When no one saw him he kept this stealthy watch. In the daytime, with the others about, he still was careful to preserve his brusque indifference, to avoid her, to hide his passion with a jealous subtlety. But beneath the imposed bonds it grew with each day, stronger and more savage as the way waxed fiercer. It was not an obsession of occasional moments, it was always with him. As pilot her image moved across the waste before him. When he fell back for words with Daddy John, he was listening through the old man's speech, for the fall of her horse's hoofs. Her voice made his heart stop, the rustle of her garments dried his throat. When his lowered eyes saw her hand on the plate's edge, he grew rigid, unable to eat. If she brushed by him in the bustle of camp pitching, his hands lost their strength and he was sick with the sense of her. Love, courtship, marriage, were words that no longer had any meaning for him. All the tenderness and humanity he had felt for her in the days of her father's sickness were gone. They were burned away, as the water and the grass were. When he saw her solicitude for David, his contempt for the weak man hardened into hatred. He told himself that he hated them both, and he told himself he would crush and kill them both before David should get her. The desire to keep her from David was stronger than the desire to have her for himself. He did not think or care what he felt. She was the prey to be won by cunning or daring, whose taste or wishes had no place in the struggle. He no longer looked ahead, thought, or reasoned. The elemental in him was developing to fit a scene in which only the elemental survived. They broke camp at four the next morning. For the last few days the heat had been unbearable, and they decided to start while the air was still cool and prolong the noon halt. The landscape grew barer. There were open areas where the soil was soft and sifted from the wheels like sand, and dried stretches where the alkali lay in a caked, white crust. In one place the earth humped into long, wavelike swells each crest topped with a fringe of brush, fine and feathery as petrified spray. At mid-day there was no water in sight. Courant, standing on his saddle, saw no promise of it, nothing but the level distance streaked with white mountain rims, and far to the south a patch of yellow--bare sand, he said, as he pointed a horny finger to where it lay.