, catching up the water-jar (the olla de agua), overtook
him, and shook it in his face with the sweetest derision. "Now we'll go
together," said she, and started gayly through the green trees and the
garden. He followed her, two paces behind, half ashamed, and gazing at
her red handkerchief, and the black hair blowing a little; thus did they
cross the tiny cool home acre through the twinkling pleasantness of the
leaves, and pass at once outside the magic circle of irrigation into
Arizona's domain, among a prone herd of carcasses upon the ground--dead
cattle, two seasons dead now, hunted to this sanctuary by the drought,
killed in the sanctuary by cold water.

A wise, quiet man, with a man's will, may sometimes after three days of
thirst still hold grip enough upon his slipping mind to know, when he
has found the water, that he must not drink it, must only dampen his
lips and tongue in a drop-by-drop fashion until he has endured the
passing of many slow, insidious hours. Even a wise man had best have a
friend by his side then, who shall fight and tear him from the perilous
excesses that he craves, knock him senseless if he cannot pin him down;
but cattle know nothing of drop by drop, and you cannot pin down a
hundred head that have found water after three days. So these hundred
had drunk themselves swollen, and died. Cracked hide and white bone they
lay, brown, dry, gaping humps straddled stiff askew in the last
convulsion; and over them presided Arizona--silent, vast, all sunshine
everlasting.

Luis saw these corpses that had stumbled to their fate, and he
remembered; with Lolita in those trees all day, he had forgotten for a
while. He pointed to the wide-strewn sight, familiar, monotonous as
misfortune. "There will be many more," he said. "Another rainy season is
gone without doing anything for the country. It cannot rain now for
another year, Lolita."

"God help us and our cattle, and travellers!" she whispered.

Luis musingly repeated a saying of the country about the Tinaja Bonita,

"'When you see the Black Cross dry,
Fill the wagon cisterns high'"

--a doggerel in homely Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom,
stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded
wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and passed beneath the
desert.

"But the Black Cross has never been dry yet," Luis said.

"You have not seen it lately," said Lolita.

"Lolita! do you mean--" He looked in