The Heart of the Desert Part 33

"You needed the rest and I didn't!"

DeWitt rose and shook himself like a great dog, then looked at Rhoda wonderingly.

"And you don't look much done up! But you had no right to do such a thing! I told you to give me ten minutes. I feel like a brute. Lie down now and get a little sleep yourself."

"Lie in the sun? Thank you, I'd rather push on to the camp and have some breakfast. How do you feel?"

"Much better! It was fine of you, dear, but it wasn't a fair deal."

"I'll be good from now on!" said Rhoda meekly. "What would you like for breakfast?"

DeWitt looked about him. Already the desert was a.s.suming its brazen aspect.

"Water will be enough for me," he answered, "and nothing else. I am seriously considering a rigid diet for a time."

They both drank sparingly of the water in Rhoda's canteen.

"I have three shots in my Colt," said DeWitt, "but I want to save them for an emergency. But if we don't strike camp pretty soon, I'll try to pot a jack-rabbit."

"We can eat desert mice," said Rhoda. "I know how to catch and cook them!"

"Heaven forbid!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed DeWitt. "Let's start on at once, if you're not too tired."

So they began the day cheerfully. As the morning wore on and they found no trace of the camp, they began to watch the canteen carefully.

Gradually their thirst became so great that the desire for food was quite secondary to it and they made no attempt to hunt for a rabbit.

They agreed toward noon to save the last few drops in the canteen until they could no longer do without it.

Hour after hour they toiled in the blinding heat, the strange deep blue of the sky reflecting the brazen light of the desert. In their careful avoiding of the mountain where they had rested at sunset the night before, they gradually worked out into a wide barren s.p.a.ce with dunes and rock heaps interchanging.

"This won't do at all," said Dewitt at last, wearily. "We had better try for any old mountain at all in the hope of finding water."

They stood panting, staring at the distant haze of a peak. Trackless and tortuous, the way underfoot was incredibly difficult. Yet the distances melted in ephemeral slopes as lovely in their tints as they were accursed in their reality of cruelty. Rhoda, unaccustomed to day travel, panted and gasped as they walked. But she held her own fairly well, while DeWitt, sick and overstrained at the start, was failing rapidly.

"It's noon now," said John a little thickly. "You had better lie in the shade of that rock for an hour."

"You sleep too!" pleaded Rhoda.

"I'm too hot to sleep. I'll wake you in an hour."

When Rhoda awoke it was to see DeWitt leaning against the rock heap, his lips swollen, his eyes uncertain.

Weak and dizzy herself, she rose and laid her hand on John's, every maternal instinct in her stirring and speaking in her gray eyes.

"Come, dear boy, we mustn't give up so easily."

John lifted the little hand to his cheek.

"I won't give up," he said uncertainly. "I'll take care of you, honey girl!"

"Come on, then!" said Rhoda. "You see that queer bunch of cholla yonder? Let's get as far as that before we stop again!"

With a great effort, DeWitt gathered himself together and, fixing his eyes on the fantastic cactus growth, he plodded desperately through the sand. At the cholla bunch, Rhoda pointed to a jutting lavender rock.

"At that we'll rest for a minute. Come on, John!"

John's sick eyes did not waver but his trembling legs described many circles in their journey to the jutting rock. Distances were so many times what they seemed that Rhoda's little scheme carried them over a mile of desert before DeWitt sank to his knees.

"I'm a sick man," he said huskily as he fell in a limp heap.

Nothing could have appeared more opportunely than this new hards.h.i.+p to take Rhoda's mind off her misery of the night. Nothing could have brought John so near to her as this utter helplessness brought about through his toiling for her. She looked at him with tears of pity in her eyes, while her heart sank with fright. She knew the terrible danger that menaced them. But she closed her lips firmly and looked thoughtfully at the mite of water that remained to them. Then she held the canteen to DeWitt's lips. He pushed it away from him and in another moment or so he rose.

Rhoda, fastening their hopes to another distant cholla, led the way on again. But she too was growing a little light-headed. The distant cactus danced grotesquely and black spots flitted between her and the molten iron over which, her fancy said they traveled. Suddenly she laughed crazily:

"'Twas brillig, and the slythy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe!"

DeWitt laughed hoa.r.s.ely.

"That's just the way it looks to me, Rhoda. But you're just as crazy as I am."

Rhoda jerked herself together and tried to moisten her lips with her swollen tongue.

"We must take it turn about. When you are crazy I must try to be sane!"

"Good idea!" croaked DeWitt, "only I'm crazy all the time!"

"'O frabjous day! Calloo! Collay!

He chortled in his joy!'"

Rhoda patted his hand.

"Poor John! Oh, my poor John! I was not worth all this. You may not have an Apache's strength, but your heart is right!" Two great tears rolled down her cheeks.

DeWitt looked at her seriously.

"You aren't as dry as I am. I haven't enough moisture in me to moisten my eyeb.a.l.l.s, let alone cry! I am so cracked and dry that you will have to soak me in the first spring we come to before I'll hold water."

Rhoda laughed weakly and John turned away with a hurt look.

"It's not a joke!" he said.

How long they were, in their staggering, circuitous course, in reaching their goal of cholla, Rhoda never knew. She knew that each heavy foot, tingling and scorched, seemed to drag her back a step for every one that she took forward. She knew that she repeatedly offered the last of their water to John and that he repeatedly refused it, urging it on her. She knew that the pulp of the barrel cactus that she tried to chew turned to bitter sawdust in her mouth and sickened her. Then suddenly, as she struggled to refocus her wandering wits on the cholla, it appeared within touch of her hand.

Afraid to pause, she adopted a new goal in a far mesa, and clutching DeWitt's unresponsive fingers she struggled forward.

And so on and on toward a never nearing goal; now falling, now rising, now pausing to strive to hush Dewitt's cracked voice that wandered aimlessly through all the changes of verse that seemed to his delirium appropriate to the occasion. It seemed to Rhoda that her own brain was reeling as she watched the illimitable s.p.a.ce through which they moved.

John's voice did not cease.

"Alone! Alone! All, all, alone!