ned and left him. He saddled his horse with eager
fingers, gave the order for the wagon carrying water to move steadily
northward until it came up with the men who had gone ahead, put a
lunch and a flask of whisky into his pocket, filled his own canteens,
and rode out across the hot sands.

"I am going to find her," he told himself, with quiet confidence.

He rode slowly at first, curbing his crying impatience with the
knowledge that restraint now meant the reserve of endurance to his
horse upon which he might be forced to call before he had found her.
He held to a course due north, remembering what Argyl had told him
about the location of the spring.

When he had gone nearly five miles he began to search to right and
left, still holding to a general northerly direction, but often
turning out of his course to ride to the tops of the knolls which rose
here and there about him. And now he had let his horse out into a
swinging gallop, urged to spare neither animal nor himself, prompted
to make what haste he might by the thought that already noon had
passed, that the day was half gone, that what he was to do must be
done before the night came.

Once--he thought that Valley City must be at least eight or nine miles
behind him--his heart leaped with sudden hope and fear as he saw, half
a mile to the east, a cluster of little sand-hills like those Argyl
had told him surrounded her spring.

He did not know that he was cutting his horse's bleeding sides with
his spurs as he galloped up the gradual slopes; long ago he had
forgotten all thought of conserving the beast's strength. He knew only
that the very soul of him cried out aloud that he might at last come
to her, and that his eyes, ever seeking, seeking, seeking, were more
than half afraid to rest upon every shadowy, stirring bunch of scrub
brush, more than half afraid to run ahead of him down the far sides of
the low hills.

Nothing before him as he jerked in his panting horse, nothing but the
desert, still, hot, thirsty, a great tortured thing under the
merciless sky. Nothing but long level stretches so bleak, so barren,
that a jackrabbit could not have hidden his gaunt, gray body. Nothing
as he looked with narrowing eye far to east and west, north and south,
but a vast, silent monotone of plain that would seem to conceal
nothing, as open under the bright rays of the sun as the palm of a
man's hand, an unsmiling, grave-faced, hypocritical thing which hid
and held fr