Long before noon he had covered the three miles and a half to the first camp on the back trail. There he hesitated. A temptingly crumbly log lay beside the trail, and his stomach was cramped with such hunger as he had not felt for days. But he halted only a moment. "Time enough to eat to-night," he muttered, and went on.
The afternoon was harder. The giddiness and the mist assailed him oftener, and several times, when the blankness became complete, he was roused by finding that his face had come into not ungentle contact with the ground. Once, doubling limply, he struck his face on his knee instead, and a cut lip gave him the pleasant salty taste of blood. Sharp pains of breathlessness stabbed his sides at intervals, and his heart had fits of throbbing suffocatingly. But he never halted as long as he could see. When the trail was only blackness in the night he sank down.
The rain and the light woke him to an accusing sense that it had long been day. He moved on at once. "I'll eat when I've made that up," he muttered, as the blur enclosed him.
That day was mostly blur until, along in the afternoon, his mind cleared suddenly. The ground sloped upward under his feet. A rocky, sparsely-wooded ridge rose above him. Remembrance tingled through him. "My cactus-farm!" he cried, in delighted recognition. "I'm gettin' almost there."
With his knees doubling under him, he clawed his way to the ridge, and a well-remembered landscape lay about him, dark billows of unbroken forest and a horizon of up-tumbled hills. The huge emptiness of it smote him like a blow and he turned to the old camp. The signs of human occupation, the remembrance of men who had spoken there and of the words they had said, comforted him wonderfully. "Here," he said, having fallen into a way of thinking aloud, "is where I eat. They'd ought to be fine buggin' here."
But the ridge was disappointingly bare of provender. Not a rotten log, not a seed pod, rewarded his toilsome search. At last, where a hanging corner of rock had sheltered it, he came upon a torpid colony of tiger-ants. He looked at them dubiously. "I wonder," he muttered, "if anybody ever et an ant? I reckon not. Don't seem to be much to th'm."
As he stirred the sluggish insects with a doubtful finger, one of them set its mandibles in his flesh. Sullivan's eyes lit with determination. "I'm hungrier'n you be, I reckon," he said gravely.
With the refreshing acidity of his experiment strong on his tongue, he rose at last, regretfully. "It would seem kind of home-like sleepin' here," he said. "But I reckon I'd better be gallopin' along." And he pushed on till once more darkness brought him merciful oblivion.
He woke to daylight with all his senses clear but one. He understood—there had been times when he forgot even that—that he was Sullivan, that behind him lay his comrades, starving, that before him the trail led to men who needed but a word, and that he had been chosen to take it. But his sense of time was gone. How long he had slept he could not guess. It might have been one night, or many. They might all have died behind him, those sick men and the Old Man who banked on him.
In torture at the uncertainty, he rose and stumbled forward again. After a while—it might have been an hour or many days—the trail brought him to a torrential river. He recognized it dimly as the Sabey. They had come up it once, sometime, any time, walking in its rocky bed. Now its swirling waters covered the trail.