The Ranger stooped and pressed his lips to the blood-blotched back of the faithful shrivelled old hand.  He did not shed a tear.  We weep only when we are half hurt.

Wayland seized the Service axe and uncased his own rifle.  Then in words that were not worshipful, not bending his knees, but standing with his hat off, he uttered what may have been a prayer, or may have been blasphemy.  I leave you to judge:  “By God, if there is a God, why doesn’t He waken up?  If there is a God, does He stand for right?  Is there such a thing as Right; or is Right the dream of fools?  I want to know!  If there is a God, I want God to speak out clear and plain, right now, in plain facts, so I can understand, and not so blamed long ago that a plain fellow can’t make out what’s the right thing to do.”

It was one thing to pray under the rose-colored windows of a college chapel, and another thing to pray under the yellow, brazen Desert sky.  There was only the dreadful Desert silence, with the rattle from the laboured breathing of the unconscious man.  If there was no God, then the fight for Right was the futility of fools:  Right was only the Right of the strong to prey upon the weak, till the weak became in turn strong enough to prey; and that meant anarchy.  If Right was right as two and two make four in Heaven or Hell, then where was the God from whom Right, laws of Right emanated, guiding the unwise as laws of gravity guide the stars?

He didn’t know that he had been staggering from physical weakness as he climbed the ridge of sand.  There was the fresh horse. One of them might escape in a night by riding it to death.  Then, there was the possibility of the railroad being within reach.  One of them might go out to the railroad, but not both.  The old frontiersman had passed the point of being able to ride; and a very few hours would probably witness the end of his life.  He could tie the old man to the fresh horse, but the slow pace that would be necessary would sacrifice both their lives.  There was another possibility:  the fresh man on the fresh horse.  That way out did not enter Wayland’s mind; but he did ask himself why the outlaws had not come down to the false pool.  Why had they gone on?  They were as near the end of their tether as he was of his.

Then he became suddenly conscious that he had eaten almost nothing for twenty-four hours and that the quivering air darkening to night rolled above the yellow sands in a way not caused by heat.  Was it saddle wear or exhaustion that he stumbled as he walked?  He looked at the silver strip of mountains above the westering sky.  A fore-shortening haze swam into his sight.  There was the mountain flecked with silver.  Then it had gone into a milky black and pools, pools of water, fringed by the pines of the North, hung in the blue haze of mid-air, fore-shortening, shifting like a blurred sieve into the silver strip