ne hand on Jack's hot
brow and the other on his pulse.

Then he attended to Firio, who was talking incoherently:

"Take water-hole--boil coffee in the morning--quail for dinner, Senor
Jack--_si, si_!"

When they had moved Jack and Firio into the shadow of the cotton-woods
and forced water down their throats, Firio revived enough to recognize
those around him and to cry out an inquiry about Jack; but Jack himself
continued in a stupor, apparently unconscious of his surroundings and
scarcely alive except for breathing. Yet, when litters of blankets and
rifles tied together had been fashioned and attached to the pack-saddles
of tandem burros, as he was lifted into place for the return he seemed to
understand that he was starting on a journey; for he said, disjointedly:

"Don't forget Wrath of God--and Jag Ear is thirsty--and bury Wrath of God
fittingly--give him an epitaph! He was gloomy, but it was a good gloom, a
kind of kingly gloom, and he liked the prospect when at last he stuck his
head through the blue blanket of the horizon."

Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead
counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of God
the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy. Bob
Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood: "Here lies the
gloomiest pony that ever was. The gloomier he was the better he went and
the better Jack Wingfield liked him;" which was Bob's way of interpreting
Jack's instructions.

Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the
slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all
Little Rivers had been asking ever since, "How is he?" A ghastly,
painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night,
with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet
bandages might be kept on Jack's feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was
frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack's hot,
cracking lips.

"If he were free of this jouncing! It is a terrible strain on him, but
the only thing is to go on!" the doctor kept repeating.

But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly
convalescing, the fever refused to abate. It seemed bound to burn out the
life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased. Men
found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis. John
Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under D