Van regarded her sternly.

“I’ve changed my mind.  I haven’t time to camp out here to-night.  You’ll have to ride.”

It seemed to Beth that, had it been to save her life, she could scarcely have climbed to that saddle.  To remain on the horse would, she knew, be far beyond her strength.  She continued on her feet only by the utmost exertion of her will.  Someway since Van had found her in this dreadful place she had lost strength rapidly—­perhaps for the leaning on him.  With Van’s ultimatum now to confront, she could summon no nerve or resolution.

Her face paled.  “You’d better go on, if you have to be at your claim,” she said, aware that she could offer no argument, no alternative plan to his wish for an onward march.  “I’m—­not used to riding—­much.  I can’t ride any more tonight.”

He knew she told the truth, knew how gladly she would have continued riding, knew what a plight of collapse she must be approaching to submit to a thought of remaining here till morning.  He could not go and leave her here.  The thought of it aroused him to something like anger.  He realized the necessity of assuming a rougher demeanor.

“Damn it, Kent,” he said, “you’re no less lost than you were before.  You know I can’t go off and leave you.  And I want to get ahead.”

She only knew she could not ride, come what might.

“You didn’t say so, a little while ago,” she ventured, half imploringly.  “I’m sorry I’m so nearly dead.  If you must go on——­”

That cut him to the heart.  How could he be a brute?

“I ought to go!” he broke in unguardedly.  “I mean I’ve got to think—­I’ve got work to do in the morning.  Don’t you suppose you could try?”

The moonlight was full on his face.  All the laughter she knew so well had disappeared from his eyes.  In its place she saw such a look of yearning and worry—­such a tenderness of love as no woman ever yet saw and failed to comprehend.  She divined in that second that he knew who she was—­she felt it, through all her sense of intuition and the fiber of her soul.  She understood his insistence on the march, the saving march, straight onward without a halt.  She loved him for it.  She had loved him with wild intensity, confessed at last to herself, ever since the moment he had appeared in the desert to save her.

If a certain reckless abandon to this love rocked her splendid self-control, it was only because she was so utterly exhausted.  Her judgment was sound, unshaken.  Nevertheless, despite judgment and all—­to go on was out of the question.  God had flung them out here together, she thought, for better or for worse.  That Van would be the fine chivalrous gentleman she had felt him to be at the very first moment of their accidental acquaintance, she felt absolutely assured.  She accepted a certain inevitable fatality in the situation—–­perhaps the more readily now that she knew he knew, for she seemed so much more secure.