So he imagined it
was accepted by the others. Not even Mercedes uttered a regret.
No word was spoken of home. If there was thought of loved one,
it was locked deep in their minds. In Mercedes there was no change
in womanly quality, perhaps because all she had to love was there
in the desert with her.
Gale had often pondered over this singular change in character.
He had trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something
in the desert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an
insidious primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness
at all, merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the
need now of redoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in
drifting. Not only was it easy to forget, it was hard to remember.
His idea was that a man laboring under a great wrong, a great crime,
a great passion might find the lonely desert a fitting place for
either remembrance or oblivion, according to the nature of his soul.
But an ordinary, healthy, reasonably happy mortal who loved the open
with its blaze of sun and sweep of wind would have a task to keep
from going backward to the natural man as he was before civilization.
By tacit agreement Ladd again became the leader of the party.
Ladd was a man who would have taken all the responsibility
whether or not it was given him. In moments of hazard, of
uncertainty, Lash and Gale, even Belding, unconsciously looked to the
ranger. He had that kind of power.
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