“Jack,” she repeated.

“Well?” he replied, in surprise.

“To look at you!—­I never dreamed—­I’d forgotten—­”

“What’s the matter with me?” demanded Jack.

Wonderingly, her mind on the past, she replied:  “You were dying when we found you at White Sage.”

He drew himself up with a sharp catch in his breath, and stared at her as if he saw a ghost.

“Oh—­Jack!  You’re going to get well!”

Her lips curved in a smile.

For an instant Jack Hare spent his soul in searching her face for truth.  While waiting for death he had utterly forgotten it; he remembered now, when life gleamed in the girl’s dark eyes.  Passionate joy flooded his heart.

“Mescal—­Mescal!” he cried, brokenly.  The eyes were true that shed this sudden light on him; glad and sweet were the lips that bade him hope and live again.  Blindly, instinctively he kissed them—­a kiss unutterably grateful; then he fled into the forest, running without aim.

That flight ended in sheer exhaustion on the far rim of the plateau.  The spreading cedars seemed to have eyes; and he shunned eyes in this hour.  “God! to think I cared so much,” he whispered.  “What has happened?” With time relief came to limbs, to labored breast and lungs, but not to mind.  In doubt that would not die, he looked at himself.  The leanness of arms, the flat chest, the hollows were gone.  He did not recognize his own body.  He breathed to the depths of his lungs.  No pain—­only exhilaration!  He pounded his chest—­no pain!  He dug his trembling fingers into the firm flesh over the apex of his right lung—­the place of his torture—­no pain!

“I wanted to live!” he cried.  He buried his face in the fragrant juniper; he rolled on the soft brown mat of earth and hugged it close; he cooled his hot cheeks in the primrose clusters.  He opened his eyes to new bright green of cedar, to sky of a richer blue, to a desert, strange, beckoning, enthralling as life itself.  He counted backward a month, two months, and marvelled at the swiftness of time.  He counted time forward, he looked into the future, and all was beautiful—­long days, long hunts, long rides, service to his friend, freedom on the wild steppes, blue-white dawns upon the eastern crags, red-gold sunsets over the lilac mountains of the desert.  He saw himself in triumphant health and strength, earning day by day the spirit of this wilderness, coming to fight for it, to live for it, and in far-off time, when he had won his victory, to die for it.

Suddenly his mind was illumined.  The lofty plateau with its healing breath of sage and juniper had given back strength to him; the silence and solitude and strife of his surroundings had called to something deep within him; but it was Mescal who made this wild life sweet and significant.  It was Mescal, the embodiment of the desert spirit.  Like a man facing a great light Hare divined his love.  Through all the days on the plateau, living with her the natural free life of Indians, close to the earth, his unconscious love had ripened.  He understood now her charm for him; he knew now the lure of her wonderful eyes, flashing fire, desert-trained, like the falcon eyes of her Indian grandfather.  The knowledge of what she had become to him dawned with a mounting desire that thrilled all his blood.