angry whisper.

"Are you going to do what I tell you or not?"

"Not," said Farallone.

"I'll"--the groom's voice loudened--his eye sought an ally in mine. But
I turned my face away and pretended that I had not seen or heard. There
had been born in my breast suddenly a cold unreasoning fear of Farallone
and of what he might do to us weaklings. I heard no more words and,
venturing a look, saw that the groom was seating himself once more by
the bride.

"If you sit on the other side of her," said Farallone, "you'll keep the
sun off her head."

He turned his bold eyes on me and winked one of them. And I was so taken
by surprise that I winked back and could have kicked myself for doing
so.

II

Farallone helped the bride to her feet. "That's right," he said with a
kind of nursely playfulness, and he turned to the groom.

"Because I told you to help yourself," he said, "doesn't mean that I'm
not going to do the lion's share of everything. I am. I'm fit. You and
the writer man aren't. But you must do just a little more than you're
able, and that's all we'll ask of you. Everybody works this voyage
except the woman."

"I can work," said the bride.

"Rot!" said Farallone. "We'll ask you to walk ahead, like a kind of
north star. Only we'll tell you which way to turn. Do you see that
sugar-loaf? You head for that. Vamoose! We'll overhaul you."

The bride moved upon the desert alone, her face toward an easterly hill
that had given Farallone his figure of the sugar-loaf. She had no longer
the effect of a wilted flower, but walked with quick, considered steps.
What the groom carried and what I carried is of little moment. Our packs
united would not have made the half of the lumbersome weight that
Farallone swung upon his giant shoulders.

"Follow the woman," said he, and we began to march upon the
shoe-and-stocking track of the bride. Farallone, rolling like a ship (I
had many a look at him over my shoulder) brought up the rear. From time
to time he flung forward a phrase to us in explanation of his rebellious
attitude.

"I take command because I'm fit; you're not. I give the orders because I
can get 'em obeyed; you can't." And, again: "You don't know east from
west; I do."

All the morning he kept firing disagreeable and very personal remarks at
us. His proposition that we were not in any way fit for anything he
enlarged upon and illustrated. He flung the groom's unemployed ancestry
at him; he likened the groom t