She had raised him bodily to the pony's back. Stiffly as a man that freezes he straddled the animal. He made no answer, no movement. She feared he must be dead. She dared not look at the little papoose. Barney's weight rested partially upon her shoulder. She tossed away the reins. "Go on, Sancho--go on home," she croaked to the horse, passionately. The pony seemed to comprehend. With some faint fragrance of the waters of Bitter Hole in his nostrils, the willing creature fought slowly, steadily forward, against the terrible drift. * * * * * John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl, against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike slowness and silence toward them. And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely see--and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust. Moody ran to meet him. "Barney?--Sally?--the kid?" the teamster demanded, raucously. "Back--and goin' to live," said Moody. "The Injuns up to Red Shirt heard where the little feller was and was goin' on the war-trail, sudden, but the mother came down on the stage to-day,--and got her pretty little kid." "Oh, God! I didn't deserve it!" said Slivers, and letting himself fall limply to the earth, he lay with his face in the curve of his arm and shook with emotion. THE REPARATION BY EMERY POTTLE He looked up from the desk where he had been sitting for the last hour, his head down on his arms, trying to shut out the brave, old cry of life coming in through the open windows, pulling gently at his heart, cheeping through the darkened room as lightly and as blithely as the birds in the horse-chestnut tree just outside--the brave cry of life that, somehow, for all its clamorous traditions, seemed just then something peaceful, something that held release, freedom. He stared about him, furtively, for an instant, as if instinctively on his guard against an unwelcome eye. Then, presently, he smiled, and going to a window, pushed open the blinds, leaning, with elbows on the sill, gratefully out into the rectangular enclosure, walled in high by houses, where the late afternoon sun glanced with uncertain warmth on the horse-chestnut.