Next day she took up a position a few hundred yards from the trail and followed its course, straining her eyes to see before and behind her, husbanding her strength with frequent rests, and drinking from every pool.

That day, like its predecessor, passed swiftly by and left her well out upon the huge, billowy bosom of the plains.  Again she sought a hiding-place, but none offered.  There was no warmth in the sand, and the night wind arose, cold and moaning.  She could not sleep.  The whole empty world seemed haunted.  Rustlings of the sage, seepings of the sand, gusts of the wind, the night, the loneliness, the faithless stars and a treacherous moon that sank, the wailing of wolves—­all these things worked upon her mind and spirit until she lost her courage.  She feared to shut her eyes or cover her face, for then she could not see the stealthy forms stalking her out of the gloom.  She prayed no more to her star.

“Oh, God, have you forsaken me?” she moaned.

How relentless the grip of the endless hours!  The black night held fast.  And yet when she had grown nearly mad waiting for the dawn, it finally broke, ruddy and bright, with the sun, as always, a promise of better things to come.

Allie found no water that day.  She suffered from the lack of it, but hunger appeared to have left her.  Her strength diminished, yet she walked and plodded miles on miles, always gazing both hopelessly and hopefully along the winding trail.

At the close of the short and merciful day despair seized upon Allie’s mind.  With night came gloom and the memory of her mother’s fate.  She still clung to a strange faith that all would soon be well.  But reason, fact, reality, these present things pointed to certain doom—­starvation—­death by thirst—­or Indians!  A thousand times she imagined she heard the fleet hoof-beating of many mustangs.  Only the tiny pats of the broken sage leaves in the wind!

It was a dark and cloudy night, warmer and threatening rain.  She kept continually turning round and round to see what it was that came creeping up behind her so stealthily.  How horrible was the dark—­the blackness that showed invisible things!  A wolf sent up his hungry, lonely cry.  She did not fear this reality so much as she feared the intangible.  If she lived through this night, there would be another like it to renew the horror.  She would rather not live.  Like a creature beset by foes all around she watched; she faced every little sound; she peered into the darkness, instinctively unable to give up, to end the struggle, to lie down and die.

Neale seemed to be with her.  He was alive.  He was thinking of her at that very moment.  He would expect her to overcome self and accident and calamity.  He spoke to her out of the distance and his voice had the old power, stronger than fear, exhaustion, hopelessness, insanity.  He could call her back from the grave.

And so the night passed.