I. The Water-Hole

A fitful breeze played among the mesquite bushes. The naked earth, where it showed between the clumps of grass, was baked plaster hard. It burned like hot slag, and except for a panting lizard here and there, or a dust-gray jack-rabbit, startled from its covert, nothing animate stirred upon its face. High and motionless in the blinding sky a buzzard poised； long-tailed Mexican crows among the thorny branches creaked and whistled, choked and rattled, snored and grunted； a dove mourned inconsolably, and out of the air issued metallic insect cries--the direction whence they came as unascertainable as their source was hidden.

Although the sun was half-way down the west, its glare remained untempered, and the tantalizing shade of the sparse mesquite was more of a trial than a comfort to the lone woman who, refusing its deceitful invitation, plodded steadily over the waste. Stop, indeed, she dared not. In spite of her fatigue, regardless of the torture

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