the Papago Well.  The need of water for his horse entailed a risk that otherwise he could have avoided.  The well was on Mexican soil.  Gale distinguished a faint light flickering through the thin, sharp foliage.  Campers were at the well, and, whoever they were, no doubt they had prevented Ladd from meeting Gale.  Ladd had gone back to the next waterhole, or maybe he was hiding in an arroyo to the eastward, awaiting developments.

Gale turned his horse, not without urge of iron arm and persuasive speech, for the desert steed scented water, and plodded back to the edge of the arroyo, where in a secluded circle of mesquite he halted.  The horse snorted his relief at the removal of the heavy, burdened saddle and accoutrements, and sagging, bent his knees, lowered himself with slow heave, and plunged down to roll in the sand.  Gale poured the contents of his larger canteen into his hat and held it to the horse’s nose.

“Drink, Sol,” he said.

It was but a drop for a thirsty horse.  However, Blanco Sol rubbed a wet muzzle against Gale’s hand in appreciation.  Gale loved the horse, and was loved in return.  They had saved each other’s lives, and had spent long days and nights of desert solitude together.  Sol had known other masters, though none so kind as this new one; but it was certain that Gale had never before known a horse.

The spot of secluded ground was covered with bunches of galleta grass upon which Sol began to graze.  Gale made a long halter of his lariat to keep the horse from wandering in search of water.  Next Gale kicked off the cumbersome chapparejos, with their flapping, tripping folds of leather over his feet, and drawing a long rifle from its leather sheath, he slipped away into the shadows.