e. "You don't mean--"

"Yes, I do. You must be right."

It was the speaker who held out a dimly-seen hand now, one that was
grasped and held while the ponies closed in so much together that the
boys' legs touched as they cantered steadily on straight for a line
drawn down in imagination from the planet now twinkling brightly--the
guiding star which both boys mentally prayed might lead them to the
object of their quest.

Then cantering steadily till the ponies dropped into a walk to avoid
rough ground, the two lads rode on and on, with the barrels rolling
behind, and the hours gently gliding by unheeded, till the glittering
star sank lower and lower and dropped at last into the great bed of haze
which seemed to extinguish it all at once, but not until Chris had
marked down another to take its place as their goal.

Neither spoke, for their heads were too full of the object they had in
view, with its hopes and many fears.

The ponies kept on straight for the starry guides, not deviating in the
least from the point at which their heads had been directed by their
riders, and the mule followed steadily behind, with the empty barrels
keeping up their hollow, rumbling sound, and it was this that seemed to
form a strange lulling accompaniment to the boys' thoughts, which in the
course of their progress gradually darkened into a confused
nightmare-like state. It was not sleep, but a stupor in which they kept
on their horses instinctively, from no voluntary effort of their own.
The state of exhaustion and weakness into which they had been lapsing
during the perilous journey must have had much to do with their
feelings, and robbed them of the power to feel more than a dull, numbing
pain which came and went as their steeds ambled or walked unchecked or
guided by rein, for even the lariat had glided from Chris's fingers and
trailed along behind the mule upon the sand. Not that it mattered, for
the mongrel beast kept steadily on behind its companions, trotting or
cantering or dropping into a walk as they gave it the cue, but never
once stopping to rest or attempting to browse.

Always onward, straight onward, while the riders sank deeper and deeper
into their strange stupor-like state, which, in one faint struggle back
into partial consciousness, Chris had likened to the closing-in of the
sultry haze which seemed to him to press upon him as if it grew so thick
that it held him fast what time he was being urged through it.