hen the man came about them to dig
with his bloody fingers in the sand.

He tried another place, and another--he didn't know--he was a man of
the short-grass country, not a coaster; perhaps a sandy sink might
mean fresh water. But after each effort the damp feeling on his hands
was from his gashed and battered head and not life-giving water. He
wiped the blood from his eyes and stood up in the starlight.

"Twenty-one of 'em--alive--and me," he muttered. "I got 'em off--they
trampled me and beat me down, but I got their pens open. Twenty-one
livin'--and me on the sands!"

He wondered stupidly how he had done it. The stern of the _Marie
Louise_ had burned off and sogged down in deep water, but her bow hung
to the reef, and in smoke and flame he had fought the cattle over it.
They clustered now in the false water-hole, silent, listless, as if
they knew the uselessness of the urge of life on Au Fer reef.

And after a while the man went on eastward. Where and how far the sand
ridge stretched he did not know. Vaguely he knew of the tides and sun
to-morrow. From the highest point he looked back. The wreck was a dull
red glow, the stars above it cleared now of smoke. The sea, too,
seemed to have gone back to its infinite peace, as if it had washed
itself daintily after this greasy morsel it must hide in its depths.

A half hour the man walked wearily, and then before him stretched
water again. He turned up past the tide flowing down the pass--perhaps
that was all of Au Fer. A narrow spit of white sand at high tide, and
even over that, the sea breeze freshening, the surf would curl?

"Ships never come in close, they said," he mused tiredly, "and miles
o' shoals to the land--and then just swamp for miles. Dumb brutes o'
cows, and me on this--and no water nor feed, nor shade from the sun."

He stumbled on through the shallows, noticing apathetically that the
water was running here. Nearly to his waist he waded, peering into the
starlight. He was a cowman and he couldn't swim; he had never seen
anything but the dry ranges until he said he would go find the girl he
had met once on the upper Brazos--a girl who told him of sea and
sunken forests, of islands of flowers drifting in lonely swamp
lakes--he had wanted to see that land, but mostly the Cajan girl of
Bayou Des Amoureaux.

He wouldn't see her now; he would die among dying cattle, but maybe it
was fit for a cattleman to go that way--a Texas man and Texas cows.

Then h