Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver
under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he
strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the
racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell,
and beat him down, despite his desert strain. She had no pity; she would
have killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving
her own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this
thing, to save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun.
She did not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing,
to fulfill the mission that she undertook. She loved with the passionate
blindness of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern
blood. If to spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would
have given the word for their destruction without a moment's pause.
Once, from some screen of gaunt and barren rock, a shot was fired at
her, and flew within a hair's breadth of her brain; she never even
looked around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab
prowler of the plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled
lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. And
as she felt the hours steal on--so fast, so hideously fast--with that
horrible relentlessness which tarries for no despair, as it hastens for
no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to the roof of
her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain.
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