of his soul, Cassidy was forced at last to listen. Rudely and
forever they dispelled Cassidy's dull impression that things were well
with Cassidy, and in so doing tore away the veil and revealed Truth
standing before him, naked, yet gloriously unashamed. But the general
outlines of the goddess had not been entirely unfamiliar to him.
Although his previous skull-gropings had brought forth neither a cause
nor a remedy, he had so long felt that things were far from
satisfactory that when at last she fronted him brazenly, eye to eye,
he only sighed heavily, spat twice in sad reflection, and----nodded
for her to pass on; she had been accepted.

"Gosh, wot a thirst I got!" he pondered, and kicked the empty canteen
at his feet. "Wot a simply horrible thirst! Say, pardner, I wonder did
a feller _ever_ have a thirst like this?" Luckily for Cassidy, his
throat was not yet so dry but that he could amuse himself by
fancifully measuring his thirst, first by pints, then by quarts.

"A quart would never do it, though," he meditated whimsically. "It
would be a mean, low trick to make it think so. This yere job rightly
belongs to a water-tank. Oh, gosh! And ten miles yet, across that
darned dry lake, tuh Ochre. Gid-ap, Tawmm!"

In slow response, the four blacks settled into their sweaty collars,
and the big Bain freighter, with its tugging trailer, heaved up the
swale and lurched drunkenly down the other side to the glittering
mesa.

For four long summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a
freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like
progress up and down the canons, through the rocky washes and crooked
draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin
it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water
ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, dancing pillars of
grit that drove spitefully into his slack, parched mouth and sleepy
eyes.

"It's the goll-dinged monotonosity of it I cain't stand!" he whined,
as he drove his boot-heel down on the rasping brake-lever and waited
sullenly for the inevitable bump from the trailer. "Gawd never meant
fer a feller tuh do this work. I don't know Him very good," wailed
Cassidy, "but I bet He wouldn't deal no such a raw hand. It ain't
_human!_"

He frowned heavily at the sky-line of jagged mountains blued with
haze. "They look like a lot of big old alligators--just as if they was
asleep and lyin' with their shoulders half out o