y as dust, her tongue clove to the roof of
her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain.

What she dreaded came.

Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed,
the animal strained with hard-drawn, panting gasps to answer the demand
made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded
onward. In the lantern light she saw his head stretched out in the
racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and
blood, his heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his
heart gave; she knew that, half a league more forced from him, he would
drop like a dead thing never to rise again. She let the bridle drop upon
the poor beast's neck, and threw her arms above her head with a shrill,
wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the
cry of a shot-stricken animal. She saw it all: the breaking of the
rosy, golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the
few picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the leveled carbines
gleaming in the first rays of the sun. . . She had seen it so many
times--seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the
morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass.

That single moment was all the soldier's nature in her gave to the
abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her. With that one
cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the weakness spent itself;
she knew that action alone could aid him. She looked across, southward
and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught near from which
she could get aid. If there were none, the horse must drop down to die,
and with his life the other life would perish as surely as the sun would
rise.

Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and there by
fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the distance of some yet
darker thing, moving rapidly--a large cloud skimming the earth. She let
the horse, which had paused the instant the bridle had touched his neck,
stand still a while, and kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud
till, with the marvelous surety of her desert-trained vision, she
disentangled it from the floating mists and wavering shadows and
recognized it, as it was, a band of Arabs.

If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength of her
horse would be fully enough to take her into safety from their pursuit,
or even from their perception, fo