Me Smith

strength of will, he fought against his desire to return to the pool.
    Smith did not expect to die. He felt that if he could keep his senses and not crawl back to drink again, he would pull through somehow. The living hell he now endured would pass.
    He wallowed and threshed about like a suffering animal, beating the earth with his clenched fists, during the paroxysms of cutting, wrenching pain. His suffering was supreme. All else in the world shrank into insignificance beside it. No thoughts of Dora fortified him; no mother’s face came to comfort him; nor that of any human being he had ever known. He was just Smith—self-centred—alone; just Smith, fighting and suffering and struggling for his life. His anguish found expression in the single sentence:
    “I’m sick! I’m sick! Oh, God! I’m sick!” He repeated it in every key with every inflection, and his moans lost themselves in the silence of the desert.
    Yet underneath it all, when his agony was at its height, he still believed in himself. In a kind of subconscious arrogance, he believed that he was stronger than Fate, more powerful than Death. He would not die; he would live because he wanted to live. Death was not for him—Smith. For others, but not for him.
    At last the paroxysms became less frequent and lost their violence. When they ceased altogether, he lay limp and half-conscious. He was content to remain motionless until the flies and insects of the sand roused him to the fact that another day had come.
    He was incredibly weak, and it took all his remaining strength to throw his forty-pound cow-saddle upon his horse’s back. His knees shook under him, and he had to rest before he could lift his foot to the stirrup and pull himself into the seat.
    Before he rode away he turned and looked at the hollow in the sand where his blankets had been.
    “That was a close squeak, Smith,” was all he said.
    He had no desire for breakfast; in fact, he could not have eaten, for his tongue was swollen, and his throat felt too dry to swallow. His skin was the color of his saddle-leather, and his inflamed eye-balls had the redness of live coals. Smith was far from handsome that morning.
    His own recent sufferings had in nowise made him more merciful: he spurred his stiff and lifeless horse without pity, but he spurred uselessly. It stumbled under him as he drove the spiritless band toward the hopeless waste ahead of him.
    “Unless I’m turned around, we ought to get out of this to-day,” he thought. The effort of speaking aloud was too great to be made. “Unless I’m lost, or fall off my horse, we ought to make it sure.”
    Distance had meant nothing to him during the first evening and night of his ride. He had fixed his eye upon the furthermost object within his range of vision and ridden for it—buoyant, confident, as his horse’s flying feet ate up the intervening miles. Now he shrank from looking ahead. He dreaded to lift his eyes to the interminable desolation stretching before him. The minutes seemed hours long; time was protracted as though he had been eating hasheesh. He felt as if he had ridden for a week, before his horse’s shadow told him that noon had come. The jar of his horse hurt him, and it all seemed unreal at times, like a torturing nightmare from which he must soon awake. He rode long distances with closed eyes as the day wore on. The world, red and wavering, swung around him, and he gripped his saddle-horn hard. The only real thing, the agony of which was too great to be mistaken for anything else, was his thirst. This was superlatively intense. There were moments when he had a desire to slide easily from his horse into the sand and lie still—just to be rid for a time of that jar that hurt him so. He viewed the distance to the ground contemplatively. It was not great. He would merely crumple up like a drunken person and go to sleep.
    But these moments soon passed: the instinct of self-preservation was quick to assert itself. Each time, he took a fresh grip on the slack reins and kept his horse plodding onward, ever onward, through the heavy sand and blistering alkali dust, and always to the northeast, where somewhere there was relief which somehow he must reach.
    Mile after mile crept under his horse’s lagging feet. The midday sun beat down upon him, drying the very blood in his veins, scorching him, shrivelling him, and yet there seemed no end to the waterless gulches, to the sand, the cactuses, the stunted sage-brush. His