hrunk still further and raised a hand between them. He snatched
at it, pulling it down, saying hoarsely:

"Of me?"

"Of something--I don't know what. Of something terrible and strange."

She tried to strike at her horse with the reins, but the man's hand
dropped like a hawk on the pommel and drew the tired animal back to the
foot pace.

"If you love me there's no need of fear," he said, then waited, the
sound of her terrified breathing like the beating of waves in his ears,
and murmured lower than before, "And you love me. I know it."

Her face showed in dark profile against the deep sky. He stared at it,
then suddenly set his teeth and gave the pommel a violent jerk that
made the horse stagger and grind against its companion. The creaking
of the wagon came faint from a wake of shadowy trail.

"You've done it for weeks. Before you knew. Before you lied to your
father when he tried to make you marry David."

She dropped the reins and clinched her hands against her breast, a
movement of repression and also of pleading to anything that would
protect her, any force that would give her strength to fight, not the
man alone, but herself. But the will was not within her. The desert
grew dim, the faint sounds from the wagon faded. Like a charmed bird,
staring straight before it, mute and enthralled, she rocked lightly to
left and right, and then swayed toward him.

The horse, feeling the dropped rein, stopped, jerking its neck forward
in the luxury of rest, its companion coming to a standstill beside it.
Courant raised himself in his saddle and gathered her in an embrace
that crushed her against his bony frame, then pressed against her face
with his, till he pushed it upward and could see it, white, with closed
eyes, on his shoulder. He bent till his long hair mingled with hers
and laid his lips on her mouth with the clutch of a bee on a flower.

They stood a compact silhouette, clear in the luminous starlight. The
crack in the canvas that covered the wagon back widened and the eye
that had been watching them, stared bright and wide, as if all the life
of the feeble body had concentrated in that one organ of sense. The
hands, damp and trembling, drew the canvas edges closer, but left space
enough for the eye to dwell on this vision of a shattered world. It
continued to gaze as Susan slid from the encircling arms, dropped from
her horse, and came running forward, stumbling on the fallen bushes, as
she ran