The man recognized this truth but it made only a dim impression;that keg of water meant life--and life was a thousandfold more to him than death.He drew himself upon the seat,snatched at the tin cup beside the keg,and drew out the cloth-covered corn-cob that stopped the flow.Having slaked his thirst,there was mingled with his sense of ineffable content,an overwhelming desire for sleep.He dropped on the second mattress,on which bedclothes were carelessly strewn;his head found the empty pillow that lay indented as it had been left by some vanished sleeper.As his eyelids closed,he fell sound asleep.But for the rising and falling of his powerful breast,he was as motionless as the body of the woman.
Without,the afternoon sun slowly sank behind the mountains casting long shadows over the plains;the wind swirled the sand in tireless eddies,sometimes lifting it high in great sheets,forming sudden dunes;coyotes prowled among the foot-hills and out on the open levels,squatting with eyes fixed on the wagon,uttering sharp quick barks of interrogation.A herd of deer lifted their horns against the horizon,then suddenly bounded away,racing like shadows toward the lowlands of Red River.On the domelike summit of Mount Welsh,a mile away,a mountain-lion showed his sinuous form against the sky seven hundred feet in air.And from the mountainside near at hand stared from among the thick greenery of a cedar,the face of an Indian whose black hair was adorned by a single red feather.
Within the wagon,unconscious of all,in strange fellowship,lay the living and the dead.