Page:Harold Lamb--Marching Sands.djvu/199

 guards of Sungan did not seem overmerciful. But why should they kill her?

No, he reasoned, she was alive. She must be alive. And she was waiting for help to come. She might have discovered that her uncle had escaped in the fight before the ruins. And she knew that Gray was coming to Sungan in their tracks.

What Gray was going to do after he found the girl, he did not know. He had long ago discovered that a multitude of difficulties confuse and baffle a man. He had trained himself to tackle only one thing at a time; not only that, but to think of only one thing. If he found Mary, there would be time to consider what would come next.

The thought of the girl urged him on, so that it was hard to keep an even pace. But he was aware of the uselessness of blind haste. He struck a steady gait which he could keep up for hours, a swift walk that left the dunes behind rapidly.

These dunes, he noticed, were not as high as at first. The desert was becoming more level, the soil harder. At some points the clay surface appeared between the sand ridges.

Gray did not try to eat. Nor did he drink, knowing the folly of that at the beginning of a march. In time he would do both, not now.

The man's powerful frame enabled him to keep up the pace he had set without fatigue or loss of breath. This was the secret of Gray's success as