rowning in the dust. He was a huge young fellow, and it was
a great smooth face, from which the gaping mouth cut a slice from jaw to
jaw. Terror and rage, and an overpowering passion of self-pity,
convulsed the coarse features in turn; then, with the grunt of a wounded
beast, he rallied and plunged to his destruction, deeper and deeper into
the bush, further and further from the fence.

The trees were few and mostly stunted, but Vanheimert crashed into more
than one upon his headlong course. The sense was choked out of him
already; he was fleeing on the wings of the storm; of direction he
thought no more. He forgot that the run he had been traversing was at
the best abandoned by man and beast; he forgot the "spell" that he had
promised himself at the deserted homestead where he had once worked as a
lad. He might have remembered that the paddock in which he was burying
himself had always been the largest in the district. It was a ten-mile
block without subdividing fence or drop of water from end to end. The
whole station was a howling desert, little likely to be stocked a second
time by enlightened man. But this was the desert's heart, and into it
sped Vanheimert, coated yellow to the eyes and lips, the dust-fiend
himself in visible shape. Now he staggered in his stride, now fell
headlong to cough and sob in the hollow of his arm. The unfortunate
young man had the courage of his desperate strait. Many times he arose
and hurled himself onward with curse or prayer; many times he fell or
flung himself back to earth. But at length the storm passed over and
over his spent members; sand gathered by the handful in the folds of his
clothes; the end was as near as end could be.

It was just then that two riders, who fancied they had heard a voice,
struck an undoubted trail before it vanished, and followed it to the
great sprawling body in which the dregs of life pulsed feebly. The thing
groaned as it was lifted and strapped upon a horse; it gurgled gibberish
at the taste of raw spirits later in the same hour. It was high noon
before Vanheimert opened a seeing eye and blinked it in the unveiled
sun.

He was lying on a blanket in a treeless hollow in the midst of trees.
The ground had been cleared by no human hand; it was a little basin of
barren clay, burnt to a brick, and drained by the tiny water-hole that
sparkled through its thatch of leaves and branches in the centre of a
natural circle. Vanheimert lay on the eastern circum