"There's no one like Susan," the lover went on, now with returning
forces, anxious to give the mead of praise where it was due. "She
tried to talk me out of it, and then when she saw I couldn't stand it
she just went quietly off and got it."

"I guess you could have held out till the morning if you'd put your
mind to it," said the old man dryly, rising with the blankets.

For the moment he despised David almost as bitterly as Courant did. It
was not alone the weakness so frankly admitted; it was that his action
had made Daddy John harbor secret censure of the being dearest to him.
The old man could have spat upon him. He moved away for fear of the
words that trembled on his tongue. And another and deeper pain
tormented him--that his darling should so love this feeble creature
that she could steal for him and take the blame of his misdeeds. This
was the man to whom she had given her heart! He found himself wishing
that David had never come back from his search for the lost horses.
Then the other man, the real man that was her fitting mate, could have
won her.

At sunset the train was ready. Every article that could be dispensed
with was left, a rich find for the Indians whose watch fires winked
from the hills. To the cry of "Roll out," and the snap of the long
whip, the wagon lurched into motion, the thirst-racked animals
straining doggedly as it crunched over sage stalks and dragged through
powdery hummocks. The old man walked by the wheel, the long lash of
his whip thrown afar, flashing in the upper light and descending in a
lick of flame on the mules' gray flanks. With each blow fell a phrase
of encouragement, the words of a friend who wounds and wounding himself
suffers. David rode at the rear with Susan. The two men had told him
he must ride if he died for it, and met his offended answer that he
intended to do so with sullen silence. In advance, Courant's figure
brushed between the bushes, his hair a moving patch of copper color in
the last light.

Darkness quickly gathered round them. The bowl of sky became an
intense Prussian blue that the earth reflected. In this clear, deep
color the wagon hood showed a pallid arch, and the shapes of man and
beast were defined in shadowless black. In the west a band of
lemon-color lingered, and above the stars began to prick through, great
scintillant sparks, that looked, for all their size, much farther away
than the stars of the peopled places. Their light