s bare toes. But he kicked him only once. Peter's ribs were
strong and none too well covered.

Peter looked at Roger's thin white body and his brown angry face, moved
his ears, breathed hard and snorted.

Roger roared again. "All right, sir! All right, sir! If you won't come
with me, neither shall you go back to the Germans and their
sympathizers. I'll fix you, young fellow!"

He led Peter up to a mesquite tree and with trembling fingers tied the
little gray head as high as he could pull it.

"There," he said, "you can stay there till the buzzards get you" and
without a backward glance he swam once more across to the island.

Here he dressed and lay for a time resting in the sand. The sun had sunk
behind the ranges. The night shadows in the valley were cool. Partly
because of this, partly from sheer nervous and physical exhaustion,
Roger shivered. Finally when twilight had settled in the valley, he sat
up and gazed across the river. It was too dark to see Peter. There was
only the murmur of the river in all that barren solitude. Then suddenly
Peter brayed. It was not the usual ridiculous hee haw of the burro but a
strange blending of whinny and scream. Roger shuddered and told himself
that he would keep Peter company just a little longer, then move on.

The desert night came on quickly and completely. The great desert stars
had pricked out before the last light had left the mountain tops. An
hour passed, then two. Roger was too weary to build a fire, too wretched
to sleep. He sat huddled in the sand, his head against a great
cottonwood log, his face toward the river. A dim red edge began to show
over the ranges. It lifted into a crescent, then into a half circle.
Suddenly the little valley was flooded with white light and the moon
sailed free over the sliding river.

Roger stared eagerly toward the mesquite tree. Peter stood unmoving, his
little gray head turned upward, his sturdy neck seeming unusually long
and thin, stretched thus unnaturally. It seemed curious to Roger that
the burro did not kick nor lunge. But Peter's patience, won by who knows
what beaten and burdened ancestry, did not desert him. He did not tug at
his rope but he brayed again, as if he were giving an eerie shriek of
warning.

Roger bit his nails nervously, then hollowed out a bed in the sand and
lying down tried to sleep. The stars glowed down on him quietly. From
where he lay he could see Peter. The little gray head must be tired. How
Fe