d 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. 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. The nights had the balmy coolness of
spring, and would have been delightful for sleep, but that would have
made the blazing days unendurable.

The sun rose in a vast white flame. With it came the blasting,
withering wind from the gulf. A red haze, like that of earlier
sunsets, seemed to come sweeping on the wind, and it roared up the
arroyo, and went bellowing into the crater, and rushed on in fury to
lash the peaks.

During these hot, windy hours the desert-bound party slept in deep
recesses in the lava; and if necessity brought them forth they could
not remain out long. "he sand burned through boots, and a touch of
bare hand on lava raised a blister.

A short while before sundown the Yaqui went forth to build a campfire,
and soon the others came out, heat-dazed, half blinde