The wind, the keen
air of the heights, the red lava, the boundless surrounding blue,
all seemed to have something to do with his wildness. Then, hiding,
slipping, creeping, crawling, he closed in upon his quarry until
the long rifle grew like stone in his grip, and the whipping "spang"
ripped the silence, and the strange echo boomed deep in the crater,
and rolled around, as if in hollow mockery at the hopelessness of
escape.
Gale's exultant yell was given as much to free himself of some
bursting joy of action as it was to call the slower Yaqui.
Then he liked the strange echoes. It was a maddening whirl of
sound that bored deeper and deeper along the whorled and caverned
walls of the crater. It was as if these aged walls resented the
violating of their silent sanctity. Gale felt himself a man, a
thing alive, something superior to all this savage, dead, upflung
world of iron, a master even of all this grandeur and sublimity
because he had a soul.
He waited beside his quarry, and breathed deep, and swept the long
slopes with searching eyes of habit.
When Yaqui came up they set about the hardest task of all, to pack
the best of that heavy sheep down miles of steep, ragged,
choya-covered lava. But even in this Gale rejoiced. The heat was
nothing, the millions of little pits which could hold and twist a
foot were nothing; the blade-edged crusts and the deep fissures and
the choked canyons and the tangled, dwarfed mesquites, all these
were as nothing but obstacles to be cheerfully overcome.
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