panting out the old servant's name. Then it went back to the
mountain man, a black shape in the loneliness of the night.

CHAPTER V

A slowly lightening sky, beneath it the transparent sapphire of the
desert wakening to the dawn, and cutting the blue expanse the line of
the new trail. A long butte, a bristling outline on the paling north,
ran out from a crumpled clustering of hills, and the road bent to meet
it. The air came from it touched with a cooling freshness, and as they
pressed toward it they saw the small, swift shine of water, a little
pool, grass-ringed, with silver threads creeping to the sands.

They drank and then slept, sinking to oblivion as they dropped on the
ground, not waiting to undo their blankets or pick out comfortable
spots. The sun, lifting a bright eye above the earth's rim, shot its
long beams over their motionless figures, "bundles of life," alone in a
lifeless world.

David alone could not rest. Withdrawn from the others he lay in the
shadow of the wagon, watching small points in the distance with a
glance that saw nothing. All sense of pain and weakness had left him.
Physically he felt strangely light and free of sensation. With his
brain endowed with an abnormal activity he suffered an agony of spirit
so poignant that there were moments when he drew back and looked at
himself wondering how he endured it. He was suddenly broken away from
everything cherished and desirable in life. The bare and heart-rending
earth about him was as the expression of his ruined hopes. And after
these submergences in despair a tide of questions carried him to
livelier torment: Why had she done it? What had changed her? When had
she ceased to care?

All his deadened manhood revived. He wanted her, he owned her, she was
his. Sick and unable to fight for her she had been stolen from him,
and he writhed in spasms of self pity at the thought of the cruelty of
it. How could he, disabled, broken by unaccustomed hardships, cope
with the iron-fibered man whose body and spirit were at one with these
harsh settings? _He_ was unfitted for it, for the heroic struggle, for
the battle man to man for a woman as men had fought in the world's dawn
into which they had retraced their steps. He could not make himself
over, become another being to appeal to a sense in her he had never
touched. He could only plead with her, beg mercy of her, and he saw
that these were not the means that won women grown h