CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.
STRUGGLING AMONG THE SAGES.
It is the fourth day after forsaking the couch among the shin oaks, and the two fugitives are still travelling upon the Llano Estacado.

They have made little more than sixty miles to the south-eastward, and have not yet struck any of the streams leading out to the lower level of the Texan plain.
Their progress has been slow; for the wounded man, instead of recovering strength, has grown feebler.

His steps are now unequal and tottering.
In addition to the loss of blood, something else has aided to disable him--the fierce cravings of hunger and the yet more insufferable agony of thirst.
His companion is similarly afflicted; if not in so great a degree, enough to make him also stagger in his steps.

Neither has had any water since the last drop drank amid the waggons, before commencing the fight; and since then a fervent sun shining down upon them, with no food save crickets caught in the plain, an occasional horned frog, and some fruit of the _opuntia_ cactus--the last obtained sparingly.
Hunger has made havoc with both, sad and quick.

Already at the end of the fourth day their forms are wasted.