At the first pale glint of the new day he was astir.  With sleep still heavy in his eyes he hurried back to the ridge over which his horse had gone.  As he was pretty well prepared to expect, there was no horse in sight.  He waited for the light to brighten, probing with eager eyes into the distances.  Swiftly the sky filled to the coming day; the shadows withdrew from the hollows, the earth stood forth, naked and clearly revealed.  Save for himself, feeling dwarfed in this immensity, there was no living thing within the scope of his vision.  He shook his head and turned back to camp and breakfast, frowning grimly.  He would have to walk out of this mess, and like any twelve cattlemen out of a dozen he had little love of walking.

While he ate his morning meal he turned matters over in his mind.  He saw that he could look forward confidently to a couple of unpleasant days.  He did not anticipate any difficulty beyond that of the irksomeness of being obliged to trudge something like fifty miles in the sun.  He knew that he would waste no end of time trying to track the vanished horse across such a land as this; he saw only foolhardiness in leaving the trail he had had picked out for him and, with little food and no knowledge of water, turning out across an utterly unknown land of forbidding desolation.  He judged roughly that Desert Valley was as near as Quigley.  Hence, having filled his canteen and tied his provisions into a bundle, he slung the two over his shoulders, left his saddle where it was and turned his face toward the home range.

Despite his determination to get an ugly task over and done with, he was a full four hours making the first ten miles.  He walked as swiftly as he might to take the full advantage of the lesser heat of the earlier hours, but his way led him through loose sand, down into cuts and gorges, up their steep sides, across fields of loose stones, which, shifting underfoot, made his striving for haste a pure work of Tantalus.  At the end of the first hour the heat was already intense; at the end of the second he felt that his skin was as dry as the desert sands and that the moisture of his body was being sucked out of it by the thirsty air and that at every stride the day grew drier and hotter.  Thirst clutched his throat, ached throughout his body, that thirst which is like no other, desert thirst.  Again and again he drank from his canteen.  When he ploughed up the slope of the little hills and then down into their hollow to the double-ringed spring, his canteen was half empty.  And when at last he came to the spring itself he found it as dry as a last year’s seedpod.

Until this instant the day’s adventure had been merely the acme of unpleasantness.  Now something more sinister entered into it.  He made certain that he had found the place where the water-hole should be.  Then he sat down.  His eyes were very grave.

‘If I don’t play this hand right,’ he told himself solemnly, ’I’ll never get out of this.’