He washed the blood from his right arm and examined the wound. The bullet had struck him between the elbow and shoulder and had passed out again without touching the bone. The second shot had missed him. He tore some strips from his shirt, and bound it up as well as he could with his left hand aided by his teeth.
He drew his belt tighter to keep off hunger, and drank again before facing the long leagues of waterless desert between him and Santiago. He looked at the rolling river and at the farther shore where he had so longed to be. "_Rio maldito!_" he cried. "Accursed stream, what happiness you have robbed me of! what misery you have wrought us! Why could you not wait only one day longer?" He turned away, set his face towards the pueblo, and began his weary journey.
He soon found the weight of his arm grow more and more painful as his pulse beat faster with movement, and he had to carry it across his body, supporting it with the other. But he pushed on with a steady, untiring gait, showing the marvellous power of his race to bear pain and fatigue and hunger and thirst. On all the Western frontier there is no white man that is not proud to be credited with "Indian endurance."
Curiously enough, he felt no fear. The cacique's threat to kill him did not affect his purpose in the slightest. He had recoiled from instant death when the pistol cracked in his face, but that was only instinctive, defenceless as he was against a man with firearms. He felt no shame at having done so. It did not seem to him cowardly to avoid being killed if he could. But he did not flinch for a moment when he thought of returning to the pueblo. No doubt Salvador would try to carry out his threat. "Well," thought he, "I must be beforehand with him. If I can't hold my father's gun with this sore arm, I must get Tito's pistol; Tito is my friend; he will not be afraid to let me have it."
The sun rose high in the heavens and beat down upon him as he toiled along, parching him with thirst. He was travelling the same trail back to Santiago that he had traversed the night before. The tracks of the horses going and returning were plainly visible. But what a change for him! A few hours before he had ridden that way feeling every inch a man, with his sweetheart in his arms and the happiness of a lifetime within his grasp; and now--As the thought stung him he pulled himself together and forced his weary feet to carry him on faster.