rt came close on us and looked us fair in the eyes, concealing
nothing. She killed poor Deuce, the beautiful setter who had traveled
the wild countries so long; she struck Wes and the Tenderfoot from
their horses when finally they had reached a long-legged water tank;
she even staggered the horses themselves. And I, lying under a bush
where I had stayed after the others in the hope of succoring Deuce,
began idly shooting at ghostly jack-rabbits that looked real, but
through which the revolver bullets passed without resistance.

After this day the Tenderfoot went water-crazy. Watering the horses
became almost a mania with him. He could not bear to pass even a
mud-hole without offering the astonished Tunemah a chance to fill up,
even though that animal had drunk freely not twenty rods back. As for
himself, he embraced every opportunity; and journeyed draped in many
canteens.

After that it was not so bad. The thermometer stood from a hundred to
a hundred and five or six, to be sure, but we were getting used to it.
Discomfort, ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept as the
normal environment of man. It is astonishing how soon uniformly
uncomfortable conditions, by very lack of contrast, do lose their power
to color the habit of mind. I imagine merely physical unhappiness is a
matter more of contrasts than of actual circumstances. We swallowed
dust; we humped our shoulders philosophically under the beating of the
sun, we breathed the debris of high winds; we cooked anyhow, ate
anything, spent long idle fly-infested hours waiting for the noon to
pass; we slept in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind
stables, in hay, anywhere. There was little water, less wood for the
cooking.

It is now all confused, an impression of events with out sequence, a
mass of little prominent purposeless things like rock conglomerate. I
remember leaning my elbows on a low window-ledge and watching a poker
game going on in the room of a dive. The light came from a sickly
suspended lamp. It fell on five players,--two miners in their
shirt-sleeves, a Mexican, a tough youth with side-tilted derby hat, and
a fat gorgeously dressed Chinaman. The men held their cards close to
their bodies, and wagered in silence. Slowly and regularly the great
drops of sweat gathered on their faces. As regularly they raised the
backs of their hands to wipe them away. Only the Chinaman,
broad-faced, calm, impassive as Buddha, save for