all.

Madeline King thought of her husband, wounded, helpless. "Oh,
Juan--must you leave us? If--if something has happened to him it only
means your life, too!"

"_Voy_!" said the Indian, "_I go_!" He turned and looked again at Honor,
this time with a warming pity in his bronze face. "_I will bring back
your man, Senorita_," he said in Spanish. "And this great strong
one"--he pierced Carter through with his black gaze--"shall guard you
till I come again." Then he smiled and flung at him that stinging
Spanish proverb which runs, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed
man is king!" Then he went out of the house, dropping to his hands and
knees, hugging the shadows, creeping along the tunnel of tropic green
which led to the ancient well.

Honor stopped her wild singing and shouting then, but she still sat on
the floor, striking her hands softly together, her dry lips parted in a
smile of utter peace.

"Come, Honor, take this chair!" Carter urged her, bending over her.

"I don't want a chair, Cartie," she said, gently. "I'm just waiting for
Jimsy." She looked up and caught the expression on Madeline King's face.
"Oh, you mustn't worry," she said, contentedly. "He'll bring him back.
Yaqui Juan will. He'll bring him back _safe_. Why, what kind of a God
would that be?--To let anything happen to him, _now_?" Her defense was
impregnable.

"Let her alone," said Mrs. King again. "She'll realize, soon enough,
poor child. Stay with her, Carter. I must go back to my husband." She
went away with a backward, pitying glance which yet held understanding.
She knew that danger and death and thirst were smaller things than
shame, this wife of a King who had held hard in her day.

Carter sat down and watched her drearily. He wasn't thinking now. He was
nothing at all but one burning, choking thirst, one aching resentment
... Jimsy King, who had won, after all ... who had won alive or dead.

Honor was silent for the most part but she was wholly serene. Sometimes
she spoke and her speech was harder to hear than her happy stillness.
"You know, Cartie, I can be glad it happened." She seemed to speak more
easily now, almost as if her thirst had been slaked; her voice was
clearer, steadier. "I should never have known how much I cared. It was
easy enough, wasn't it, to look at my ring and talk about 'holding hard'
when there wasn't really anything to hold _for_? I really found out
about caring to-night ... what it means. I guess I never