e last few days the
heat had been unbearable, and they decided to start while the air was
still cool and prolong the noon halt. The landscape grew barer. There
were open areas where the soil was soft and sifted from the wheels like
sand, and dried stretches where the alkali lay in a caked, white crust.
In one place the earth humped into long, wavelike swells each crest
topped with a fringe of brush, fine and feathery as petrified spray.
At mid-day there was no water in sight. Courant, standing on his
saddle, saw no promise of it, nothing but the level distance streaked
with white mountain rims, and far to the south a patch of yellow--bare
sand, he said, as he pointed a horny finger to where it lay.

They camped in the glare and opened the casks. After the meal they
tried to rest, but the sun was merciless. The girl crawled under the
wagon and lay there on the dust, sleeping with one arm thrown across
her face. The two men sat near by, their hats drawn low over their
brows. There was not a sound. The silence seemed transmuted to a
slowly thickening essence solidifying round them. It pressed upon them
till speech was as impossible as it would be under water. A broken
group in the landscape's immensity, they were like a new expression of
its somber vitality, motionless yet full of life, in consonance with
its bare and brutal verity.

Courant left them to reconnoiter, and at mid afternoon came back to
announce that farther on the trail bent to an outcropping of red rock
where he thought there might be water. It was the hottest hour of the
day. The animals strained at their harness with lolling tongues and
white-rimmed eyeballs, their sweat making tracks on the dust. To
lighten the wagon Daddy John walked beside it, plodding on in his
broken moccasins, now and then chirruping to Julia. The girl rode
behind him, her blouse open at the neck, her hair clinging in a black
veining to her bedewed temples. Several times he turned back to look
at her as the only other female of the party to be encouraged. When
she caught his eye she nodded as though acknowledging the salutation of
a passerby, her dumbness an instinctive hoarding of physical force.

The red rock came in sight, a nicked edge across the distance. As they
approached, it drew up from the plain in a series of crumpled points
like the comb of a rooster. The detail of the intervening space was
lost in the first crepuscular softness, and they saw nothing