on dog";
and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven due west instead
of skirting to the north by the longer route, where they would have had
the advantage of drinking at several creeks before crossing Green River.
Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard, and he insisted upon his
order in spite of the Wetmore men's protestations.

The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the color
of blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the landscape;
sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as ulcers. All the
animal trails led back from the country into which they were proceeding.
The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped earthward. The sun
looked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no sign of life in all the
land. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the sun, the silence, and the
desolation. To ears accustomed to the incessant shrilling of the insects,
the cessation was ominous, like the sudden stopping of a clock in a
chamber of death. Above the angry bellow of the thirsty herd the men
strained their ears again and again for this familiar sound of life, but
there was nothing but the bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of their
hoofs, and sometimes the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threw
back his head in seeming demand to know the justice of this thing.

Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric
reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A
cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a
weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a
thousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the red
silence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once it
had flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came upon
it, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to living
things.

The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had
scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had
weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six
hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the
enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit. Creek after creek
that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.

The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun,
tormented the eyes of the men into strange illu