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. But
suddenly, inexplicably, Gale felt Yaqui's human quality. It was aloof,
as was everything about this Indian; but it was there. This savage
walked silently beside him, without glance or touch or word. His
thought was as inscrutable as if mind had never awakened in his race.
Yet Gale was conscious of greatness, and, somehow, he was reminded of
the Indian's story. His home had been desolated, his people carried
off to slavery, his wife and children separated from him to die. What
had life meant to the Yaqui? What had been in his heart? What was now
in his mind? Gale could not answer these questions. But the
difference between himself and Yaqui, which he had vaguely felt as that
between savage and civilized men, faded out of his mind forever. Yaqui
might have considered he owed Gale a debt, and, with a Yaqui's austere
and noble fidelity to honor, he meant to pay it. Nevertheless, this
was not the thing Gale found in the Indian's silent presence.
Accepting the desert with its subtle and inconceivable influence, Gale
felt that the savage and the white man had been bound in a tie which
was no less brotherly because it could not be comprehended.

Toward dawn Gale managed to get some sleep. Then the morning broke
with the sun hidden back of the uplift of the plateau. The horses
trooped up the arroyo and snorted for water. After a hurried breakfast
the packs were hidden in holes in the lava. Th