ead.
Again and again it came--a moan born of the frightful torture of mortal
agony.

Giving his mount a touch of spur, the horseman turned the animal
westward toward the Llano Estacado. So horrible were the sounds that
he had paled under his tan. But he headed directly toward the
direction of the cries. He knew that some human being was suffering
frightful pain.

Crossing a sun-baked gully, he climbed upward and onto a flat-topped,
miniature butte. Here he saw a spectacle that literally froze him with
horror.

Although accustomed to a hundred gruesome sights in that savage land,
he had never seen one like this. Staked on the ground, feet and arms
wide-stretched, and securely bound, was a man. Or rather, it was a
thing that had once been a man. It was a torture that even the
diabolical mind of an Indian could not have invented. It was the
insane creation of another race--the work of a madman.

For the suffering wretch had been left on his back, face up to the sun,
with his eyelids removed!

Ants crawled over the sufferer, apparently believing him dead. Flies
buzzed, and a raven flapped away, beating the air with its startled
wings. The horseman dismounted, took his water bag from his horse, and
approached the tortured man.

The moaning man on the ground did not see him, for his eyes were
shriveled. He was blind.

The youth with the water bag tried to speak, but at first words failed
to come. The sight was too ghastly.

"Heah's watah," he muttered finally. "Just--just try and stand the
pain fo' a little longah. I'll do all I can fo' yo'."

He held the water bag at the swollen, blackened lips. Then he poured a
generous portion of the contents over the shriveled eyes and
skeletonlike face.

For a while the tortured man could not speak. But while his rescuer
slashed loose the rawhide ropes that bound him, he began to stammer a
few words:

"Heaven bless yuh! I thought I was dead, or mad! Oh, how I wanted
water! Give me more--more!"

"In a little while," said the other gently.

In spite of the fact that he was now free, the sufferer could not move
his limbs. Groans came from his lips.

"Shoot me!" he cried. "Put a bullet through me! End this, if yuh've
got any pity for me! I'm blind--dying. I can't stand the pain. Yuh
must have a gun. Why don't yuh kill me and finish me?"

It was the living dead! The buckskin-clad youth gave him more water,
his face drawn with compassion.

"Yo