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Several of the negroes had already died, and more were down helpless beneath the feet of their thirst-tortured but more able-bodied fellow sufferers. The howls and lamentations that continually ascended through the grating were trying to the nerves, aside from considerations of profit and loss. The combined effect on Gary was to render him more unreasonable and tyrannical than ever.

It was six years since Brantley, with his companions in misery, had drifted ashore at lonely Vahitahi in the Paumotu Group, and the kindly-hearted people had gazed with pitying horror upon the dreadful beings that, muttering and gibbering to each other, lay in the bottom of the boat, and pointed with long talon-like fingers to their burnt and bloody thirst-tortured lips.

There was only a small trickle of water. It was in the very middle, the lowest point of the stream, and up to the very edge of this the thirst-tortured cattle pressed, sinking down deep in the soft mud. "We've got to get 'em out of that," declared the ranchman. "A lot of 'em will be mired if we don't." "There are some mired now," said Skinny, pointing. "Ed and Foster are trying to yank 'em out."

To get a toe in these cracks or on one or other of these scarcely visible projections, while crawling on hands and knees, weary, thirst-tortured, and gasping for breath, this was to climb; but at last the peak was won, and Miss Bird rejoiced in the consciousness of being the first woman who had ever placed her feet on its lofty summit.

With every sunrise the magpies and buzzards came in great flocks, to sit upon the wall after they had sated themselves in the corral, and watch him. With every nightfall the wolves slunk down from the mountains and fought over the body outside the gate. Night and day the thirst-tortured mules kept up a pandemonium. A road-grading party came along on Sunday morning.

Some of the voices he had heard had been silent on earth this many a long year, but Abel Keeling, thirst-tortured, had heard them, even as he was now hearing that vacant moaning with the intermittent throbbing that filled the strait with alarm.... "Praise Him, praise Him, praise Him!" Bligh was calling deliriously.