“Water!”
With cracking lips and bloodshot eyes, they staggered on. The horses were fast becoming mad with thirst, and covered with blood from the pitiless stings of hungry insects—with the fiery sky and baked earth beneath, they still stumbled forward, hopeless, fainting, gasping for life.
“Water!”
In the yet distant timber, the green leaves rustled and sung a dewy psalm—the liquid crystals dropped into mossy pools—flashed over the white pebbles—leaped from the lofty rock—danced in foamy eddies, and flung high the wreaths of misty spray. Cool and sparkling they slept in the deep pools, sung along the rapids, and showered the jutting rocks, until they looked like Tritons shaking their wet locks, and rising from an ocean’s bed. From the far-off springs, the icegrottoes and eternal snows of their mountain home, they had come, laughing, leaping, dashing, to charm the mind with fairy pictures, and gratify the thirsty soul, until it reeled with the overflowing of perfect satiety. Ah! what a dream for fevered lips—bodies aflame with heat, and hearts sinking with the long-endured sufferings of ungratified thirst. What a vivid mockery it was.
“Water! water!” whispered every tongue, and the hollow-eyed and gasping horses told of still deeper want.
“Water, for God’s sake, Waltermyer, guide us to water,” was now the continued cry.
“Be men! A short hour will bring us to it. See yender, where the ground looks dead, and dry, and parched. That is the long grass of a savanna; beyond it we can find water by digging. The arroyas may not be dried up, but if they are, thar is, or was an old well thar that never failed me yet.”
“Come on, then!”
Oh! with what fearful hoarseness the sound came from the seared throats—a harsh, file-like, rasping sound, as if the breath was forced between the thickly-set saw-teeth, or could find an outlet only between ragged stones.
“That I will, boys. I’d even go before—for, see, my horse hasn’t turned a hair yet—and bring you water, if I dared. Put a bullet in your mouths, and we’ll drink toasts yet, around the Challybate spring.”