“Come back here,” he called, and in a rage let fly a bullet after her.
She paid no heed, did not stop till she reached the spring and threw herself down full length to drink, to lave her burnt face, to drink again of the alkali brackish water that trickled down her throat like nectar incomparably delicious.
She was just rising to her feet when Struve hobbled up.
“Don’t you think you can play with me, missie. When I give the word you stop in your tracks, and when I say ‘Jump!’ step lively.”
She did not answer. Her head was lifted in a listening attitude, as if to catch some sound that came faintly to her from a distance.
“You’re mine, my beauty, to do with as I please, and don’t you forget it.”
She did not hear him. Her ears were attuned to voices floating to her across the desert. Of course she was beginning to wander in her mind. She knew that. There could be no other human beings in this sea of loneliness. They were alone; just they two, the degenerate ruffian and his victim. Still, it was strange. She certainly had imagined the murmur of people talking. It must be the beginning of delirium.
“Do you hear me?” screamed Struve, striking her on the cheek with his fist. “I’m your master and you’re my squaw.”
She did not cringe as he had expected, nor did she show fight. Indeed the knowledge of the blow seemed scarcely to have penetrated her mental penumbra. She still had that strange waiting aspect, but her eyes were beginning to light with new-born hope. Something in her manner shook the man’s confidence; a dawning fear swept away his bluster. He, too, was now listening intently.
Again the low murmur, beyond a possibility of doubt. Both of them caught it. The girl opened her throat in a loud cry for help. An answering shout came back clear and strong. Struve wheeled and started up the arroyo, bending in and out among the cactus till he disappeared over the brow.
Two horsemen burst into sight, galloping down the steep trail at breakneck speed, flinging down a small avalanche of shale with them. One of them caught sight of the girl, drew up so short that his horse slid to its haunches, and leaped from the saddle in a cloud of dust.
He ran toward her, and she to him, hands out to meet her rescuer.
“Why didn’t you come sooner? I’ve waited so long,” she cried pathetically, as his arms went about her.
“You poor lamb! Thank God we’re in time!” was all he could say.
Then for the first time in her life she fainted.
The other rider lounged forward, a hat in his hand that he had just picked up close to the fire.
“We seem to have stampeded part of this camping party. I’ll just take a run up this hill and see if I can’t find the missing section and persuade it to stay a while. I don’t reckon you need me hyer, do you?” he grinned, with a glance at Neill and his burden.
“All right. You’ll find me here when you get back, Fraser,” the other answered.
Larry carried the girl to the water-hole and set her down beside it. He sprinkled her face with water, and presently her lids trembled and fluttered open. She lay there with her head on his arm and looked at him quite without surprise.
“How did you find me?”
“Mainly luck. We followed your trail to where we found the rig. After that it was guessing where the needle was in the haystack It just happened we were cutting across country to water when we heard a shot.”
“That must have been when he fired at me,” she said.
“My God! Did he shoot at you?”
“Yes. Where is he now?” She shuddered.
“Cutting over the hills with Steve after him.”
“Steve?”
“My friend, Lieutenant Fraser. He is an officer in the ranger force.”
“Oh!” She relapsed into a momentary silence before she said: “He isn’t my brother at all. He is a murderer.” She gave a sudden little moan of pain as memory pierced her of what he had said. “He bragged to me that he had killed my brother. He meant to kill me, I think.”
“Sho! It doesn’t matter what the coyote meant. It’s all over now. You’re with friends.”
A warm smile lit his steel-blue eyes, softened the lines of his lean, hard face. Never had shipwrecked mariner come to safer harbor than she. She knew that this slim, sun-bronzed Westerner was a man’s man, that strength and nerve inhabited his sinewy frame. He would fight for her because she was a woman as long as he could stand and see.
A touch of color washed back into her cheeks, a glow of courage into her heart. “Yes, it’s all over. The weary, weary hours—and the fear—and the pain—and the dreadful thirst—and worst of all, him!”
She began to cry softly, hiding her face in his coat-sleeve.
“I’m crying because—it’s all over. I’m a little fool, just as—as you said I was.”
“I didn’t know you then,” he smiled. “I’m right likely to make snap-shot judgments that are ‘way off.”
“You knew me well enough to—” She broke off in the middle, bathed in a flush of remembrance that brought her coppery head up from his arm instantly.
“Be careful. You’re dizzy yet.”
“I’m all right now, thank you,” she answered, her embarrassed profile haughtily in the air. “But I’m ravenous for something to eat. It’s been twenty-four hours since I’ve had a bite. That’s why I’m weepy and faint. I should think you might make a snap-shot judgment that breakfast wouldn’t hurt me.”
He jumped up contritely. “That’s right. What a goat I am!”
His long, clean stride carried him over the distance that separated him from his bronco. Out of the saddle-bags he drew some sandwiches wrapped in a newspaper.
“Here, Miss Margaret! You begin on these. I’ll have coffee ready in two shakes of a cow’s tail. And what do you say to bacon?”
He understood her to remark from the depths of a sandwich that she said “Amen!” to it, and that she would take everything he had and as soon as he could get it ready. She was as good as her word. He found no cause to complain of her appetite. Bacon and sandwiches and coffee were all consumed in quantities reasonable for a famished girl who had been tramping actively for a day and a night, and, since she was a child of impulse, she turned more friendly eyes on him who had appeased her appetite.
“I suppose you are a cowboy like everybody else in this country?” she ventured amiably after her hunger had become less sharp.
“No, I belong to the government reclamation service.”
“Oh!” She had a vague idea she had heard of it before. “Who is it you reclaim? Indians, I suppose.”
“We reclaim young ladies when we find them wandering about the desert,” he smiled.
“Is that what the government pays you for?”
“Not entirely. Part of the time I examine irrigation projects and report on their feasibility. I have been known to build dams and bore tunnels.”
“And what of the young ladies you reclaim? Do you bore them?” she asked saucily.
“I understand they have hitherto always found me very entertaining,” he claimed boldly, his smiling eyes on her.
“Indeed!”
“But young ladies are peculiar. Sometimes we think we’re entertaining them when we ain’t.”
“I’m sure you are right.”
“And other