he could distinguish
nothing; the gloom was still too deep. He spoke more loudly; still there
was no reply. Then he raised his voice in a shout; it rang through the
silence, and, when it ceased, the silence reigned again.

A deadly chill came on him. How had he missed his comrade? They must be
far apart, he knew, since no response was given to his summons; or--the
alternative rose before him with a terrible foreboding.

That intense quiet had a repose as of death in it, a ghastly loneliness
that seemed filled with desolation. His horse was stretched before him
on the sand, powerless to rise and drag itself a rood onward, and fast
expiring. From the plains around him not a sound came, either of friend
or foe. The consciousness that he was alone, that he had lost forever
the only friend left to him, struck on him with that conviction which
so often foreruns the assurance of calamity. Without a moment's pause
he plunged back in the direction he had come, leaving the charger on
the ground to pant its life out as it must, and sought to feel his way
along, so as to seek as best he could the companion he had deserted. He
still could not see a rood before him, but he went on slowly, with some
vague hope that he should ere long reach the man whom he knew death or
the fatality of accident alone would keep from his side. He could not
feel or hear anything that gave him the slightest sign or clew to aid
his search; he only wandered farther from his horse, and risked falling
afresh into the hands of his pursuers; he shouted again with all his
strength, but his own voice alone echoed over the plains, while his
heart stood still with the same frozen dread that a man feels when,
wrecked on some barren shore, his cry for rescue rings back on his own
ear over the waste of waters.

The flicker of the dawn was growing lighter in the sky, and he could see
dimly now, as in some winter day's dark twilight, though all around him
hung the leaden mist, with the wild winds driving furiously. It was with
difficulty also that he kept his feet against their force; but he was
blown onward by their current, though beaten from side to side, and he
still made his way forward. He had repassed the ground already traversed
by some hundred yards or more, which seemed the length of many miles in
the hurricane that was driving over the earth and sky, when some outline
still duskier than the dusky shadow caught his sight; it was the body of
a horse, standing