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.
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