Clara only uttered inarticulate murmurs, while her hands crawled up Thurstane’s arms, pressing and clutching him to make sure that he was alive.  There was an indescribable pathos in this eagerness which could not trust to sight, but must touch also, as if she were blind.  Thurstane held her firmly, kissing hair, forehead, and temples, and whispering, “Clara!  Clara!” Her face, which had turned white at the first glimpse of him, was now roseate all over and damp with a sweet dew.  It became smirched with the dust of his face; but she would only have rejoiced, had she known it; his very squalor was precious to her.

At last she fell back from him, held him at arm’s length with ease, and stared at him.  “Oh, how sick!” she gasped.  “How thin!  You are starving.”

She ran to her horse, drew from her saddle-bags some remnants of food, and brought them to him.  He had sunk down faint upon a stone, and he was too weak to speak aloud; but he gave her a smile of encouragement which was at once pathetic and sublime.  It said, “I can bear all alone; you must not suffer for me.”  But it said this out of such visible exhaustion, that, instead of being comforted, she was terrified.

“Oh, you must not die,” she whispered with quivering mouth.  “If you die, I will die.”

Then she checked her emotion and added, “There!  Don’t mind me.  I am silly.  Eat.”

Meanwhile Coronado looked on with such a face as Iago might have worn had he felt the jealousy of Othello.  For the first time he positively knew that the woman he loved was violently in love with another.  He suffered so horribly that we should be bound to pity him, only that he suffered after the fashion of devils, his malignity equalling his agony.  While he was in such pain that his heart ceased beating, his fingers curled like snakes around the handle of his revolver.  Nothing kept him from shooting that man, yes, and that woman also, but the certainty that the deed would make him a fugitive for life, subject everywhere to the summons of the hangman.

Once, almost overcome by the temptation, he looked around for the train.  It was within hearing; he thought he saw Mrs. Stanley watching him; two of his Mexicans were approaching at full speed.  He dismounted, sat down upon a stone, partially covered his face with his hand, and tried to bring himself to look at the two lovers.  At last, when he perceived that Thurstane was eating and Clara merely kneeling by, he walked tremulously toward them, scarcely conscious of his feet.

“Welcome to life, lieutenant,” he said.  “I did not wish to interrupt.  Now I congratulate.”

Thurstane looked at him steadily, seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then put out his hand.

“It was I who discovered you,” went on Coronado, as he took the lean, grimy fingers in his buckskin gauntlet.

“I know it,” mumbled the young fellow; then with a visible effort he added, “Thanks.”