neck. Every inch and pore of his skin was tingling and pricking under
the merciless lash of the sun's rays.

"If it gets much hotter," he muttered, with a long breath, "if it gets
much hotter, I--I don' know--" He wagged his head and wiped the sweat
from his eyelids, where it was running like tears.

The sun rose higher; hour by hour, as the dentist tramped steadily on,
the heat increased. The baked dry sand crackled into innumerable tiny
flakes under his feet. The twigs of the sage-brush snapped like brittle
pipestems as he pushed through them. It grew hotter. At eleven the earth
was like the surface of a furnace; the air, as McTeague breathed it in,
was hot to his lips and the roof of his mouth. The sun was a disk
of molten brass swimming in the burnt-out blue of the sky. McTeague
stripped off his woollen shirt, and even unbuttoned his flannel
undershirt, tying a handkerchief loosely about his neck.

"Lord!" he exclaimed. "I never knew it COULD get as hot as this."

The heat grew steadily fiercer; all distant objects were visibly
shimmering and palpitating under it. At noon a mirage appeared on the
hills to the northwest. McTeague halted the mule, and drank from the
tepid water in the canteen, dampening the sack around the canary's cage.
As soon as he ceased his tramp and the noise of his crunching, grinding
footsteps died away, the silence, vast, illimitable, enfolded him like
an immeasurable tide. From all that gigantic landscape, that colossal
reach of baking sand, there arose not a single sound. Not a twig
rattled, not an insect hummed, not a bird or beast invaded that huge
solitude with call or cry. Everything as far as the eye could reach,
to north, to south, to east, and west, lay inert, absolutely quiet and
moveless under the remorseless scourge of the noon sun. The very shadows
shrank away, hiding under sage-bushes, retreating to the farthest nooks
and crevices in the canyons of the hills. All the world was one gigantic
blinding glare, silent, motionless. "If it gets much hotter," murmured
the dentist again, moving his head from side to side, "if it gets much
hotter, I don' know what I'll do."

Steadily the heat increased. At three o'clock it was even more terrible
than it had been at noon.

"Ain't it EVER going to let up?" groaned the dentist, rolling his eyes
at the sky of hot blue brass. Then, as he spoke, the stillness was
abruptly stabbed through and through by a shrill sound that seemed to
come f