Only the
choya hindered Dick Gale.
When his heavy burden pulled him out of sure-footedness, and he
plunged into a choya, or when the strange, deceitful, uncanny,
almost invisible frosty thorns caught and pierced him, then there
was call for all of fortitude and endurance. For this cactus had
a malignant power of torture. Its pain was a stinging, blinding,
burning, sickening poison in the blood. If thorns pierced his
legs he felt the pain all over his body; if his hands rose from
a fall full of the barbed joints, he was helpless and quivering
till Yaqui tore them out.
But this one peril, dreaded more than dizzy height of precipice
or sunblindness on the glistening peak, did not daunt Gale. His
teacher was the Yaqui, and always before him was an example that
made him despair of a white man's equality. Color, race, blood,
breeding--what were these in the wilderness? Verily, Dick Gale
had come to learn the use of his hands.
So in a descent of hours he toiled down the lava slope, to stalk
into the arroyo like a burdened giant, wringing wet, panting,
clear-eyed and dark-faced, his ragged clothes and boots white
with choya thorns.
The gaunt Ladd rose from his shaded seat, and removed his pipe from
smiling lips, and turned to nod at Jim, and then looked back again.
The torrid summer heat came imperceptibly, or it could never have
been borne by white men. It changed the lives of the fugitives,
making them partly nocturnal in habit.
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