mock her as
the desert mocked him, refusing to yield up one single drop of water?

Gradually, steadily he swung toward the left, riding a little to
westward so as not to be seeking over the same territory across which
the men before him had ridden. And as he rode he saw, a mile away from
him, still farther to the west, a ring of hills, and he prayed that he
might come upon the spring there and upon Argyl. And his moving lips
were not still before he had found her.

He had swept down into a little hollow, the slightest of depressions
in the sandy level, not to be seen until a man was upon its very rim,
floored with scanty, dry brush. His tired horse threw up its head and
shied. But Conniston had seen her first, a huddled heap, almost at his
feet.

"Argyl!" he cried, loudly, dropping to his knees beside her, leaving
his horse to stand staring at them. "Argyl!"

She lay as she had fallen, her right arm stretched straight out in
front of her, her left arm lying close to her side, her face hidden
from him in the sand. She did not move. Had he called to her an hour
ago she would have turned her wide eyes upon him wonderingly. Now, if
he had shouted with the voice of thunder she would not have heard. She
was dead, or death was very close to her. For a moment, a moment
lengthened into an eternity of hell, he did not know whether the
shadowy wings of the stern angel were now rustling over her head or if
already the wings had swept over her and had borne away from him the
soul of the woman he loved.

"Argyl, Argyl dear!" he whispered. "I have come to save you, Argyl. To
take you home. Oh! don't you hear me, Argyl?"

He put his arms about her, and as he knelt lifted her and put his face
to hers. She was not cold; thank Heaven, she was not cold! But she
did not move, she was heavy in his arms, the warmth of her body might
have been from the ebbing tide of life or from the sun's fire. He
could not feel her breathe, could not feel the beating of her heart.

He held her so that he could look into her face, and the cry upon his
lips was frozen into a grief-stricken horror. Her hair unbound,
hanging loose, tangled about her face, dull and soiled with the gray
sand-dust, her lips dry, cracked, unnaturally big, her cheeks pinched
and stamped at the corners of her mouth with the misery through which
she had lived--was this Argyl?

He laid her back upon the sand, his body bent over her to shut out the
sun, and unslung his canteen