After he had eaten he drew a saddle back into the rock's shade, spread a blanket and threw himself on it. Almost before he had composed his body in comfort he was asleep, one arm thrown over his head, his sinewy neck outstretched, his chest rising and falling in even breaths.

At noon Daddy John in broaching the cask discovered the deficit in the water supply. She came upon the old man with the half-filled coffee-pot in his hand staring down at its contents with a puzzled face. She stood watching him, guilty as a thievish child, the color mounting to her forehead. He looked up and in his eyes she read the shock of his suspicions. Delicacy kept him silent, and as he rinsed the water round in the pot his own face reddened in a blush for the girl he had thought strong in honor and self-denial as he was.

"I took it," she said slowly.

He had to make allowances, not only to her, but to himself. He felt that he must reassure her, keep her from feeling shame for the first underhand act he had ever known her commit. So he spoke with all the cheeriness he could command:

"I guess you needed it pretty bad. Turning out as it has I'm glad you done it."

She saw he thought she had taken it for herself, and experienced relief in the consciousness of unjust punishment.

"You were asleep," she said, "and I came down and took it twice."

He did not look at her for he could not bear to see her humiliation. It was his affair to lighten her self-reproach.

"Well, that was all right. You're the only woman among us, and you've got to be kept up."

"I - I - couldn't stand it any longer," she faltered now, wanting to justify herself. "It was too much to bear."

"Don't say no more," he said tenderly. "Ain't you only a little girl put up against things that 'ud break the spirit of a strong man?"

The pathos of his efforts to excuse her shook her guarded self-control. She suddenly put her face against his shoulder in a lonely dreariness. He made a backward gesture with his head that he might toss off his hat and lay his cheek on her hair.

"There, there," he muttered comfortingly. "Don't go worrying about that. You ain't done no harm. It's just as natural for you to have taken it as for you to go to sleep when you're tired. And there's not a soul but you and me'll ever know it, and we'll forget by to-night."

His simple words, reminiscent of gentler days, when tragic problems lay beyond the confines of imagination, loosed the tension of her mood, and she clasped her arms about him, trembling and shaken. He patted her with his free hand, the coffee-pot in the other, thinking her agitation merely an expression of fatigue, with no more knowledge of its complex provocation than he had of the mighty throes that had once shaken the blighted land on which they stood.

David was better, much better, he declared, and proved it by helping clear the camp and pack the wagon for the night march. He was kneeling by Daddy John, who was folding the blankets, when he said suddenly:

"If I hadn't got water I think I'd have died last night."

The old man, stopped in his folding to turn a hardening face on him.