lying low, close to the face of the desert. His
first connected impression was that he had overslept and that the men
were already going to work. For he saw a long line, fifty men at the
least count, filing out toward the spot where the water-barrels stood
in the long-bodied wagons, while other crowds of men were grouped
about one of the wagons. And then suddenly he sat bolt upright,
strangely uneasy. It was still long before day--and something was
wrong.

He pulled on his boots and, without stopping to lace them, hurried
toward the wagons. And before he had gone twenty paces he knew what it
was that had happened. The men had been talking in hushed voices, so
as not to wake him; but, now that two or three made out who he was, a
shout rose sharply into the morning stillness, a shout at once of
warning and of derision. And it was clearly the shout of drunkenness.
It was taken up by fifty throats, a hundred throats, clamorous,
exultant, jeering.

As the men moved back and forth, many of them staggered perceptibly.
Conniston saw one of them pitch forward and lie helpless. A man passed
by him, swaying and lurching, and in the pale light there was
something fiendish in the fellow's leering face, his open mouth, his
wide, staring eyes. Off yonder he heard two men quarreling, their
voices raised in windy gusts of snapping oaths; saw one of them lift
his hand and strike, not as a man strikes with his bare fist, but as a
man strikes with a knife; saw the other man fling out his arms, heard
his gurgling, choking cry above the sudden clamorous tumult; saw him
settle quietly to the ground as though every bone in his body had
jellied. His eyes accustomed to the half-light, his ears free of the
wax of sleep, it seemed to Conniston that he was peering into a scene
which could be no part of earth, but which must be some frenzied
corner of hell.

As he ran forward, brushing past tottering forms which cursed him
thickly, he saw yet another group of men beyond the wagons; saw that
there, too, the spirit of alcohol was rampant; heard a man's voice,
high-raised and raspingly shrill, in a monotonous song. And as he ran
men did not fall back, but glared at him belligerently, many a
coarse-featured countenance distorted hideously, while the men about
the wagon bunched up close together threateningly.

He stopped suddenly, trying to think. A mighty laugh greeted his
hesitation. He saw a big fellow thrust a tin cup down into one of the
barr