s condition was still so serious
that she had to help him into the saddle. With the pony in lead, she set
out straight toward the North Star.

Before many miles Lennon caught himself lapsing into a doze. He had
almost dropped his rifle. To make certain against its loss, he thrust it
into his cartridge belt like a pistol. After this he drowsed off again
into a half torpor of sleep and exhaustion. Some automatic functioning
of his subconscious mind kept him balanced in the saddle.

When at last he roused from the stupor it was to a miserable
realization of pain and weariness and cold. A bleak gray light was
filtering over the eastern rim of mesas down into the blackness of the
Basin. Dry as was this land of desolation, it was not so utterly arid as
the sea-level deserts of the lower Colorado.

Lennon shivered and forced open his heavy eyelids. He first made out the
bowed figure of Carmena plodding along, with one backward-dragged hand
noosed in the reins of the weary pony. The gray light gradually
brightened. He saw that the girl was swaying, almost staggering. He
forced out a hoarse cry:

"Stop!"

The call broke the hypnotic spell of motion that alone had enabled the
girl to keep placing one leaden foot before the other. She tottered and
sank down and lay still. Lennon dropped out of the saddle to bend over
her. Like the knees of the pony, the girl's moccasins were torn with the
thorns of cacti and desert bushes, against which they had struck in the
dark.

She had not fainted. Her dark eyes gazed up at Lennon, wide with an
anguish of self-reproach.

"Used up--can't make it," she whispered. "No chance for both--after
sun-up. Ride hard toward Triple Butte."

Lennon's reply was to open the canteen and hold it to her lips. Only a
few drops were left when she managed to thrust it away. He put his
uninjured arm about her slender waist and lifted her to her feet.

"Ride--your turn," he commanded. "I walk. Never say die!"

Her sunken eyes lighted with a faint glow. A last flicker of strength
enabled her, with his help, to pull herself into the saddle. Lennon
caught up her rifle and started off toward Triple Butte in desperate
haste.

An hour after sunrise found him still staggering forward almost at a dog
trot. The northern border mesas of the Basin were now only a short
distance ahead. But already his swollen tongue was beginning to blacken
in his mouth. When at last he came to the foot of the lower mesa he
could