“Is there no hope?” said one.

“None,” said the other, “none.”

There was a sound of some one crying; it seemed to last a long time, but it was so faint she could scarcely hear it.

“It is just as well.  She would have died in child-birth, or lost her reason.”

The crying sounded very far away.

It ceased.  The sand drifted and fell from under her feet; she was sinking into a whirlpool, sucked down by a great spinning darkness and by an icy wind.  She threw up her arms above her head like a dreamer awaking from sleep.  She had done with fevers and with dreams.

The doctor pushed back the soft fringe of down from her forehead.  “Look,” he said, “it is like the forehead of a child.”

CHAPTER XXII

IN THE DESERT

It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his tent, doing something to the body of a sick man.  He had turned the narrow place into a temporary ambulance.  Dysentery had broken out among his little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a man’s life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he died.  This boy was dying.  The air was stifling; but it was better than what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor devils were dying faster than you could bury them—­even in the desert, where funeral rites are short.  And as he stooped to moisten the boy’s lips, Tyson swore with a great oath:  there was no water in the tin basin; the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood.  His own tongue was like a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth.  The heat by night was the heat of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron; and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.

He went out to find water.  When they were not interrupted by the enemy, he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it would be another.  The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded had fallen to Tyson’s charge.

Let the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women remember what they have done for men.

The boy died before dawn.  And now, what with sickness and much fighting, out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty sound men.

When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs.  The mail had come in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest station.  There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of cartridges amongst his other papers.  These he began to look over and arrange.