They did not travel all night.  Casey looked at the Big Dipper and judged it was midnight when they stopped on the brink of a deep canyon, halted there in William’s sheer despair because the light appeared suddenly on the high point of a hill directly ahead of them.  William’s voice was gone like Casey’s, so that he, too, cursed in a whisper with a spasmodic indrawing of ribs and a wheezing in his throat.

When it was plain that the mule had stopped permanently, Casey slid off William’s back and lay down without knowing or caring much whether he would ever get up again.  He said he wasn’t hungry—­much; but his mouth was too full of tongue, he added grimly.

He lay and watched through half-closed, staring eyes the light that mocked him so.  His dulling senses told him that it was no camp fire, nor any light made by human hands.  He did not know what it was.  He didn’t care any more.  William crumpled up and lay down beside him, breathing heavily.  It was getting close to the end of things.  Casey knew it, and he thinks William knew it too.

The sun found them there and forced Casey to move.  He sat up painfully, the fight to live not yet burned out of him, and gazed dully at the forbidding hills that closed around him like great, naked rock demons watching to see him die for want of the things they withheld.  Where he remembered the light to have been when last he saw it was bleak, bare rock.  It was a devil’s light and there was nothing friendly or human about it.

He looked down into the canyon which William had refused to enter.  A faint interest revived within him because of a patch of green.  Trees,—­but they might easily be junipers which will grow in dry canyons as readily, it would seem, as in any other.  He kept looking, because green was a great relief from the monotonous gray and black and brown of the hills.  It seemed to him after awhile that he saw a small splotch of dead white.

In the barren lands two things will show white in the distance; a white horse and a tent of white canvas.  Casey shifted his position and squinted long at the spot, then got up slowly with the help of a bush and took William by the rope.  William was on his feet, standing with head dropped, apparently half asleep.  Casey knew that William was simply waiting until he could no longer stand.

Together they wabbled down the sloping canyon side and over a grassy bottom to the trees, which were indeed juniper trees, but thriftier looking than their brethren of the dry places.  There was water, for William smelled it at last and hurried forward with more briskness than Casey could muster, eager though he was to reach the tent he saw standing there under the biggest juniper.

Beside the tent was a water bucket of bright, new tin.  A white granite dipper stood in it.  Casey drank sparingly and stopped when he would have given all he ever possessed in the world to have gone on drinking until he could hold no more.  But he was not yet crazy with the thirst.  So he stopped drinking, filled a white granite basin and soused his head again and again, sighing with sheer ecstasy at the drip of water down his back and chest.  After a little he drank two swallows more, put down the dipper and went into the tent.