om him all that he wanted in the world.

A frenzy of terrified rage upon him, he stiffened in his stirrups, he
shook his clenched fist at the quiet, jeering face whose very unmoved
stillness was like a deep contempt, and cursed it, his voice springing
harshly through his dry lips, rising almost into a sobbing shriek,
dying away without an echo, leaving the face of the desert quietly
contemptuous. For he grew suddenly as silent, a word cut in two by the
click of his teeth, the sound of his own voice in his ears tricking
him.

Breathless, a man turned to stone, he listened.

He had heard something--he _knew_ that he had heard a voice, not his
own, a voice hardly more than a faint whisper, calling to him, calling
again, then lost in the all-engulfing silence. About him the miles
were laid bare in the sunlight. There was nothing.

Driven from the moment of inactivity into a madness of haste,
tormented afresh at the thought that he had lost one precious minute,
he cut anew with his red-roweled spurs into the torn flanks of his
horse, and rode on, careless of all save that he must hurry, that his
was a great race against the racing day, that he must find her before
the night had sought her out. The very shadow which he and his horse
cast--a distorted, black centaur sort of thing, running silently
across the desert--was one with the desert in its cursed menace. For a
moment ago it had hidden under his horse's belly, and now it ran
beside him, ever lengthening, ever pushing farther to the eastward, a
grim avowal that the day was passing.

The miles fled behind him like lean greyhounds. The miles before him
reached out in unshortened endlessness. It was one o'clock. He had
been gone two hours--he had done nothing. Now, far ahead, he caught
sight of moving figures, saw a man yonder on horseback, saw another,
hardly more than a drifting dot against the sky-line to the east,
another yet to the west.

They were still searching for her, still pushing deeper and deeper
into the burning solitudes; they had found nothing. They must be, he
estimated roughly, twenty miles from Valley City. Had she ridden so
far? Why hadn't she told him more about the location of the spring? If
there _was_ a spring, had she clung close to it when her horse had
left her? Then she would not die for want of water! Or had she dug
with breaking nails into the soil which had in it moisture enough to
feed the roots of the yellow willows but which would but