He had suffered greatly from thirst, so that when he tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving he could not move his swollen tongue.

He was weakened, too, but the freezing cold of the desert night aroused all his latent force.

He struggled to his feet, and laid a course by the light of the moon back to the spring he had left in the morning.

How he reached the hills again he never knew, nor how he made his way over them and back to the settlement.

But there he lay sick for many days, his mind, when he felt it at all, tossing idly upon the great sustaining consciousness of that vision in the desert.
The day which he next remembered clearly, and from which he dated his new life, was one when he was back in the Meadows.