The night was falling when Courant rode out. She passed him as he was mounting, the canteen strapped to the back of his saddle. "Good-by, and good luck," she said in a low voice as she brushed by. His "good-by" came back to her instilled with a new meaning. The reserve between them was gone. Separated as the poles, they had suddenly entered within the circle of an intimacy that had snapped round them and shut them in. Her surroundings fell into far perspective, losing their menace. She did not care where she was or how she fared. An indifference to all that had seemed unbearable, uplifted her. It was like an emergence from cramped confines to wide, inspiring spaces. He and she were there - the rest was nothing.

Sitting beside David she could see the rider's figure grow small, as it receded across the plain. The night had come and the great level brooded solemn under the light of the first, serene stars. In the middle of the camp Daddy John's fire flared, the central point of illumination in a ring of fluctuant yellow. Touched and lost by its waverings the old man's figure came and went, absorbed in outer darkness, then revealed his arms extended round sheaves of brush. David turned and lay on his side looking at her. Her knees were drawn up, her hands clasped round her ankles. With the ragged detail of her dress obscured, the line of her profile and throat sharp in clear silhouette against the saffron glow, she was like a statue carved in black marble. He could not see what her glance followed, only felt the consolation of her presence, the one thing to which he could turn and meet a human response.

He was feverish again, his thirst returned in an insatiable craving. Moving restlessly he flung out a hand toward her and said querulously:

"How long will Low be gone?"

"Till the morning unless he finds water by the way."

Silence fell on him and her eyes strained through the darkness for the last glimpse of the rider. He sighed deeply, the hot hand stirring till it lay spread, with separated fingers on the hem of her dress. He moved each finger, their brushing on the cloth the only sound.

"Are you in pain?" she asked and shrunk before the coldness of her voice.

"No, but I am dying with thirst."

She made no answer, resting in her graven quietness. The night had closed upon the rider's figure, but she watched where it had been. Over a blackened peak a large star soared up like a bright eye spying on the waste. Suddenly the hand clinched and he struck down at the earth with it.

"I can't go without water till the morning."

"Try to sleep," she said. "We must stand it the best way we can."

"I can't sleep."

He moaned and turned over on his face and lying thus rolled from side to side as if in anguish that movement assuaged. For the first time she looked at him, turning upon him a glance of questioning anxiety. She could see his narrow, angular shape, the legs twisted, the arms bent for a pillow, upon which his head moved in restless pain.

"David, we've got to wait."

"The night through? Stay this way till morning? I'll be dead. I wish I was now."