the ridge over which his horse had
gone. As he was pretty well prepared to expect, there was no horse in
sight. He waited for the light to brighten, probing with eager eyes
into the distances. Swiftly the sky filled to the coming day; the
shadows withdrew from the hollows, the earth stood forth, naked and
clearly revealed. Save for himself, feeling dwarfed in this immensity,
there was no living thing within the scope of his vision. He shook his
head and turned back to camp and breakfast, frowning grimly. He would
have to walk out of this mess, and like any twelve cattlemen out of a
dozen he had little love of walking.

While he ate his morning meal he turned matters over in his mind. He
saw that he could look forward confidently to a couple of unpleasant
days. He did not anticipate any difficulty beyond that of the
irksomeness of being obliged to trudge something like fifty miles in
the sun. He knew that he would waste no end of time trying to track
the vanished horse across such a land as this; he saw only
foolhardiness in leaving the trail he had had picked out for him and,
with little food and no knowledge of water, turning out across an
utterly unknown land of forbidding desolation. He judged roughly that
Desert Valley was as near as Quigley. Hence, having filled his canteen
and tied his provisions into a bundle, he slung the two over his
shoulders, left his saddle where it was and turned his face toward the
home range.

Despite his determination to get an ugly task over and done with, he
was a full four hours making the first ten miles. He walked as swiftly
as he might to take the full advantage of the lesser heat of the
earlier hours, but his way led him through loose sand, down into cuts
and gorges, up their steep sides, across fields of loose stones, which,
shifting underfoot, made his striving for haste a pure work of
Tantalus. At the end of the first hour the heat was already intense;
at the end of the second he felt that his skin was as dry as the desert
sands and that the moisture of his body was being sucked out of it by
the thirsty air and that at every stride the day grew drier and hotter.
Thirst clutched his throat, ached throughout his body, that thirst
which is like no other, desert thirst. Again and again he drank from
his canteen. When he ploughed up the slope of the little hills and
then down into their hollow to the double-ringed spring, his canteen
was half empty. And when at la