So that he was driven, a gaunt and ever gaunter shadow of a man, up and down the beaten trails of the oasis. Soon he would fall and die, be sun-dried and blow away like powdered leather on the desert wind. By his agonies he measured the inhospitableness and inevitableness of the wasteland. Every thought had some connection with his torture or some relation to his physical being in its fight for existence. In this desert oasis were living things, creatures grown too wary for him now, and willows, cacti, sages, that had conquered over the barrenness of the desert. On his brain had been etched by words of steel the fact that no power to fight was so great and unquenchable as that of man’s. He lived on, he staggered on through the solemn, glaring days.
* * * * *
One morning h
