y a hundred miles nearly of unknown
country. They could not go that way. They were not, in fact, fit for
travel in any direction. For all the day before they had run, dodging
like hunted rats, between a line of fire--of their own making--before
them, and a line of armed men behind them. They had outrun the fire
and gotten beyond its edge. They had outrun the men and escaped them.
They were free of those two enemies. But a third enemy had run with
them all through the day yesterday and had stayed with them through
all the horror of last night and it had lain with them through all the
blistering heat of to-day, thirst. Thirst, intolerable, scorching
thirst, drying their bones, splitting their lips, bulging their eyes.
And all day long, down there before their very eyes, taunting them,
torturing them by its nearness, lay a lake cool and sweet and deep and
wide. It was worse than the mirage of any desert, for they knew that
it was real. It was not merely the illusion of the sense of sight.
They could perhaps have stood the torture of one sense. But this lake
came up to them through all their senses. They could feel the air from
it cool upon their brows. The wind brought the smell of water up to
taunt their nostrils. And, so near did it seem, they could even fancy
that they heard the lapping of the little waves against the rocks.
This last they knew was an illusion. But, for the matter of that, all
might as well have been an illusion. Armed men, their enemies who had
yesterday chased them with death in their hearts, were scattered
around the shore of the lake, alert and watching for any one who might
come out of the fringe of shrub and grass beyond the line of the burnt
ground. No living thing could move down that bare and whitened
hillside toward the lake without being marked by those armed men. And,
for these two men, to be seen meant to die.

So they had lain all day on their faces and raved in their torture.
Now when they saw the fires on the shore where French Village had been
beginning to die down they were stumbling painfully and crazily down
to the water.

They threw themselves down heavily in the burnt grass at the edge of
the lake and drank greedily, feverishly until they could drink no
more. Then they rolled back dizzily upon the grass and rested until
they could return to drink. When they had fully slaked their thirst
and rested to let the nausea of weakness pass from them they realised
now that thirst was not