A few minutes later there came a quick rush of hoofs from up the valley, and in the moonlight he saw two horsemen galloping towards him. They dashed up with hurried questions as to the firing they had heard, and, somehow, he managed to make them understand that a party of white men were dying of thirst twenty miles out on the desert.
The next thing he knew, he was in a house, and dropping into a sleep of such utter weariness that to do anything else would have been beyond his utmost power of mind or body.
Chapter XXXIX.
CROSSING THE SIERRA NEVADA.
When Glen next woke to a realizing sense of his surroundings, the evening shadows had again fallen, and he heard familiar voices near by him. All were there, General Elting, Mr. Hobart, "Billy" Brackett, Binney Gibbs, and the rest, just sitting down to a supper at the hospitable ranch table. It was laden with fresh beef, soft bread, butter, eggs, milk, boiled cabbage, and tea, all of them luxuries that they had not tasted for months. And they had plates, cups and saucers, spoons, knives, and forks. Glen wondered if he should know how to use them; but he did not wonder if he were hungry. Nor did he wait for an invitation to join that supper-party.
He was dirty and ragged and unkempt as he entered the room in which his comrades were assembled; but what did they care? He was the one who had found help and sent it to them in the time of their sore need. Some of them owed their lives to him, perhaps all of them did. Every man in the room stood up, as the chief took him by the hand and led him to the head of the table, saying,
"Here he is, gentlemen. Here is the lad who saved the second division. Some of us might have got through without his help; others certainly would not. Right here I wish to thank him, and to thank God for the strength, pluck, and powers of endurance with which this boy, to whom we owe so much, is endowed."
And Glen! How did he take all this praise? Why, he was so hungry, and his eyes were fixed so eagerly on the table full of good things spread before him that he hardly knew what the general was talking about. If they would only let him sit down and eat, and drink some of that delicious-looking water! He came very near interrupting the proceedings by doing so. At length, to his great relief, they all sat down, and in a moment Glen was eating and drinking in a manner only possible to a hearty boy who has gone without water and almost without food for two days.
A little later, seated before a glorious camp-fire of oak logs outside the ranch, Glen learned how the two ranchmen, after getting him to the house, had loaded a wagon with barrels of water and gone out on the desert. They first found General Elting, nearly exhausted, but still walking, within a couple of miles of the valley, and afterwards discovered the rest of the party dragging themselves falteringly along beside one of the ambulances, which, with the notes and maps of the expedition, was the only thing they had attempted to bring in.