get me yet; not till I’ve had my meat.”

The cough seized him, and ere it let go its hold the disappointed vultures, with never a stroke of their wide wings, faded into the skyey depths.

But Gard had no heart to linger further. The 40sight of the desert scavengers had shaken him sorely, he hastened to rouse his strange fellow, and soon the pair were again threading that weary way from nowhere to the unknown.

40

All day they had moved steadily mountainward, and now they began to draw nearer the range that ever since dawn had reared a jagged line along the horizon. Gard had not known whether they would reach the mountains that day. One does not predicate distances in the desert. They may be long, or short; the lying air gives no clue.

But as the afternoon shadows were turning to mauve and blue, what had for hours looked like sloping foothills, leading gently toward further heights, suddenly reared itself before them in a long stretch of high, perpendicular wall.

Straight toward it the camel went, never pausing or looking around at the man beside him, and when another forward step would have found their progress barred, the creature swerved to the left, to enter a narrow pass that appeared as if by magic in the seemingly unbroken wall.

Now the way wound upward along a dry wash, climbing almost imperceptibly, at first, growing steeper, by degrees, though at no time a sharp ascent. The shadows closed in upon them, and the air grew chill, but still the camel walked on, and 41beside him, clinging, now, in his weakness, to the animal’s long hair, toiled the man.

41

More and more often he paused for breath, his lungs tortured by the pace. He was faint with fatigue, chilled by the shadow-cooled air, but a drink from the flask gave him brief strength, and he struggled on.

An hour, and they were well within the mountains. The way wound now among greasewood and scrub oaks, with only here and there a cactus. The chaparral drew dense, and Gard could hear birds calling in its depths.

The trail began to widen, and patches of coarse grasses cropped out, here and there. The altitude was not particularly great, but it was beginning to tell upon the man when his strange guide halted in a little open glade, where the wash ended abruptly.

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