The coyotes were howling, not here and there, but in concerted volume at the head of the arroyo.  To Dick this was no more reassuring than had been the flickering light of the campfire.  The wild desert dogs, with their characteristic insolent curiosity, were baying men round a campfire.  Gale proceeded slowly, halting every few steps, careful not to brush against the stiff greasewood.  In the soft sand his steps made no sound.  The twinkling light vanished occasionally, like a Jack-o’lantern, and when it did show it seemed still a long way off.  Gale was not seeking trouble or inviting danger.  Water was the thing that drove him.  He must see who these campers were, and then decide how to give Blanco Sol a drink.

A rabbit rustled out of brush at Gale’s feet and thumped away over the sand.  The wind pattered among dry, broken stalks of dead ocatilla.  Every little sound brought Gale to a listening pause.  The gloom was thickening fast into darkness.  It would be a night without starlight.  He moved forward up the pale, zigzag aisles between the mesquite.  He lost the light for a while, but the coyotes’ chorus told him he was approaching the campfire.  Presently the light danced through the black branches, and soon grew into a flame.  Stooping low, with bushy mesquites between him and the fire, Gale advanced.  The coyotes were in full cry.  Gale heard the tramping, stamping thumps of many hoofs.  The sound worried him.  Foot by foot he advanced, and finally began to crawl.  The wind favored his position, so that neither coyotes nor horses could scent him.  The nearer he approached the head of the arroyo, where the well was located, the thicker grew the desert vegetation.  At length a dead palo verde, with huge black clumps of its parasite mistletoe thick in the branches, marked a distance from the well that Gale considered close enough.  Noiselessly he crawled here and there until he secured a favorable position, and then rose to peep from behind his covert.

He saw a bright fire, not a cooking-fire, for that would have been low and red, but a crackling blaze of mesquite.  Three men were in sight, all close to the burning sticks.  They were Mexicans and of the coarse type of raiders, rebels, bandits that Gale expected to see.  One stood up, his back to the fire; another sat with shoulders enveloped in a blanket, and the third lounged in the sand, his feet almost in the blaze.  They had cast off belts and weapons.  A glint of steel caught Gale’s eye.  Three short, shiny carbines leaned against a rock.  A little to the left, within the circle of light, stood a square house made of adobe bricks.  Several untrimmed poles upheld a roof of brush, which was partly fallen in.  This house was a Papago Indian habitation, and a month before had been occupied by a family that had been murdered or driven off by a roving band of outlaws.  A rude corral showed dimly in the edge of firelight, and from a black mass within came the snort and stamp and whinney of horses.