“Did you leave me?”

The answer was very low, and his voice shook as he uttered it; but through the roar of the hurricane Rake heard it.

“That was different, sir,” he said simply.  “Let me lie here, and go you on.  It’ll soon be over, and there’s naught to be done.”

“O God! is no help possible?”

“Don’t take on, sir; it’s no odds.  I always was a scamp, and scamps die game, you know.  My life’s been a rare spree, count it all and all; and it’s a great, good thing, you see, sir, to go off quick like this.  I might have been laid in hospital.  If you’d only take the beast and ride on, sir—­”

“Hush! hush!  Would you make me coward, or brute, or both?”

The words broke in an agony from him.  The time had been when he had been himself stretched in what he had thought was death, in just such silence, in just such solitude, upon the bare, baked earth, far from men’s aid, and near only to the hungry eyes of watching beasts of prey.  Then he had been very calm, and waited with indifference for the end; now his eyes swept over the remorseless wastes, that were growing faintly visible under the coming dawn, with all the impatience, the terror, of despair.  Death had smitten down many beside him; buoyant youth and dauntless manhood he had seen a thousand times swept under the great waves of war and lost forever, but it had an anguish for him here that he would never have known had he felt his own life-blood well out over the sand.  The whole existence of this man had been sacrificed for him, and its only reward was a thrust of a lance in a midnight fray—­a grave in an alien soil.

His grief fell dully on ears half deafened already to the sounds of the living world.  The exhaustion that follows on great loss of blood was upon the soldier who for the last half hour had lain there in the darkness and the stillness, quietly waiting death, and not once seeking even to raise his voice for succor lest the cry should reach and should imperil his master.

The morning had broken now, but the storm had not lulled.  The northern winds were sweeping over the plains in tenfold violence, and the rains burst and poured, with the fury of water-spouts on the crust of the parched, cracked earth.  Around them there was nothing heard or seen except the leaden, angry mists, tossed to and fro under the hurricane, and the white light of the coming day breaking lividly through the clouds.  The world held no place of more utter desolation, more unspeakable loneliness; and in its misery Cecil, flung down upon the sands beside him, could do nothing except—­helpless to aid, and powerless to save—­watch the last breath grow feebler and feebler, until it faded out from the only life that had been faithful to him.

By the fitful gleams of day he could see the blood slowly ebbing out from the great gap where the lance-head was still bedded with its wooden shaft snapped in two; he could see the drooped head that he had raised upon his knee, with the yellow, northern curls that no desert suns had darkened; and Rake’s eyes, smiling so brightly and so bravely still, looked up from under their weary lids to his.