rching him,
shrivelling him, and yet there seemed no end to the waterless gulches, to
the sand, the cactuses, the stunted sage-brush. His horse was stumbling
oftener, but he felt no pity--only irritation that it had not more
stamina. A sort of numbness, the lethargy of great weakness, was creeping
over him; his heart was sagging with a dull despair. He believed that he
must be lost, yet he was past cursing or complaining aloud. Only an
occasional gasp or a fretful, inarticulate sound came when his horse
stumbled badly.

He thought he saw a barbed wire fence. A barbed wire fence meant
civilization! He swung his horse and rode toward it. The dark spots he had
thought were posts were only sage-brush. The smarting of his eye-balls and
eyelids aroused him to an astonishing fact: he was crying in his weakness,
crying of disappointment like a child! But he was astonished most that he
had tears to shed--that they had not dried up like his blood.

Tears! He remembered his last tears, and they kept on sliding down his
cheek now as he recalled the occasion. His father had given him a colt
back there where they slept between sheets. He had broken it himself, and
taught it tricks. It whinnied to him when he passed the stable. The other
boys envied him his colt, and he meant to show it at the fair. He came
home one day and the colt was gone. His father handed him a silver dollar.
He had thrown the money at his father and struck him in the face, and
while the tears streamed from his eyes he had cursed his father with the
oaths with which his father had so frequently cursed him; and he had kept
on cursing until he was beaten into unconsciousness. There had been no
love between them, ever, but he had not expected that. Since then there
had been no time or inclination for tears, for it was then he had "quit
the flat." The rage of his boyhood came back to Smith as he thought of it
now. He swore, though it hurt him to speak.

His eyes were still smarting when he raised them to see a horseman on a
distant ridge. The sight roused him like a stimulant. Was he friend or
foe? He reined his horse, and, drawing his rifle from its scabbard,
waited; for the stranger had seen him and was riding toward him down the
ridge.

"If he ain't my kind, I'll have to stop him," Smith muttered.

The strength of excitement came to him, and once more he sat erect in the
saddle, fingering the trigger as the horseman came steadily on.

"He rides like a Texica