“Barney!” she called, by a mighty effort. There was no response.
Crying now, in her anguish and plight, she led the pony this way and that, up and down, listening, trying to force a shout through her swollen lips. At length, in despair, she knew she could search no more. A lifelessness of feeling was creeping upon her. Mechanically she walked beside her pony, and it was the animal that was leading.
It seemed as if she had plodded onward thus for hours, when at length she stumbled upon a gray little mound in the drifting alkali.
“Barney!” she said, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper. Crooning and sobbing, she lifted him up—unconscious, but clinging to the still, little form that was hugged to the shelter of his breast.
“Hang on—oh, hang on to the horse, dear, please,” she coaxed, in all the tender strength of a new-born love. “Barney—try—try, dear, please. I’ll be your wife—I’ll do anything—if only you’ll try.”
She had raised him bodily to the pony’s back. Stiffly as a man that freezes he straddled the animal. He made no answer, no movement. She feared he must be dead. She dared not look at the little papoose. Barney’s weight rested partially upon her shoulder. She tossed away the reins.
“Go on, Sancho—go on home,” she croaked to the horse, passionately.
The pony seemed to comprehend. With some faint fragrance of the waters of Bitter Hole in his nostrils, the willing creature fought slowly, steadily forward, against the terrible drift.
John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl, against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike slowness and silence toward them.