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
and the name and the happiness that had been and was now no
more. Often Gale thought of those hundreds of desert travelers,
prospectors, wanderers who had ventured down the Camino del
Diablo, never to be heard of again. Belding had told him of that
most terrible of all desert trails--a trail of shifting sands. Lash
had traversed it, and brought back stories of buried waterholes,
of bones bleaching white in the sun, of gold mines as lost as were
the prospectors who had sought them, of the merciless Yaqui and
his hatred for the Mexican.
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