“It’s no good wearing ourselves out in the heat of the day,” said Anderson, “wait till evening and we’ll do twice as much.”
“Which way?”
“South-east, I think. If we can only hold out we ought to fetch Gerring Gerring Water. As far as I know this must be Tamba salt lake, and if so—”
“Karinda’s just to the north there.”
“A hundred and twenty miles at the very least and not a drop of water the whole way. No, that’s out of the question, old man; our only hope lies in reaching Gerring Gerring.”
“And you don’t see much probability of our doing that?”
“Well, we can try.”
He felt a great pity, this older man, for the lad—he called him a lad for all his four-and-twenty years—doomed to die, nay, dying at this very moment, in the prime of his manhood. They could but try, he said over and over again, they could but try.
And then as they rested they fell to talking of other things—talked of their past lives and of their homes as neither, perhaps, had ever talked before.
“My old mother ‘ll miss me,” said Charlie Helm with a sigh, “though Lord knows when she’ll ever hear the truth of the matter.”