“Get a fresh horse and go back,” he said, when the man waited for an answer.  “Tell Mundy that I am starting a six-horse wagon, carrying water, right away.  Tell him to keep on looking.  You men keep close enough together for the most part to be able to hear a gun fired from the man nearest you.  I’ll send the wagon due north.  You can pick it up by the tracks.”

The man rode away, and Conniston strode to the office.

“Tommy”—­and his voice was steady and determined—­“you’ll have to get into a buggy and watch the work this afternoon.  I’ve got the men started—­and now I am going to her.”

“All right, Greek,” Garton answered, gently.  “I can keep things going.”

Conniston turned and left him.  He saddled his horse with eager fingers, gave the order for the wagon carrying water to move steadily northward until it came up with the men who had gone ahead, put a lunch and a flask of whisky into his pocket, filled his own canteens, and rode out across the hot sands.

“I am going to find her,” he told himself, with quiet confidence.

He rode slowly at first, curbing his crying impatience with the knowledge that restraint now meant the reserve of endurance to his horse upon which he might be forced to call before he had found her.  He held to a course due north, remembering what Argyl had told him about the location of the spring.

When he had gone nearly five miles he began to search to right and left, still holding to a general northerly direction, but often turning out of his course to ride to the tops of the knolls which rose here and there about him.  And now he had let his horse out into a swinging gallop, urged to spare neither animal nor himself, prompted to make what haste he might by the thought that already noon had passed, that the day was half gone, that what he was to do must be done before the night came.

Once—­he thought that Valley City must be at least eight or nine miles behind him—­his heart leaped with sudden hope and fear as he saw, half a mile to the east, a cluster of little sand-hills like those Argyl had told him surrounded her spring.

He did not know that he was cutting his horse’s bleeding sides with his spurs as he galloped up the gradual slopes; long ago he had forgotten all thought of conserving the beast’s strength.  He knew only that the very soul of him cried out aloud that he might at last come to her, and that his eyes, ever seeking, seeking, seeking, were more than half afraid to rest upon every shadowy, stirring bunch of scrub brush, more than half afraid to run ahead of him down the far sides of the low hills.

Nothing before him as he jerked in his panting horse, nothing but the desert, still, hot, thirsty, a great tortured thing under the merciless sky.  Nothing but long level stretches so bleak, so barren, that a jackrabbit could not have hidden his gaunt, gray body.  Nothing as he looked with narrowing eye far to east and west, north and south, but a vast, silent monotone of plain that would seem to conceal nothing, as open under the bright rays of the sun as the palm of a man’s hand, an unsmiling, grave-faced, hypocritical thing which hid and held from him all that he wanted in the world.