That hour when Doc Stooder’s pipe line began spouting information Grant Hickman was discovering deep down within him an unguessed hardiness of spirit. A trial was on him, a test of his moral fibre no less than of his physical powers. At the end of twelve hours’ steady plodding across the desert he was coming into his second wind. Every effort a devilish ingenuity could contrive had been tried out by the four rurales, his guards, in their common endeavour to break down this gringo’s fighting morale. The single result was a fixed grin on features smeared with dried blood and sweat--a challenge provoking the Mexicans to fresh barbarities. During the first dark hours of the march Grant had nursed the hope that at some point outside of town he and his fellow prisoners would be brought to a railroad station to await the coming of a train. He could not conceive a reason for transferring prisoners afoot when a railroad would serve. But with the coming of the dawn and the lifting of the dark from an empty land not even a telegraph pole raised above the scrub to point fulfilment of his hope. Just the dry ribbon of road stretching ahead and empty speculation as to the number of days or hours which must intervene between present misery and journey’s end. Grant never had heard the name Hermosillo until it was spoken by the examining judge the night before; he did not know whether the town was just over the horizon or half way to Panama. Morning brought him the chance to study the men chained with him who, during the night hours, had been just so many disembodied shadows marching in a nightmare. The one ahead of him was a shrivelled little Chinaman, whose legs were so short he was forced to a skipping step to keep slack on his segment of the chain; his breath came in asthmatic pipings and wheezes like the noise of a leaky valve in some midget engine. Behind him was a giant of an Indian, almost the colour of teak. With a timed regularity this Indian spat noisily all through the dark hours and until the sun rose to dry up his throat. The rest were in character with Grant’s nearer companions--just flotsam. The guards were typical of their class; Mexican peons brutalized even beyond the inheritance of their mixed bloods by their small taste of power. The quarter-blood Indian south of the Line, whose ancestry is devious as his own starved dog’s, knows but a single law of life and that the law of fear. Lift him by ever so little from the station of the one who fears to that of the one to be feared and he has no counterpart for studied cruelty anywhere on earth.