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.
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