id you leave me?"

The answer was very low, and his voice shook as he uttered it; but
through the roar of the hurricane Rake heard it.

"That was different, sir," he said simply. "Let me lie here, and go you
on. It'll soon be over, and there's naught to be done."

"O God! is no help possible?"

"Don't take on, sir; it's no odds. I always was a scamp, and scamps die
game, you know. My life's been a rare spree, count it all and all; and
it's a great, good thing, you see, sir, to go off quick like this. I
might have been laid in hospital. If you'd only take the beast and ride
on, sir--"

"Hush! hush! Would you make me coward, or brute, or both?"

The words broke in an agony from him. The time had been when he had
been himself stretched in what he had thought was death, in just such
silence, in just such solitude, upon the bare, baked earth, far from
men's aid, and near only to the hungry eyes of watching beasts of prey.
Then he had been very calm, and waited with indifference for the end;
now his eyes swept over the remorseless wastes, that were growing
faintly visible under the coming dawn, with all the impatience, the
terror, of despair. Death had smitten down many beside him; buoyant
youth and dauntless manhood he had seen a thousand times swept under the
great waves of war and lost forever, but it had an anguish for him here
that he would never have known had he felt his own life-blood well out
over the sand. The whole existence of this man had been sacrificed for
him, and its only reward was a thrust of a lance in a midnight fray--a
grave in an alien soil.

His grief fell dully on ears half deafened already to the sounds of the
living world. The exhaustion that follows on great loss of blood was
upon the soldier who for the last half hour had lain there in the
darkness and the stillness, quietly waiting death, and not once seeking
even to raise his voice for succor lest the cry should reach and should
imperil his master.

The morning had broken now, but the storm had not lulled. The northern
winds were sweeping over the plains in tenfold violence, and the rains
burst and poured, with the fury of water-spouts on the crust of the
parched, cracked earth. Around them there was nothing heard or seen
except the leaden, angry mists, tossed to and fro under the hurricane,
and the white light of the coming day breaking lividly through
the clouds. The world held no place of more utter desolation, more
unspeakable lone