TIS felt water splashed on his face, trickling down his throat. He gulped it greedily and opened his eyes. A savage face bent over him, swarthy, repulsive, hateful. In the clear starlight he could see the smeared paint, the dirty headcloth bound turbanwise above the beady black eyes. Dim shapes were busy in the gloom behind.
His last conscious thought had been of Sleiter falling slowly, slowly; of Kennedy and Dolly flashing through the broad bar of sunlight before the Gap to the black shadow beyond. It came to him now with a thrill of pride and triumph and grateful joy—Don would save her. A terrible racking pain throbbed and beat through his shoulder, but he made no outcry. His head whirled dizzily. He concentrated all his thought on that one picture: Sleiter's bending knees, his red beard about the propping gunstock; far below, in a golden haze, the black horse and his burden laboring across the glory and glow of sunset.
Another Indian came. They threw him roughly into the saddle. The pain was unendurable; he gave a stifled shriek. They bound his feet under the horse's belly and led him away. Every step was agony worse than death. His hands were free. He clutched desperately at the high, sharp saddle-horn. The gripping muscles helped him, but the groans came. He was very weak. His clothes clung to his flesh, soaking in blood. They went down the hill, by the wagon, crossed the head of the Gap and climbed back up the mountain from which Kennedy had come. The pain cleared his senses, his eyes grew wonted to the night. There were shadowy, silent riders before—five, six, seven. Thorns dug at his legs, branches whipped his face, clutched at his shattered shoulder; the bitterness of death was on him. He set his mind stubbornly on the one thought: Dolly was safe; once for all he abandoned hope for himself. He thought of Lena; and then for a long, long time he set his teeth and groaned no more.
They crossed to the west side and crawled southward along a rocky ledge near the top. They crept along a hogback, hugged close under the crest of Timber Mountain—on, ever on, to the south. A merciful lethargy of weakness came to him. He drooped over, the elbow of his good arm clinging to the high-pointed horn; his hair was in the horse's mane.
Centuries afterward the journey came to an end. He roused himself and looked about numbly. They were in a craterlike sink on the mountainside. He could not see the peak, the plains, the westward rim or the mountain ranges beyond. A clump of dwarfed and stunted trees grew in the hollow, a narrow circle of jagged and crumbling rock shut out all the world beside. So, he thought, this was the end of radiant life. To this undreamed-of narrow valley his feet had tended since childhood—to Gethsemane.
There were but two of the Indians with him now; the others had fallen out on the way, unseen by Otis. They dragged him off and bundled him down by a lightning-blasted tree; they wrenched his arms around the stump behind his back and tied him fast. Then they left him.
The thirst which had tormented him from the beginning tortured him now. His wounds, aggravated as they were by the rough journey, were nothing to this; but it was the wounds that made the thirst so terrible. His tongue and lips had already begun to swell. There was not even a cooling dew.
No weakling, this! Waiting, he braced his soul firmly to meet the end. The stars burned warm and near in the violet-black sky. He watched them, waiting. Then he closed his eyes. Faces, thronging, vivid, real—Dolly, her dead mother, smiling, tender; Lena's face, rosy-flushing; Hiram's, bright, wide-eyed; Don's, resolute and high and strong. Again that flashing vision, the Titan Sleiter tottering to his fall, the black horse racing forever across the blazing sunset.
He could not see the stars—warm tears were in his eyes. Not of sorrow—of love and pride.
The far-off, measured beat of soft footsteps; they came nearer to him—the trampling of many feet. The moon rose radiant over the crater's low rim; the rocky circle became a shore, bordered on a pool of dancing, rippling light; the soft air was sweet and pure and cool.
The trampling feet came into the circle behind him. Forms monstrous, barbarous, fantastic, silent, flitted from the shad owed barrier into the silver fire. There was a horse with a shapeless burden; they cast off ropes and threw a bundle at his feet. A man, fast bound; his head touched Otis' foot, his face was in the dust, his sunny hair dabbled and dank with blood. He rolled over silently.
"God! Dolly?"
"Safe!" said Kennedy. "Safe!" The man was beautiful; the glory of strength and courage and manhood glowed through flesh and stain.