“What do you want?”
“You know. I can’t let you go all alone.”
“What!” cried the boy, in a hoarse, cracked voice. “You don’t mean—”
“Yes, I do. You must be right.”
It was the speaker who held out a dimly-seen hand now, one that was grasped and held while the ponies closed in so much together that the boys’ legs touched as they cantered steadily on straight for a line drawn down in imagination from the planet now twinkling brightly—the guiding star which both boys mentally prayed might lead them to the object of their quest.
Then cantering steadily till the ponies dropped into a walk to avoid rough ground, the two lads rode on and on, with the barrels rolling behind, and the hours gently gliding by unheeded, till the glittering star sank lower and lower and dropped at last into the great bed of haze which seemed to extinguish it all at once, but not until Chris had marked down another to take its place as their goal.
Neither spoke, for their heads were too full of the object they had in view, with its hopes and many fears.
The ponies kept on straight for the starry guides, not deviating in the least from the point at which their heads had been directed by their riders, and the mule followed steadily behind, with the empty barrels keeping up their hollow, rumbling sound, and it was this that seemed to form a strange lulling accompaniment to the boys’ thoughts, which in the course of their progress gradually darkened into a confused nightmare-like state. It was not sleep, but a stupor in which they kept on their horses instinctively, from no voluntary effort of their own. The state of exhaustion and weakness into which they had been lapsing during the perilous journey must have had much to do with their feelings, and robbed them of the power to feel more than a dull, numbing pain which came and went as their steeds ambled or walked unchecked or guided by rein, for even the lariat had glided from Chris’s fingers and trailed along behind the mule upon the sand. Not that it mattered, for the mongrel beast kept steadily on behind its companions, trotting or cantering or dropping into a walk as they gave it the cue, but never once stopping to rest or attempting to browse.
Always onward, straight onward, while the riders sank deeper and deeper into their strange stupor-like state, which, in one faint struggle back into partial consciousness, Chris had likened to the closing-in of the sultry haze which seemed to him to press upon him as if it grew so thick that it held him fast what time he was being urged through it.
Then utter unconsciousness of everything, which lasted without change and as if the very calm, restful, painful end of all things had come.