Judged by the great average of ideals and conventional standards of life, Dick Gale was a starved, lonely, suffering, miserable wretch.  But in his case the judgment would have hit only externals, would have missed the vital inner truth.  For Gale was happy with a kind of strange, wild glory in the privations, the pains, the perils, and the silence and solitude to be endured on this desert land.  In the past he had not been of any use to himself or others; and he had never know what it meant to be hungry, cold, tired, lonely.  He had never worked for anything.  The needs of the day had been provided, and to-morrow and the future looked the same.  Danger, peril, toil—­these had been words read in books and papers.

In the present he used his hands, his senses, and his wits.  He had a duty to a man who relied on his services.  He was a comrade, a friend, a valuable ally to riding, fighting rangers.  He had spent endless days, weeks that seemed years, alone with a horse, trailing over, climbing over, hunting over a desert that was harsh and hostile by nature, and perilous by the invasion of savage men.  That horse had become human to Gale.  And with him Gale had learned to know the simple needs of existence.  Like dead scales the superficialities, the falsities, the habits that had once meant all of life dropped off, useless things in this stern waste of rock and sand.

Gale’s happiness, as far as it concerned the toil and strife, was perhaps a grim and stoical one.  But love abided with him, and it had engendered and fostered other undeveloped traits—­romance and a feeling for beauty, and a keen observation of nature.  He felt pain, but he was never miserable.  He felt the solitude, but he was never lonely.

As he rode across the desert, even though keen eyes searched for the moving black dots, the rising puffs of white dust that were warnings, he saw Nell’s face in every cloud.  The clean-cut mesas took on the shape of her straight profile, with its strong chin and lips, its fine nose and forehead.  There was always a glint of gold or touch of red or graceful line or gleam of blue to remind him of her.  Then at night her face shone warm and glowing, flushing and paling, in the campfire.

To-night, as usual, with a keen ear to the wind, Gale listened as one on guard; yet he watched the changing phantom of a sweet face in the embers, and as he watched he thought.  The desert developed and multiplied thought.  A thousand sweet faces glowed in the pink and white ashes of his campfire, the faces of other sweethearts or wives that had gleamed for other men.  Gale was happy in his thought of Nell, for Nell, for something, when he was alone this way in the wilderness, told him she was near him, she thought of him, she loved him.  But there were many men alone on that vast southwestern plateau, and when they saw dream faces, surely for some it was a fleeting flash, a gleam soon gone, like the hope