“Get me a long-range rifle an’ lots of shells.  Rustle now,” he said.

“Laddy, you don’t want to be weighted down?” protested Belding.

“Shore I want a gun that’ll outshoot the dinky little carbines an’ muskets used by the rebels.  Trot one out an’ be quick.”

“I’ve got a .405, a long-barreled heavy rifle that’ll shoot a mile.  I use it for mountain sheep.  But Laddy, it’ll break that bronch’s back.”

“His back won’t break so easy....Dick, take plenty of shells for your Remington.  An’ don’t forget your field glass.”

In less than an hour after the time of the raid the three rangers, heavily armed and superbly mounted on fresh horses, rode out on the trail.  As Gale turned to look back from the far bank of Forlorn River, he saw Nell waving a white scarf.  He stood high in his stirrups and waved his sombrero.  Then the mesquites hid the girl’s slight figure, and Gale wheeled grim-faced to follow the rangers.

They rode in single file with Ladd in the lead.  He did not keep to the trail of the raiders all the time.  He made short cuts.  The raiders were traveling leisurely, and they evinced a liking for the most level and least cactus-covered stretches of ground.  But the cowboy took a bee-line course for the white escarpment pointed out by the Yaqui; and nothing save deep washes and impassable patches of cactus or rocks made him swerve from it.  He kept the broncho at a steady walk over the rougher places and at a swinging Indian canter over the hard and level ground.  The sun grew hot and the wind began to blow.  Dust clouds rolled along the blue horizon.  Whirling columns of sand, like water spouts at sea, circled up out of white arid basins, and swept away and spread aloft before the wind.  The escarpment began to rise, to change color, to show breaks upon its rocky face.

Whenever the rangers rode out on the brow of a knoll or ridge or an eminence, before starting to descend, Ladd required of Gale a long, careful, sweeping survey of the desert ahead through the field glass.  There were streams of white dust to be seen, streaks of yellow dust, trailing low clouds of sand over the glistening dunes, but no steadily rising, uniformly shaped puffs that would tell a tale of moving horses on the desert.

At noon the rangers got out of the thick cactus.  Moreover, the gravel-bottomed washes, the low weathering, rotting ledges of yellow rock gave place to hard sandy rolls and bare clay knolls.  The desert resembled a rounded hummocky sea of color.  All light shades of blue and pink and yellow and mauve were there dominated by the glaring white sun.  Mirages glistened, wavered, faded in the shimmering waves of heat.  Dust as fine as powder whiffed up from under the tireless hoofs.

The rangers rode on and the escarpment began to loom.  The desert floor inclined perceptibly upward.  When Gale got an unobstructed view of the slope of the escarpment he located the raiders and horses.  In another hour’s travel the rangers could see with naked eyes a long, faint moving streak of black and white dots.