Billy Jordan, terror springing up into his own eyes, sped through the
door. And Conniston and Garton turned grave faces upon each other.
"Have you any idea," Garton was asking, and to Conniston his voice
seemed to come faintly from a great distance, "which way she rode?"
"North. I don't know how far. Tommy, have you a horse here I can
ride?"
"You are going to look for her?"
"Yes."
He was already at the door, and turned impatiently as Garton called to
him:
"It's up to you, Greek. But--do you think that you could do any more
to help her than the men you are sending out?"
"No. But, man, I can't sit here without knowing--"
"Greek!" There was a note in Tommy's voice, a look in his eyes which
held Conniston. "I know how you feel, old man. And don't you know that
another man might be fool enough to--to love her as much as you do?"
"Tommy!"
"Yes," with a hard little smile. "Why not? I'm only half a man, old
fellow, but the head and the heart of me are left. And I've got to sit
here and wait. And," his tone suddenly stern, "that's what you've got
to do! You can't help by going--and you are the only man who has got
to keep his head clear, who has got to stay here and direct the new
forces which our good fortune has given to us."
For a moment Conniston stood staring incredulously. Then he turned,
and his frowning eyes ran out toward the north, across the
far-stretching solitudes of the desert. Somewhere out there, a mile
away, ten miles away, twenty miles away, alone, perhaps tortured with
thirst, perhaps famishing, perhaps--He shuddered and groaned aloud as
he tried in vain to shut out the pictures which his leaping
imagination drew for him. And here Garton's quiet voice was telling
him that he had responsibilities, that he had work to do, that he, to
whom she meant more than success or failure, life or death, must hold
back from going to her.
"I won't--I can't!" he cried, wildly. "She is out there, Tommy, alone.
She needs me--and I am going to her! What do I care about your cursed
work!"
"There's a horse and saddle in the shed by the lunch-stand." Garton
turned and hobbled back to his stool.
And Conniston, without a glance over his shoulder, hastened toward the
shed. Before he had gone half the distance he stopped, swung about,
and went slowly back to the office.
"You were right, Tommy," he said, as he stopped in the doorway. "I was
a fool. Understand," he added, quickly, "that if I thought I could be
of one particle more value than the men I shall send in my place the
work here could go to eternal perdition! But I can tell them all that
I know of the way she has gone--and she would want me to stay here and
push the work as if nothing had happened."
Mrs. Ridley, hysterically crying that Argyl was dead, that she _knew_
that she was dead, and that she herself was to blame, came sobbing and
moaning and wringing her hands into the office.
"Don't do that!" Conniston cried, angrily. "If you want to do any
good, go down to the lunch-counter and help your husband put up fifty
lunches. The men may be gone all day. Put up plenty."
She hurried away, drying her eyes now that there was something for her
to do; and the two men, never looking at each other, sat and waited
the coming of Brayley's men.
All that long, endlessly, wretchedly long forenoon, Conniston went
about his work like a man under sentence of death, his face white and
drawn, his step heavy, his voice silent save when necessity drove him
to short, sharp, savage commands.
Again and again he forgot what it was that he was doing, forgot the
ditches which were branching off from the main canal, right and left,
as his eyes ran out across the sun-blistered sands, as his fancies ran
ahead of them, searching, searching, searching--and half afraid to
find what they sought. He had seen the questing riders push farther
and farther into the desert, had seen them drop out of sight. Now they
were gone; no moving dot told him where their search had taken them,
what they had found. In the middle of an order he found himself
breaking off and turning again to the north, looking for the return of
the party, hoping to see the men waving their hats that all was well,
straining his ears for their reassuring shouts. And the desert, vast,
illimitable, threatening, mysterious, full of dim promise, full of
vague threats, gave no sign.
At eleven o'clock he saw one of the men returning. Why one man alone?
What would be the word which he was bringing? His heart beat thickly.
His throat was very dry. He felt a quick pain through it as he tried
to swallow. He lifted his head, and his eyes asked the question of the
man who had jerked in his sweating horse at his side. The rider shook
his head.
"Nothin'--we ain't found nothin' yet. Mundy sent me back. He says to
tell you they're about ten mile out now, an' the hosses is gettin'
done up for water. He says will you send a water-wagon or will you
send out a fresh party?"
Conniston's heart leaped at the man's first word. He knew then how he
had feared to know what they had found. And then it sank as fear
surged higher into it. They had not found her yet--already she had
been gone a whole day, a whole night, half the second day--
"Get a fresh horse and go back," he said, when the man waited for an
answer. "Tell Mundy that I am starting a six-horse wagon, carrying
water, right away. Tell him to keep on looking. You men keep close
enough together for the most part to be able to hear a gun fired from
the man nearest you. I'll send the wagon due north. You can pick it up
by the tracks."
The man rode away, and Conniston strode to the office.
"Tommy"--and his voice was steady and determined--"you'll have to get
into a buggy and watch the work this afternoon. I've got the men
started--and now I am going to her."
"All right, Greek," Garton answered, gently. "I can keep things
going."
Conniston turned and left him. He saddled his horse with eager
fingers, gave the order for the wagon carrying water to move steadily
northward until it came up with the men who had gone ahead, put a
lunch and a flask of whisky into his pocket, filled his own canteens,
and rode out across the hot sands.
"I am going to find her," he told himself, with quiet confidence.
He rode slowly at first, curbing his crying impatience with the
knowledge that restraint now meant the reserve of endurance to his
horse upon which he might be forced to call before he had found her.
He held to a course due north, remembering what Argyl had told him
about the location of the spring.
When he had gone nearly five miles he began to search to right and
left, still holding to a general northerly direction, but often
turning out of his course to ride to the tops of the knolls which rose
here and there about him. And now he had let his horse out into a
swinging gallop, urged to spare neither animal nor himself, prompted
to make what haste he might by the thought that already noon had
passed, that the day was half gone, that what he was to do must be
done before the night came.
Once--he thought that Valley City must be at least eight or nine miles
behind him--his heart leaped with sudden hope and fear as he saw, half
a mile to the east, a cluster of little sand-hills like those Argyl
had told him surrounded her spring.
He did not know that he was cutting his horse's bleeding sides with
his spurs as he galloped up the gradual slopes; long ago he had
forgotten all thought of conserving the beast's strength. He knew only
that the very soul of him cried out aloud that he might at last come
to her, and that his eyes, ever seeking, seeking, seeking, were more
than half afraid to rest upon every shadowy, stirring bunch of scrub
brush, more than half afraid to run ahead of him down the far sides of
the low hills.
Nothing before him as he jerked in his panting horse, nothing but the
desert, still, hot, thirsty, a great tortured thing under the
merciless sky. Nothing but long level stretches so bleak, so barren,
that a jackrabbit could not have hidden his gaunt, gray body. Nothing
as he looked with narrowing eye far to east and west, north and south,
but a vast, silent monotone of plain that would seem to conceal
nothing, as open under the bright rays of the sun as the palm of a
man's hand, an unsmiling, grave-faced, hypocritical thing which hid
and held from him all that he wanted in the world.
A frenzy of terrified rage upon him, he stiffened in his stirrups, he
shook his clenched fist at the quiet, jeering face whose very unmoved
stillness was like a deep contempt, and cursed it, his voice springing
harshly through his dry lips, rising almost into a sobbing shriek,
dying away without an echo, leaving the face of the desert quietly
contemptuous. For he grew suddenly as silent, a word cut in two by the
click of his teeth, the sound of his own voice in his ears tricking
him.
Breathless, a man turned to stone, he listened.
He had heard something--he _knew_ that he had heard a voice, not his
own, a voice hardly more than a faint whisper, calling to him, calling
again, then lost in the all-engulfing silence. About him the miles
were laid bare in the sunlight. There was nothing.
Driven from the moment of inactivity into a madness of haste,
tormented afresh at the thought that he had lost one precious minute,
he cut anew with his red-roweled spurs into the torn flanks of his
horse, and rode on, careless of all save that he must hurry, that his
was a great race against the racing day, that he must find her before
the night had sought her out. The very shadow which he and his horse
cast--a distorted, black centaur sort of thing, running silently
across the desert--was one with the desert in its cursed menace. For a
moment ago it had hidden under his horse's belly, and now it ran
beside him, ever lengthening, ever pushing farther to the eastward, a
grim avowal that the day was passing.
The miles fled behind him like lean greyhounds. The miles before him
reached out in unshortened endlessness. It was one o'clock. He had
been gone two hours--he had done nothing. Now, far ahead, he caught
sight of moving figures, saw a man yonder on horseback, saw another,
hardly more than a drifting dot against the sky-line to the east,
another yet to the west.
They were still searching for her, still pushing deeper and deeper
into the burning solitudes; they had found nothing. They must be, he
estimated roughly, twenty miles from Valley City. Had she ridden so
far? Why hadn't she told him more about the location of the spring? If
there _was_ a spring, had she clung close to it when her horse had
left her? Then she would not die for want of water! Or had she dug
with breaking nails into the soil which had in it moisture enough to
feed the roots of the yellow willows but which would but mock her as
the desert mocked him, refusing to yield up one single drop of water?
Gradually, steadily he swung toward the left, riding a little to
westward so as not to be seeking over the same territory across which
the men before him had ridden. And as he rode he saw, a mile away from
him, still farther to the west, a ring of hills, and he prayed that he
might come upon the spring there and upon Argyl. And his moving lips
were not still before he had found her.
He had swept down into a little hollow, the slightest of depressions
in the sandy level, not to be seen until a man was upon its very rim,
floored with scanty, dry brush. His tired horse threw up its head and
shied. But Conniston had seen her first, a huddled heap, almost at his
feet.
"Argyl!" he cried, loudly, dropping to his knees beside her, leaving
his horse to stand staring at them. "Argyl!"
She lay as she had fallen, her right arm stretched straight out in
front of her, her left arm lying close to her side, her face hidden
from him in the sand. She did not move. Had he called to her an hour
ago she would have turned her wide eyes upon him wonderingly. Now, if
he had shouted with the voice of thunder she would not have heard. She
was dead, or death was very close to her. For a moment, a moment
lengthened into an eternity of hell, he did not know whether the
shadowy wings of the stern angel were now rustling over her head or if
already the wings had swept over her and had borne away from him the
soul of the woman he loved.
"Argyl, Argyl dear!" he whispered. "I have come to save you, Argyl. To
take you home. Oh! don't you hear me, Argyl?"
He put his arms about her, and as he knelt lifted her and put his face
to hers. She was not cold; thank Heaven, she was not cold! But she
did not move, she was heavy in his arms, the warmth of her body might
have been from the ebbing tide of life or from the sun's fire. He
could not feel her breathe, could not feel the beating of her heart.
He held her so that he could look into her face, and the cry upon his
lips was frozen into a grief-stricken horror. Her hair unbound,
hanging loose, tangled about her face, dull and soiled with the gray
sand-dust, her lips dry, cracked, unnaturally big, her cheeks pinched
and stamped at the corners of her mouth with the misery through which
she had lived--was this Argyl?
He laid her back upon the sand, his body bent over her to shut out the
sun, and unslung his canteen. He washed her mouth, let the water
trickle over her brow and cheeks, forced a little of the lukewarm
stuff between her teeth. He bathed her head, bathed her throat, and
again forced a few drops into her mouth. And then, when she did not
move, he would not believe that she was dead. She could not be dead.
It was impossible. She would open her eyes in a minute, those great,
frank, fearless, glorious gray eyes, and she would come back to
him--back from the shadow of the stern angel's wing, back to herself
and to him.
He unstoppered his flask of whisky and, holding her to him, thrust it
to her lips. And the thing which had been a curse to Bat Truxton,
which had hurled him downward from his leadership of men, which had
threatened to wreck the hopes of the Great Work, brought Argyl back
from the last boundaries of the thing called Life, back from the misty
frontiers of the thing called Death to which she was journeying.
Her eyes opened, she stared at him, her eyes closed again.
Again he forced her reluctant throat to swallow the whisky, a few
drops only. And again he bathed her with water--brow and throat and
quiet wrists. Her eyes did not open now, but he saw that she was
breathing. Presently he made her take a little water. He washed her
dusty nostrils that she might breathe better. And that breath might
come into her tired lungs more easily he gently, reverently loosened
the clothing about her breasts.
Not once did his eyes leave her face. He did not fire the shot which
was to be a signal to the others, because he knew that they could not
hear. Soon he would look for the wagon. It would pass closely enough
for him to see it, near enough for him to make himself seen. Now he
could do alone as much for her as could fifty men, as could any one.
An hour passed, two hours. He had watched the color of life creep back
into her face faintly, slowly, but steadily. She had again opened her
eyes, had turned them for a puzzled second upon his tense face, had
closed them.
Now she seemed to be sleeping.
He had exhausted the contents of one canteen, had gone to his saddle
for the other, when far to the south he saw the wagon. He had waved
his hat high above his head, standing like a circus-rider in the
saddle, and had emptied the cylinder of his revolver into the air. He
had seen that the driver had heard him, that he had fired an answering
volley, that he had turned westward. And then he had gone back to
Argyl.
She had heard the shots. Her eyes were open and turned curiously upon
him as he came swiftly to where she lay.
"Will you give me some water?" she whispered.
He lifted her head, and she drank thirstily, looking with reproachful
surprise at him when he took the canteen from her lips.
"That is all now, Argyl," he told her, his voice choking. And then,
all power of restraint swept away from him by the joyous, throbbing
love which so long he had silenced, he drew her close, closer to him,
crying, almost harshly: "Oh, Argyl, thank God! For if you hadn't come
back to me--I love you, love you! Don't you know how I love you,
Argyl?"
Her hand closed weakly upon his.
"Of course, dear," she answered him, faintly, her poor lips trying to
smile. "Of course we love each other. But can't I have a little water,
dear?"