Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/275

stars. At times it seemed to him that he was not moving at all, but pinned like a beetle in the centre of a circle of red blotting-paper, a beetle with futile moving legs that carried him nowhere. For he walked, and walked, and the distance never changed, and the moon wore a foolish grin . . . and there was a raging fire inside him, and—he—must go straight on. By and by he realised that the water-bag was quite empty, though he had no recollection of taking the last draught. His knees felt weak and he had stumbled once or twice in the last hour. Now he stopped short, for quite suddenly he felt afraid. Not the reasonable, controlled, and wholesome fear that had been with him for days, but a blind panic.

“You must pull yourself together,” he said aloud, and his voice sounded so uncanny that it made things worse. “We’re—quite near water now.” He turned and looked back in the direction from which he had come, and an unbelievably long black shadow, stretching across the trail he had made, lifted a menacing arm at him.

He stepped back involuntarily and gave a short bark of laughter as the shadow moved too. He seemed to have been walking towards the moon so long that he had quite forgotten his own shadow—still, it did look rather overwhelming, all by itself in that . . . place. Tony tried to think of a suitable word, and rejected several as inadequate. He felt better, somehow, as he faced the amused moon again.

“There’s thirty miles more in me, at any rate, and I haven’t begun to wobble much yet . . . and the next hole can’t be that far.” Unless he had missed it. . . . He would not let himself think that.

Faltering and checking he reeled to the water-hole next day. The sun rode high in a sky of brass by that time, but he had wound himself up to go and he went till, literally, he dropped. And there was no water in that hole.