re them hidden in the
west.

Now gradually as they went onward the country began to change; the
sage-brush became more stunted, the grass tufts sparser; the streams
ran smaller and smaller. Until there came a day when they traveled
from dawn until long after sunset before they encountered any water;
and this lay lukewarm in hollows of the sandstone, accumulations from
rains of long ago. The earth was hard and dry and there were stretches
where there was no earth at all, only a rubble of sharp rock fragments
radiating heat-waves under the glaring sun.

There was no rollicking about the camp-fires any more. When evening
came the men were weary from hurrying their wagons over rugged ground
or climbing lofty buttes to look ahead for signs of water. Isham the
fiddler left his violin in its case; he never took it from that case
again. The oxen had grown gaunt from lack of feed and drink; they
wandered about the night camps nibbling disdainfully at what growth
there was, low bitter sapless weeds.

The change in the country had come so imperceptibly that they did not
realize the presence of the desert until they were confronted by
an-appalling revelation one afternoon.

All that day and all the day before the drivers had been goading the
failing oxen while they peered with reddened eyes out on the glaring
plain, from which arose a series of isolated cone-shaped buttes. For
the water in the barrels was running very low and they were always
seeking some sign of stream or pool.

Then one of them uttered a loud cry and at that shout the others saw,
two miles or so off to the right where the plain opened out between
the cone-shaped hills, a lake whose waters were bluer than any they
had ever looked upon. A little breeze was stirring its surface, and on
the further bank there were some trees whose branches were moving as
if perhaps the wind were stronger over there.

Now every driver lashed his oxen to a lumbering run, and the women
lifted the canvas tops of the prairie-schooners to show their children
the pretty lake. The whole train turned away from its course and went
rumbling across the plain, one mile, then a second; and another
followed before they found themselves in the midst of a glaring
expanse of snow-white alkali, baked by the sun to rock-like hardness.
The vision of blue waters had vanished with the suddenness of a dream
which ceases on the instant of awakening.

The mothers lowered the canvas wagon-covers and s