He fought with himself to hold that picture of her, to utter some word, make some movement.  But the power to see and to live died out of him.  He sank back with a queer sound in his throat.  He did not hear the answering cry from the girl as she flung herself, with a quick little prayer for help, on her knees in the soft, white sand beside him.  He felt no movement when she raised his head in her arm and with her bare hand brushed back his sand-littered hair, revealing where the bullet had struck him.  He did not know when she ran back to the river.

His first sensation was of a cool and comforting something trickling over his burning temples and his face.  It was water.  Subconsciously he knew that, and in the same way he began to think.  But it was hard to pull his thoughts together.  They persisted in hopping about, like a lot of sand-fleas in a dance, and just as he got hold of one and reached for another, the first would slip away from him.  He began to get the best of them after a time, and he had an uncontrollable desire to say something.  But his eyes and his lips were sealed tight, and to open them, a little army of gnomes came out of the darkness in the back of his head, each of them armed with a lever, and began prying with all their might.  After that came the beginning of light and a flash of consciousness.

The girl was working over him.  He could feel her and hear her movement.  Water was trickling over his face.  Then he heard a voice, close over him, saying something in a sobbing monotone which he could not understand.

With a mighty effort he opened his eyes.

“Thank le Bon dieu, you live, m’sieu,” he heard the voice say, as if coming from a long distance away.  “You live, you live—­”

“Tryin’ to,” he mumbled thickly, feeling suddenly a sense of great elation.  “Tryin’—­”

He wanted to curse the gnomes for deserting him, for as soon as they were gone with their levers, his eyes and his lips shut tight again, or at least he thought they did.  But he began to sense things in a curious sort of way.  Some one was dragging him.  He could feel the grind of sand under his body.  There were intervals when the dragging operation paused.  And then, after a long time, he seemed to hear more than one voice.  There were two—­sometimes a murmur of them.  And odd visions came to him.  He seemed to see the girl with shining black hair and dark eyes, and then swiftly she would change into a girl with hair like blazing gold.  This was a different girl.  She was not like Pretty Eyes, as his twisted mind called the other.  This second vision that he saw was like a radiant bit of the sun, her hair all aflame with the fire of it and her face a different sort of face.  He was always glad when she went away and Pretty Eyes came back.