ing
noisier and more heated when Tom stepped forward and raised his hand.

"Listen!" he shouted again and again, and at last was given a grudged
hearing. "Let's prove this question, for it's a mighty serious one," he
cried. "Last year, where th' trail hit th' Cimarron, which had some
water in it then, a team of mules, frantic from thirst, ran away with a
Dearborn carriage as the driver was getting out. When we came up with
them we found one of them with a broken leg, struggling in the wreckage
of the carriage. I have not been out of your sight all morning, and if I
tell you where to find that wrecked carriage, and you _do_ find it,
you'll know that I'm tellin' th' truth, an' that this is th' Cimarron.
Go along this bank, about four hundred yards, an' you'll find a
steep-walled ravine some thirty feet higher than th' bed of th' river.
At th' bottom of it, a hundred yards from th' river bank, you'll find
what's left of th' Dearborn. When you come back we'll show you how to
relieve your thirst and to get enough water to let you risk goin' on to
th' spring."

Sneers and ridicule replied to him, but a skeptical crowd, led by the
man he had lectured the night before, followed his suggestion and soon
returned with the word that the wrecked carriage had been found just
where Tom had said it would be. The contentious became softened and made
up in sullenness what they lacked in pugnacity; for there are some who,
proven wrong, find cause for anger in the correction, their stubbornness
of such a quality that it seems to prefer to hold to an error and take
the penalties than to accept safety by admitting that they are wrong.

In the meanwhile the experienced travelers had gone down into the river
bed and dug holes in the sand which, thanks to the recent rains, was a
masked reservoir and yielded all the water needed at a depth of two or
three feet. After a hard struggle with the thirsty animals to keep them
from stampeding for the water their nostrils scented, at last all had
been watered and the wagons formed for the noon camp. Humbled greenhorns
who had neglected the "water scrape" at the Arkansas were silently
digging holes along the river bed and filling every vessel they could
spare. They were making the acquaintance of a river of a kind they never
had seen before.

Here they found a dry stretch, despite the heavy rains; had they now
gone down or up its bed they would have found alternating sections of
water and dry sand, a