to
make useful benumbed hands and feet. Mercedes was fed while yet
wrapped in blankets. Then, while the packs were being put on and
horses saddled, she walked up and down, slapping her hands, warming her
ears. The rose color of the dawn was in her cheeks, and the wonderful
clearness of desert light in her eyes. Thorne's eyes sought her
constantly. The rangers watched her. The Yaqui bent his glance upon
her only seldom; but when he did look it seemed that his strange,
fixed, and inscrutable face was about to break into a smile. Yet that
never happened. Gale himself was surprised to find how often his own
glance found the slender, dark, beautiful Spaniard. Was this because
of her beauty? he wondered. He thought not altogether. Mercedes was a
woman. She represented something in life that men of all races for
thousands of years had loved to see and own, to revere and debase, to
fight and die for.

It was a significant index to the day's travel that Yaqui should keep a
blanket from the pack and tear it into strips to bind the legs of the
horses. It meant the dreaded choya and the knife-edged lava. That
Yaqui did not mount Diablo was still more significant. Mercedes must
ride; but the others must walk.

The Indian led off into one of the gray notches between the tumbled
streams of lava. These streams were about thirty feet high, a rotting
mass of splintered lava, rougher than any other kind of roughness in
the world. At the apex of the notch, where two streams met, a narrow
gully wound and ascended. Gale caught sight of the dim, pale shadow of
a one-time trail. Near at hand it was invisible; he had to look far
ahead to catch the faint tracery. Yaqui led Diablo into it, and then
began the most laborious and vexatious and painful of all slow travel.

Once up on top of that lava bed, Gale saw stretching away, breaking
into millions of crests and ruts, a vast, red-black field sweeping
onward and upward, with ragged, low ridges and mounds and spurs leading
higher and higher to a great, split escarpment wall, above which dim
peaks shone hazily blue in the distance.

He looked no more in that direction. To keep his foothold, to save his
horse, cost him all energy and attention. The course was marked out
for him in the tracks of the other horses. He had only to follow. But
nothing could have been more difficult. The disintegrating surface of
a lava bed was at once the roughest, the hardest, the meanest, th