," was all he said.

He had no desire for breakfast; in fact, he could not have eaten, for his
tongue was swollen, and his throat felt too dry to swallow. His skin was
the color of his saddle-leather, and his inflamed eye-balls had the
redness of live coals. Smith was far from handsome that morning.

His own recent sufferings had in nowise made him more merciful: he spurred
his stiff and lifeless horse without pity, but he spurred uselessly. It
stumbled under him as he drove the spiritless band toward the hopeless
waste ahead of him.

"Unless I'm turned around, we ought to get out of this to-day," he
thought. The effort of speaking aloud was too great to be made. "Unless
I'm lost, or fall off my horse, we ought to make it sure."

Distance had meant nothing to him during the first evening and night of
his ride. He had fixed his eye upon the furthermost object within his
range of vision and ridden for it--buoyant, confident, as his horse's
flying feet ate up the intervening miles. Now he shrank from looking
ahead. He dreaded to lift his eyes to the interminable desolation
stretching before him. The minutes seemed hours long; time was protracted
as though he had been eating hasheesh. He felt as if he had ridden for a
week, before his horse's shadow told him that noon had come. The jar of
his horse hurt him, and it all seemed unreal at times, like a torturing
nightmare from which he must soon awake. He rode long distances with
closed eyes as the day wore on. The world, red and wavering, swung around
him, and he gripped his saddle-horn hard. The only real thing, the agony
of which was too great to be mistaken for anything else, was his thirst.
This was superlatively intense. There were moments when he had a desire to
slide easily from his horse into the sand and lie still--just to be rid
for a time of that jar that hurt him so. He viewed the distance to the
ground contemplatively. It was not great. He would merely crumple up like
a drunken person and go to sleep.

But these moments soon passed: the instinct of self-preservation was quick
to assert itself. Each time, he took a fresh grip on the slack reins and
kept his horse plodding onward, ever onward, through the heavy sand and
blistering alkali dust, and always to the northeast, where somewhere there
was relief which somehow he must reach.

Mile after mile crept under his horse's lagging feet. The midday sun beat
down upon him, drying the very blood in his veins, sco