They lay all doubled up in the coarse grass, exactly as they had fallen, the man resting face downward, the slender figure of the girl clasped vice-like in his arms, with her tightly closed eyes upturned toward the glaring sun.  Their strange, strained, unnatural posture, the rigidity of their limbs, the ghastly pallor of the exposed young face accentuated by dark, dishevelled hair, all alike seemed to indicate death.  Never once questioning but that he was confronting the closing scene of a grewsome tragedy, the thoroughly aroused lieutenant dropped upon his knees beside them, his eyes already moist with sympathy, his anxious fingers feeling for a possible heart-beat.  A moment of hushed, breathless suspense followed, and then he began flinging terse, eager commands across his shoulder to where his men were clustered.

“Here!  Carson, Perry, Ronk, lay hold quick, and break this fellow’s clasp,” he cried, briefly.  “The girl retains a spark of life yet, but the man’s arms fairly crush her.”

With all the rigidity of actual death those clutching hands held their tenacious grip, but the aroused soldiers wrenched the interlaced fingers apart with every tenderness possible in such emergency, shocked at noting the expression of intense agony stamped upon the man’s face when thus exposed to view.  The whole terrible story was engraven there—­how he had toiled, agonized, suffered, before finally yielding to the inevitable and plunging forward in unconsciousness, written as legibly as though by a pen.  Every pang of mental torture had left plainest imprint across that haggard countenance.  He appeared old, pitiable, a wreck.  Carson, who in his long service had witnessed much of death and suffering, bent tenderly above him, seeking for some faint evidence of lingering life.  His fingers felt for no wound, for to his experienced eyes the sad tale was already sufficiently clear—­hunger, exposure, the horrible heart-breaking strain of hopeless endeavor, had caused this ending, this unspeakable tragedy of the barren waterless plain.  He had witnessed it all before, and hoped now for little.  The anxious lieutenant, bareheaded under the hot sun-glare, strode hastily across from beside the unconscious but breathing girl, and stood gazing doubtfully down upon them.

“Any life, sergeant?” he demanded, his voice rendered husky by sympathy.

“He doesn’t seem entirely gone, sir,” and Carson glanced up into the officer’s face, his own eyes filled with feeling.  “I can distinguish just a wee bit of breathing, but it’s so weak the pulse hardly stirs.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Starving at the bottom, sir.  The only thing I see now is to get them down to water and food.”

The young officer glanced swiftly about him across that dreary picture of sun-burnt, desolate prairie stretching in every direction, his eyes pausing slightly as they surveyed the tops of the distant cottonwoods.