“I’d give something for a good drink of water,” he said. “I’ve been longing this hour past, and I can’t understand how it is that we haven’t come upon a stream running out into the plain. There arn’t been no chance of the waggon going up into the mountains this way.”
“Shall we turn back?”
“Turn back? No! not if we have to go right round the whole world,” growled Joses. “Come along, my lad, we’ll find a spring somewheres.”
For another hour they tramped on almost in silence, and then all at once came a musical, plashing sound that made Joses draw himself up erect and say with a smile:
“There’s always water if you go on long enough, my lad. That there’s a fall.”
And so it proved to be, and one of extreme beauty, for a couple of hundred yards farther they came upon a nook in the rough wall, where the water of a small stream poured swiftly down, all foam and flash and sparkle, and yet in so close and compact a body that, pulling a cow-horn from his pocket, Joses could walk closely up and catch the pure cold fluid as it fell.
“There, Master Bart,” he said, filling and rinsing out the horn two or three times, “there you are. Drink, my lad, for you want it bad, as I can see.”
“No, you drink first, Joses,” said the lad; but the rough frontier man refused, and it was not until Bart had emptied the horn of what seemed to be the most delicious water he had ever tasted, that Joses would fill and drink.
When he did begin, however, it seemed as if he would never leave off, for he kept on pouring down horn after horn, and smacking his lips with satisfaction.
“Ah, my lad!” he exclaimed at last, “I’ve drunk everything in my time, whiskey, and aguardiente, and grape wine,