but a
stretch of darkening purple from which rose the scalloped crest painted
in strange colors. Courant trotted forward crying a word of hope, and
they pricked after him to where the low bulwark loomed above the
plain's swimming mystery.

When they reached it he was standing at the edge of a caverned
indentation. Dead grasses dropped against the walls, withered weeds
thickened toward the apex in a tangled carpet. There had once been
water there, but it was gone, dried, or sunk to some hidden channel in
the rock's heart. They stood staring at the scorched herbage and the
basin where the earth was cracked apart in its last gasping throes of
thirst.

David's voice broke the silence. He had climbed to the front seat, and
his face, gilded with the sunlight, looked like the face of a dead man
painted yellow.

"Is there water?" he said, then saw the dead grass and dried basin, and
met the blank looks of his companions.

Susan's laconic "The spring's dry," was not necessary. He fell forward
on the seat with a moan, his head propped in his hands, his fingers
buried in his hair. Courant sent a look of furious contempt over his
abject figure, then gave a laugh that fell on the silence bitter as a
curse. Daddy John without a word moved off and began unhitching the
mules. Even in Susan pity was, for the moment, choked by a swell of
disgust. Had she not had the other men to measure him by, had she not
within her own sturdy frame felt the spirit still strong for conflict,
she might still have known only the woman's sympathy for the feebler
creature. But they were a trio steeled and braced for invincible
effort, and this weakling, without the body and the spirit for the
enterprise, was an alien among them.

She went to the back of the wagon and opened the mess chest. As she
picked out the supper things she began to repent. The lean, bent
figure and sunken head kept recurring to her. She saw him not as David
but as a suffering outsider, and for a second, motionless, with a
blackened skillet in her hand, had a faint, clairvoyant understanding
of his soul's desolation amid the close-knit unity of their endeavor.
She dropped the tin and went back to the front of the wagon. He was
climbing out, hanging tremulous to the roof support, a haggard
spectacle, with wearied eyes and skin drawn into fine puckerings across
the temples. Pity came back in a remorseful wave, and she ran to him
and lifted his arm to her shoulder.