He was acquainted with the character of both. He knew that, instead of allaying his thirst, they would only have added to its intensity.
He passed the depending pods, without plucking them. He passed the succulent stalks, without tapping thorn.
To augment his anguish, he now discovered that the wounded limb was, every moment, becoming more unmanageable. It had swollen to enormous dimensions. Every step caused him a spasm of pain. Even if going in the direction of the doubtful streamlet, he might never succeed in reaching it? If not, there was no hope for him. He could but lie down in the thicket, and die!
Death would not be immediate. Although suffering acute pain in his head, neither the shock it had received, nor the damage done to his knee, were like to prove speedily fatal. He might dread a more painful way of dying than from wounds. Thirst would be his destroyer—of all shapes of death perhaps the most agonising.
The thought stimulated him to renewed efforts; and despite the slow progress he was able to make—despite the pain experienced in making it—he toiled on.
The black birds hovering above, kept pace with his halting step and laborious crawl. Now more than a mile from the point of their first segregation, they were all of them still there—their numbers even augmented by fresh detachments that had become warned of the expected prey. Though aware that the quarry still lived and moved, they saw that it was stricken. Instinct—perhaps rather experience—told them it must soon succumb.
Their shadows crossed and recrossed the track upon which he advanced—filling him with ominous fears for the end.
There was no noise: for these birds are silent in their flight—even when excited by the prospect of a repast. The hot sun had stilled the voices of the crickets and tree-toads. Even the hideous “horned frog” reclined listless along the earth, sheltering its tuberculated body under the stones.
The only sounds to disturb the solitude of the chapparal were those made by the sufferer himself—the swishing of his garments, as they brushed against the hirsute plants that beset the path; and occasionally his cries, sent forth in the faint hope of their being heard.
By this time, blood was mingling with the sweat upon his skin. The spines of the cactus, and the clawlike thorns of the agave, had been doing their work; and scarce an inch of the epidermis upon his face, hands, and limbs, that was not rent with a laceration.