This young man was Dick Gale, but not the listless traveler, nor the
lounging wanderer who, two months before, had by chance dropped
into Casita. Friendship, chivalry, love--the deep-seated, unplumbed
emotions that had been stirred into being with all their incalculable
power for spiritual change, had rendered different the meaning of
life. In the moment almost of their realization the desert had
claimed Gale, and had drawn him into its crucible. The desert
had multiplied weeks into years. Heat, thirst, hunger, loneliness,
toil, fear, ferocity, pain--he knew them all. He had felt them
all--the white sun, with its glazed, coalescing, lurid fire; the
caked split lips and rasping, dry-puffed tongue; the sickening
ache in the pit of his stomach; the insupportable silence, the
empty space, the utter desolation, the contempt of life; the weary
ride, the long climb, the plod in sand, the search, search, search
for water; the sleepless night alone, the watch and wait, the
dread of ambush, the swift flight; the fierce pursuit of men wild
as Bedouins and as fleet, the willingness to deal sudden death,
the pain of poison thorn, the stinging tear of lead through flesh;
and that strange paradox of the burning desert, the cold at night,
the piercing icy wind, the dew that penetrated to the marrow, the
numbing desert cold of the dawn.
Beyond any dream of adventure he had ever had, beyond any wild
story he had ever read, had been his experience with those
hard-riding rangers, Ladd and Lash.
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