for everybody. The hot winds have
come too early. Goin' to burn the pastures, looks like; hard to find
water now for the cattle."

He handed us two flasks of cold water. "Brought 'em from the river;
filled 'em while the water was cold early this morning."

Cold, clear water! We drank great long draughts of it, washed ourselves
clean and fresh in a basin half-full of water.

One day Tim Carter came by sober. "The damn homestead is too dry for a
man to drink water, say nothing of whisky," he stormed. "I'm going to
have water if it takes my last dollar."

He brought in a drill. For several days neighbors helped with the
drilling; others flocked around with strained anxiety, waiting, waiting
for that drill to strike water.

Then one scorching afternoon the drillers gave a whoop as they brought
up the drill. "Oil! Oil! There's oil on this drill. Damned if we ain't
struck oil!"

Tim Carter's straight, portly figure drooped. He put his hands in his
pockets, staring aghast at the evidence before him. "Oil!" he shouted.
"Who in hell wants oil? Nobody but Rockefeller. It's water we want!"

"Pack up your rig, boys," he said in a tone of defeat, as though he'd
made a final plea in court and lost the case. A discouraged,
disheartened group, they turned away.

Thirst became an obsession with us all, men and animals alike. Cattle,
breaking out of pastures, went bawling over the plains; horses went
running wildly in search of water. People were famished for a cold
drink.

"I don't believe we ought to drink that water," I heard Ida Mary tell Ma
Wagor, as she stood, dipper in hand, looking dubiously into the bucket.

"Oh, never mind about the germs," Ma said. "Just pick out them you see
and them you can't see oughtn't hurt anybody. You can't be persnickety
these days." With all that we could see in the water, it did seem as
though the invisible ones couldn't do much harm.

With the perverseness of nature, the less water one has the thirstier
one becomes. When it is on tap one doesn't think of it. But down to the
last half-gallon, our thirst was unquenchable.

The store's supply of salmon and dried beef went begging, while it kept
a team busy hauling canned tomatoes, sauerkraut, vinegar. People could
not afford lemons, so vinegar and soda were used to make a refreshing,
thirst-quenching drink.

Homesteaders reached the point where the whole family washed in the same
quart of water. A little more soap and elbow grease, the