“There’s nothin’ to boo-boo for,” he said, with a half-affected brusqueness.  “So quit, now!  They’ll stop in a minit, and send some one back for us.  Shouldn’t wonder if they’re doin’ it now.”

But Susy, with feminine discrimination detecting the hollow ring in his voice, here threw herself upon him and began to beat him violently with her little fists.  “They ain’t!  They ain’t!  They ain’t.  You know it!  How dare you?” Then, exhausted with her struggles, she suddenly threw herself flat on the dry grass, shut her eyes tightly, and clutched at the stubble.

“Get up,” said the boy, with a pale, determined face that seemed to have got much older.

“You leave me be,” said Susy.

“Do you want me to go away and leave you?” asked the boy.

Susy opened one blue eye furtively in the secure depths of her sun-bonnet, and gazed at his changed face.

“Ye-e-s.”

He pretended to turn away, but really to look at the height of the sinking sun.

“Kla’uns!”

“Well?”

“Take me.”

She was holding up her hands.  He lifted her gently in his arms, dropping her head over his shoulder.  “Now,” he said cheerfully, “you keep a good lookout that way, and I this, and we’ll soon be there.”

The idea seemed to please her.  After Clarence had stumbled on for a few moments, she said, “Do you see anything, Kla’uns?”

“Not yet.”

“No more don’t I.”  This equality of perception apparently satisfied her.  Presently she lay more limp in his arms.  She was asleep.

The sun was sinking lower; it had already touched the edge of the horizon, and was level with his dazzled and straining eyes.  At times it seemed to impede his eager search and task his vision.  Haze and black spots floated across the horizon, and round wafers, like duplicates of the sun, glittered back from the dull surface of the plains.  Then he resolved to look no more until he had counted fifty, a hundred, but always with the same result, the return of the empty, unending plains—­the disk growing redder as it neared the horizon, the fire it seemed to kindle as it sank, but nothing more.

Staggering under his burden, he tried to distract himself by fancying how the discovery of their absence would be made.  He heard the listless, half-querulous discussion about the locality that regularly pervaded the nightly camp.  He heard the discontented voice of Jake Silsbee as he halted beside the wagon, and said, “Come out o’ that now, you two, and mighty quick about it.”  He heard the command harshly repeated.  He saw the look of irritation on Silsbee’s dusty, bearded face, that followed his hurried glance into the empty wagon.  He heard the query, “What’s gone o’ them limbs now?” handed from wagon to wagon.  He heard a few oaths; Mrs. Silsbee’s high rasping voice, abuse of himself, the hurried and discontented detachment of a search party, Silsbee and one of the hired men, and vociferation and blame.  Blame always for himself, the elder, who might have “known better!” A little fear, perhaps, but he could not fancy either pity or commiseration.  Perhaps the thought upheld his pride; under the prospect of sympathy he might have broken down.