white beauty was greater than that of the dogwood blossoms showering there through the gloom under a sudden breeze; and a dizziness struck him, so that the trees swam before his eyes.
"I have you," he repeated thickly, rising to his feet.
"And the girl. . . . Sadie?" she asked.
"You are Sadie. Only you. I have forgotten. . . ." He put out his arms, but she was beyond his reach again, her eyes mysterious.
With outstretched arms, he begged her to return.
"I love you," he said.
For a full breath she looked at him gravely. Then, "We shall see," she said, plunging her hands into the stream. As she arose, her hands were cupped and brimming with water. She moved toward him, smiling.
Terror gathered in Joe's white face.
"Drink," she tempted him,
He whispered "No," and the refusal seemed to strengthen him, for when she said again, "Drink," he shouted it: "No!"
She dropped her hands, and the water went splashing back into the stream; and, smiling still, she came nearer until she was beside him upon the rock, her wet feet glistening silver upon its greenish-brown surface. Her eyes held fast his wide, frightened stare.
"Why?" she asked him, when she was so close that he was aware of the warmth and fragrance of her person.
He answered her steadily:
"I will not, that's why. I must not. I have told you I must not, every day that I have come here, and yet I have always drunk this water. It has made me less than a man. It has made me break my word and my own rules."
Once more her eyes were grave. "You must not?" she asked. Her voice might have been that of the purring shallows. There was no escaping her gaze, and before it his eyes wavered and shifted. His shoulders drooped.
"You will not?" the purring voice went on. "Not for me, and you say you love me? It is go little that I ask."
There was pain in his voice as he cried, "Don't. . . . Sadie! I have promised. . . . the rule. . . ."
It was she whose figure drooped now, and her face that was mournful. "But you have broken the rules before this for me," she murmured.
"I came today to say that I would no more."
"But it is so little I ask. And I—am—yours."
He pleaded: "Don't!"
With sudden abandon, she flung herself against him, and for the first time his arms closed about her. She yielded to his fierce embrace, her head against his breast.
"You do not love me," she whispered.
"Sadie. . . !" His arms tightened with his cry, and a red mist blinded him as he felt her warm, vital body closer against him,
She lifted her face and looked at him.
"You will?" she asked, smiling.
"No," he said, almost with a moan.
She kissed him. "To drink, only to drink," she said softly. "It is so little. I have given you myself. . . . isn't that something?"
With one arm she clung to him as tightly as he held her; the other arm was free, and with her hand she stroked his face. Her kisses were hot upon his lips. His eyes were closed, and he swayed with a dizziness that was mightier than any other he had known.
"Only to drink," she said. "Do you not care for me, and I have given you myself? What are those men in the camp to you, they and their rules? You will not drink. . . . yet I give you. . . . this. . . ."
Her lips met his in an eternity of giving and taking.
"No" he said again, but his voice quivered and broke, with the plain message of surrender.
With a little cry, she knelt at the edge of the pool, her arms still about him so that he was forced to kneel with her. She plunged her hands into the water, and lifted them to him with their silver freight.
With an eager, moaning sound, he drank the cool water; and as he did so the red mist before his eyes thickened, and his ears roared with the thunder of blood within. To drink became then his passion, and he cupped his own hands, filled them with water, and drank.
For a moment the mist cleared and the roaring ceased, and he saw that he was alone on the rock.
"Sadie!" he called.
The answering sound might have been only the prattle of the stream, or it might have been low laughter.
The thought came to him that perhaps she had fled to the bank, and with prodigious labor he clambered up the tiny slope. She was not there. He parted the soft flowing curtain of the willows, and though the fronds were so light a bird might have flown through them, he gasped with the effort it cost him.
Staggering into the sunlight beyond the fringe of trees, he found that she was not there, either. He tried to run, but only stumbled, lifting himself painfully to stagger onward. Then the mist of his delirium closed upon him, and the blood at his ear drums pounded and a tumult came out of earth and sky to overwhelm him.
THE DOCTOR and engineer, going fishing, stumbled upon his crumpled form an hour later. The former, a wizened, spectacled little man, bent over him and studied him with eyes that seemed to see everything. He studied the young fellow's pulse, loosened his shirt, stared into the pupils of his eyes. At last he turned to the other, frowning, and said:
"Fever, and maybe that damn typhoid. He's the sickest man I over saw."
Then his voice rose with a flare of auger.
"Say, can't you keep these fools away from this water?" he asked. "There's death in it."
Men, Lost at Sea, Live Through Week of Horror
A HARROWING adventure that probably will never leave their minds befell two fishermen of Freeport, L. I., who passed a week in the open sea in a small motor boat, without water or provisions. Caught in a blizzard off the Long Island coast, something went wrong with their compass and they headed out to sea, where they drifted for nearly a week before the schooner, Catherine M., saw their signals of distress and picked them up. The two men—Capt. Bergen Smith and Harry Matthews—had only a small supply of water and a few raw potatoes. On this they lived for the first two days. Then Matthews lost control of himself, drank sea water and became delirious. Raving in delirium, he urged Smith to split a bottle of iodine in a suicide pact. Their boat began to leak, and they ripped the lining from their overcoats to calk the seams. Finally, after a number of ships had passed without seeing them, they were rescued, more dead than alive, by the schooner.
