e mist mark the low watershed that rims the western valley
of the Kaw.

They went alone because skill, and not numbers, could save a captive
from the hands of the Kiowas, and the sight of a force would mean death
to the victim before he could be rescued.

A splash of water against a hot hand hanging down; a sense of light, of
motion; a glimpse of coarse sands and thin straggling weeds beside the
edge of the stream down which the pathway ran; a sharp aching at the
base of the brain; an agony of strained muscles--thus slowly I came to
my senses, to memory, to the knowledge that I was bound hand and foot to
a pony's back; that the sun was hot, and the sands were hotter, and the
glare on the waters blinding; that every splash of the pony's hoofs sent
up glittering sparkles that stabbed my aching eyes like white-hot
dagger-points; that the black and clotted dirt on the pony's shoulder
was not mud, but blood; that before and behind were other splashing
feet, all hiding the trail in the thin current of the wide old Arkansas;
that the quick turns to follow the water and the need for speed gave no
consideration to the helpless rider. The image of six pairs of snaky
black eyes came to help the benumbed brain, and I knew with whom I was
again captive. But there was no question about the friendly motive now,
for there was no friendly motive now. And as we pushed on east, Jondo
and Bill Banney were hurrying toward the northwest, and the space
between us widened every minute. A wave of helplessness and despair
swept over me; then a wild up-leaping prayer for deliverance to a
far-away unpitying Heaven; a sudden sense of the futility of prayer in a
land the Lord had forgotten; and then anger, hot and wholesome, and an
unconquered, dominant will to gain freedom or to die game, swept every
other feeling away, marvelously mastering the sense of pain that had
ground mercilessly at every nerve. Then came that small voice which a
man hears sometimes in the night stillness and sometimes in the blare of
daylight wrangle. And all suddenly I knew that He who notes the
sparrow's fall knew that I was alone with death, slow-lingering,
inch-creeping death, out on that wide, lonely plain. The glare on the
waters softened. The heat fell away. The despair and agony lifted. In
all the world--my world--there was only one, God; not a far, unpitying,
book-made Lord beyond the height of the glaring blue dome above me. God
beside me on, the yellow waters of