t meant water.

Some one had told him of the cowardice of wolves. He would try it.
Picking up a stone, he flung it at them, at the same time running
forward, brandishing his arms, and giving a feeble shout. They sprang
aside, hesitated a moment, and then turned tail and fled.

Soon afterwards Glen reached the valley, which was apparently about half
a mile broad. On its farther side was a line of shadow blacker than the
rest. It might be timber. With tottering footsteps the boy staggered
towards it. As his feet touched a patch of grass he could have knelt and
kissed it, but at the same instant he heard the most blessed sound on
earth, the trickling of a rivulet. He fell as he reached it, and plunged
his head into the life-giving water. It was warm and strongly
impregnated with sulphur; but never had he tasted anything so delicious,
nor will he ever again.

Had it been cold water, the amount that he drank might have killed him;
as it was, it only made him sick. After a while he recovered, and then
how he gloated in that tiny stream. How he bathed his hands and face,
and, suddenly, how he wished the others were there with him. Perhaps a
shot might bear the joyful news to the ears of the general.

With the thought he drew his revolver, and roused the mountain echoes
with its six shots, fired in quick succession. Then he tried to walk up
the valley in the hope of finding a ranch. It was all he could do to
keep on his feet, and only a mighty effort of will restrained him from
flinging himself down on the grass and going to sleep beside that stream
of blessed water.

A few minutes later there came a quick rush of hoofs from up the valley,
and in the moonlight he saw two horsemen galloping towards him. They
dashed up with hurried questions as to the firing they had heard, and,
somehow, he managed to make them understand that a party of white men
were dying of thirst twenty miles out on the desert.

The next thing he knew, he was in a house, and dropping into a sleep of
such utter weariness that to do anything else would have been beyond his
utmost power of mind or body.

Chapter XXXIX.

CROSSING THE SIERRA NEVADA.

When Glen next woke to a realizing sense of his surroundings, the
evening shadows had again fallen, and he heard familiar voices near by
him. All were there, General Elting, Mr. Hobart, "Billy" Brackett,
Binney Gibbs, and the rest, just sitting down to a supper at the
hospitable ranch table. It was