When Coronado reached the rocks he was fifty yards ahead of Clara.  He made the circuit of them at a slow canter; in so doing he discovered the starving and fainted Thurstane lying in the high grass beneath a low shelf of stone; he saw him, he recognized him, and in an instant he trembled from head to foot.  But such was his power of self-control that he did not check his horse, nor cast a second look to see whether the man was alive or dead.  He turned the last stone in the group, met Clara with a forced smile, and said gently, “There is nothing.”

She reined up, drew a long sigh, thought that here was another foolish hope crushed, and turned her horse’s head toward the train.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

The tread of Coronado’s horse passing within fifteen feet of Thurstane roused him from the troubled sleep into which he had sunk after his long fainting fit.

Slowly he opened his eyes, to see nothing but long grasses close to his face, and through them a haze of mountains and sky.  His first moments of wakening were so far from being a full consciousness that he did not comprehend where he was.  He felt very, very weak, and he continued to lie still.

But presently he became aware of sounds; there was a trampling, and then there were words; the voices of life summoned him to live.  Instantly he remembered two things:  the starving comrades whom it was his duty to save, and the loved girl whom he longed to find.  Slowly and with effort, grasping at the rock to aid his trembling knees, he rose to his feet just as Clara turned her horse’s head toward the plain.

Coronado threw a last anxious glance in the direction of the wretch whom he meant to abandon to the desert.  To his horror he saw a lean, smirched, ghostly face looking at him in a dazed way, as if out of the blinding shades of death.  The quickness of this villain was so wonderful that one is almost tempted to call it praiseworthy.  He perceived at once that Thurstane would be discovered, and that he, Coronado, must make the discovery, or he might be charged with attempting to leave him to die.

“Good heavens!” he exclaimed loudly, “there he is!”

Clara turned:  there was a scream of joy:  she was on the ground, running:  she was in Thurstane’s arms.  During that unearthly moment there was no thought in those two of Coronado, or of any being but each other.  It is impossible fully to describe such a meeting; its exterior signs are beyond language; its emotion is a lifetime.  If words are feeble in presence of the heights and depths of the Colorado, they are impotent in presence of the altitudes and abysses of great passion.  Human speech has never yet completely expressed human intellect, and it certainly never will completely express human sentiments.  These lovers, who had been wandering in chasms impenetrable to hope, were all of a sudden on mountain summits dizzy with joy.  What could they say for themselves, or what can another say for them?