When next they rested he pretended to be in a kind of stupor; but he covertly watched Warren.  The man appeared far gone, yet he had cunning.  He cautiously took up Cameron’s canteen and poured water into it from his own.

This troubled Cameron.  The old irritation at not being able to thwart Warren returned to him.  Cameron reflected, and concluded that he had been unwise not to expect this very thing.  Then, as his comrade dropped into weary rest, he lifted both canteens.  If there were any water in Warren’s, it was only very little.  Both men had been enduring the terrible desert thirst, concealing it, each giving his water to the other, and the sacrifice had been useless.

Instead of ministering to the parched throats of one or both, the water had evaporated.  When Cameron made sure of this, he took one more drink, the last, and poured the little water left into Warren’s canteen.  He threw his own away.

Soon afterward Warren discovered the loss.

“Where’s your canteen?” he asked.

“The heat was getting my water, so I drank what was left.”

“My son!” said Warren.

The day opened for them in a red and green hell of rock and cactus.  Like a flame the sun scorched and peeled their faces.  Warren went blind from the glare, and Cameron had to lead him.  At last Warren plunged down, exhausted, in the shade of a ledge.

Cameron rested and waited, hopeless, with hot, weary eyes gazing down from the height where he sat.  The ledge was the top step of a ragged gigantic stairway.  Below stretched a sad, austere, and lonely valley.  A dim, wide streak, lighter than the bordering gray, wound down the valley floor.  Once a river had flowed there, leaving only a forlorn trace down the winding floor of this forlorn valley.

Movement on the part of Warren attracted Cameron’s attention.  Evidently the old prospector had recovered his sight and some of his strength, for he had arisen, and now began to walk along the arroyo bed with his forked peach branch held before him.  He had clung to the precious bit of wood.  Cameron considered the prospect for water hopeless, because he saw that the arroyo had once been a canyon, and had been filled with sands by desert winds.  Warren, however, stopped in a deep pit, and, cutting his canteen in half, began to use one side of it as a scoop.  He scooped out a wide hollow, so wide that Cameron was certain he had gone crazy.  Cameron gently urged him to stop, and then forcibly tried to make him.  But these efforts were futile.  Warren worked with slow, ceaseless, methodical movement.  He toiled for what seemed hours.  Cameron, seeing the darkening, dampening sand, realized a wonderful possibility of water, and he plunged into the pit with the other half of the canteen.  Then both men toiled, round and round the wide hole, down deeper and deeper.  The sand grew moist, then wet.  At the bottom of the deep pit the sand coarsened,