The wind appeared to blow softly, with an almost
imperceptible moan, over the desert. That was a new sound to Gale.
But he heard nothing more.
Presently Lash went to the rear and Ladd started ahead. The progress
now, however, was considerably slower, not owing to a road--for that
became better--but probably owing to caution exercised by the
cowboy guide. At the end of a half hour this marked deliberation
changed, and the horses followed Ladd's at a gait that put Gale to
his best walking-paces.
Meanwhile the moon soared high above the black corrugated peaks.
The gray, the gloom, the shadow whitened. The clearing of the dark
foreground appeared to lift a distant veil and show endless aisles of
desert reaching down between dim horizon-bounding ranges.
Gale gazed abroad, knowing that as this night was the first time
for him to awake to consciousness of a vague, wonderful other
self, so it was one wherein he began to be aware of an encroaching
presence of physical things--the immensity of the star-studded sky,
the soaring moon, the bleak, mysterious mountains, and limitless
slope, and plain, and ridge, and valley. These things in all their
magnificence had not been unnoticed by him before; only now they
spoke a different meaning. A voice that he had never heard called
him to see, to feel the vast hard externals of heaven and earth, all
that represented the open, the free, silence and solitude and space.
Once more his thoughts, like his steps, were halted by Ladd's actions.
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