pped Max also, with a hand on his arm.

"It's a wonderful picture, or would be if one were happy!" she muttered;
and then Max could feel some sudden new emotion thrill through her
body. She started, or shivered, and the fingers lying lightly on his
coat-sleeve tightened.

"What is it?" he asked, but got no answer. The girl was standing with
slightly lifted face, her eyes closed, as if behind the shut lids she
saw some vision.

"Sanda!" he breathed. It was the first time he had called her by that
name, though always in his thoughts she was Sanda. "You're frightening
me!"

"Hush!" she said. "I'm remembering a dream; you and I in the desert
together, and you saving me from some danger, I never found out what,
because I woke up too soon. Just now it was as if a voice told me this
was the place of the dream."

What caused Max to tear his eyes from the rapt, white face of the girl
at that instant, and look at the sand, he did not know. But he seemed
compelled to look. Something moved, close to Sanda's feet; something
thin and long and very flat, like a piece of rope pulled quickly toward
her by an unseen hand. Max did not stop to wonder what it was. He
swooped on it and seized the viper's neck between his thumb and finger
and snapped its spine before it had time to strike Sanda's ankle with
its poisoned fang. But not before it had time to strike him.

The keen pin-prick caught him in the ball of the thumb. It did not hurt
much, but Max knew it meant death if the poison found a vein; and he did
not want to die and leave Sanda alone with Stanton. Flinging the dead
viper off, he whipped the knife in his belt from its sheath, and with
its sharp blade slit through the skin deep into the flesh. A slight
giddiness mounted like the fumes from a stale wine-vat to his head as
he cut down to the bone and hacked off a bleeding slice of his right
hand, then cauterized the wound with the flame of a match; but he was
hardly conscious of the pain in the desperate desire to save a life
necessary to Sanda. It was of her he thought then, not of himself at all
as an entity wishing to live for its own pleasure or profit; and he was
dimly conscious, as the blood spurted from his hand, of hoping that
Sanda did not see. He would have told her not to look, but the need to
act was too pressing to give time for words. Neither he nor she had
uttered a sound since his dash for the viper had shaken her clinging
fingers from his arm; and it was only