Nothing
moved--nothing outside of Gale's body appeared to live. The
Yaqui sat like an image carved out of lava. The others lay prone
and quiet. Would another night see any of them lie that way,
quiet forever? Gale felt a ripple pass over him that was at once
a shudder and a contraction of muscles. Used as he was to the
desert and its oppression, why should he feel to-night as if the
weight of its lava and the burden of its mystery were bearing
him down?
He sat up after a while and again watched the fire. Nell's sweet
face floated like a wraith in the pale smoke--glowed and flushed
and smiled in the embers. Other faces shone there--his sister's
--that of his mother. Gale shook off the tender memories. This
desolate wilderness with its forbidding silence and its dark
promise of hell on the morrow--this was not the place to unnerve
oneself with thoughts of love and home. But the torturing paradox
of the thing was that this was just the place and just the night
for a man to be haunted.
By and by Gale rose and walked down a shadowy aisle
between the mesquites. On his way back the Yaqui joined him.
Gale was not surprised. He had become used to the Indian's
strange guardianship. But now, perhaps because of Gale's poignancy
of thought, the contending tides of love and regret, the deep,
burning premonition of deadly strife, he was moved to keener
scrutiny of the Yaqui. That, of course, was futile. The Indian
was impenetrable, silent, strange.
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