“That won’t do. Texas can’t carry double. Go ahead; I’m all right.”
But Carhart dismounted, lifted his assistant, protesting, into the saddle, and pushed on, himself on foot, leading the horse.
They went on in this way for nearly an hour. Young Van found it all he could do to hold himself in the saddle. Then the horse took to staggering, and finally came to his knees.
Carhart helped his assistant to the ground, pulled his hat brim down to shade his eyes, and looked ahead. A cloud of dust on the horizon, a beaten trail through the sand, here and there a gray-brown heap where a mule had fallen,—these marked the flight of his drivers and laborers.
His eyes came back to the fainting man at his feet. Young Van had lost all sense of the world about him. Carhart saw that his lips were moving, and knelt beside him. Then he smiled, a curious, unhumorous smile; for the young engineer was muttering those words which had of late been his brother’s favorites among all the words in our rich language: “D—n Peet!”
The chief stood up again to think. And as he gazed off eastward in the general direction of Sherman, toward the place where the arch enemy of the Sherman and Western sat in his office, perhaps devising new excuses to send to the front, those same two expressive words might have been used to sum up his own thoughts. What could the man be thinking of, who had brought the work practically to a stop, who was now in the coolest imaginable fashion leaving a thousand men to mingle their bones with the bones of the buffalo—that grim, broadcast expression of the spirit of the desert.
“They went on in this way for nearly an hour.”
But these were unsafe thoughts. His own head was none too clear. It was reeling with heat and thirst and with the monotony of this desolate land. He drew a flask from his pocket,—an almost empty flask,—and placed it against Young Van’s hand. With their two hats propped together he shaded his face. Then, a canteen slung over each shoulder, he pushed ahead, on foot.