A splash of water against a hot hand hanging down; a sense of light, of motion; a glimpse of coarse sands and thin straggling weeds beside the edge of the stream down which the pathway ran; a sharp aching at the base of the brain; an agony of strained muscles—­thus slowly I came to my senses, to memory, to the knowledge that I was bound hand and foot to a pony’s back; that the sun was hot, and the sands were hotter, and the glare on the waters blinding; that every splash of the pony’s hoofs sent up glittering sparkles that stabbed my aching eyes like white-hot dagger-points; that the black and clotted dirt on the pony’s shoulder was not mud, but blood; that before and behind were other splashing feet, all hiding the trail in the thin current of the wide old Arkansas; that the quick turns to follow the water and the need for speed gave no consideration to the helpless rider.  The image of six pairs of snaky black eyes came to help the benumbed brain, and I knew with whom I was again captive.  But there was no question about the friendly motive now, for there was no friendly motive now.  And as we pushed on east, Jondo and Bill Banney were hurrying toward the northwest, and the space between us widened every minute.  A wave of helplessness and despair swept over me; then a wild up-leaping prayer for deliverance to a far-away unpitying Heaven; a sudden sense of the futility of prayer in a land the Lord had forgotten; and then anger, hot and wholesome, and an unconquered, dominant will to gain freedom or to die game, swept every other feeling away, marvelously mastering the sense of pain that had ground mercilessly at every nerve.  Then came that small voice which a man hears sometimes in the night stillness and sometimes in the blare of daylight wrangle.  And all suddenly I knew that He who notes the sparrow’s fall knew that I was alone with death, slow-lingering, inch-creeping death, out on that wide, lonely plain.  The glare on the waters softened.  The heat fell away.  The despair and agony lifted.  In all the world—­my world—­there was only one, God; not a far, unpitying, book-made Lord beyond the height of the glaring blue dome above me.  God beside me on, the yellow waters of the Arkansas.  His hand in my hot hand!  His strength about me, invisible, unbreakable, infinite.  When a man enters into that shielding Presence, nothing else matters.

I do not know how many miles we went down-stream, leaving no trail in the shallow water or along its hard-baked edges.  But by the time we dropped that line I had begun to think coherently and to take note of everything possible to me, bound as I was, face downward, on the pony’s back.  It was when we had left the river that the hard riding began, and a merciful unconsciousness, against which I fought, softened some stretches of that long day’s journey.  We crossed the Santa Fe Trail and were pushing eastward out of sight of it to the north.  No stop, no word, nothing but ride, ride, ride.  Truly, I needed the Presence that went with me on the way.