d
forward till his hands grasped one of the wheels. The contact cleared
his brain as by a magic touch. It was no dream.

Supporting himself by the sideboard, he drew himself around to the
front, the only opening of the canvas room. He looked within. A first
look told him that the wagon was fitted up for a long journey, and that
its contents had not been disturbed by bandits or Indians. The second
look distinguished two objects that excluded from attention all others.
Upon a mattress at the rear of the wagon lay a woman, her face covered
by a cloth; and near the front seat stood a keg of water. It was
impossible to note the rigid form of the woman and the position of the
arms and hands without perceiving that she was dead.

The man recognized this truth but it made only a dim impression; that
keg of water meant life--and life was a thousandfold more to him than
death. He drew himself upon the seat, snatched at the tin cup beside
the keg, and drew out the cloth-covered corn-cob that stopped the flow.
Having slaked his thirst, there was mingled with his sense of ineffable
content, an overwhelming desire for sleep. He dropped on the second
mattress, on which bedclothes were carelessly strewn; his head found
the empty pillow that lay indented as it had been left by some vanished
sleeper. As his eyelids closed, he fell sound asleep. But for the
rising and falling of his powerful breast, he was as motionless as the
body of the woman.

Without, the afternoon sun slowly sank behind the mountains casting
long shadows over the plains; the wind swirled the sand in tireless
eddies, sometimes lifting it high in great sheets, forming sudden
dunes; coyotes prowled among the foot-hills and out on the open levels,
squatting with eyes fixed on the wagon, uttering sharp quick barks of
interrogation. A herd of deer lifted their horns against the horizon,
then suddenly bounded away, racing like shadows toward the lowlands of
Red River. On the domelike summit of Mount Welsh, a mile away, a
mountain-lion showed his sinuous form against the sky seven hundred
feet in air. And from the mountainside near at hand stared from among
the thick greenery of a cedar, the face of an Indian whose black hair
was adorned by a single red feather.

Within the wagon, unconscious of all, in strange fellowship, lay the
living and the dead.

CHAPTER IV

AN UNWONTED PRAYER

When Willock started up from the mattress in the covered wagon, the