, it was a motor-driven procession. There
were, to be sure, occasional teams of fine imported draft horses, but
for every head of live stock there were a dozen huge trucks, and for
every truck a score of passenger cars. These last were battered and
gray with mud, and their dusty occupants were of a color to match, for
they drove blindly through an asphyxiating cloud. Even the thirsty
vegetation beside the roads was coated gray, and was so tinder dry that
it seemed as if a lighted match would explode it.

The sun glared cruelly, and the pyramidal piles of iron pipe chained to
the groaning trucks and plunging trailers were hot enough to fry eggs
upon, but neither they nor the steaming radiators gave off more heat
than the soil and the rocks.

Detours were common--testimony to man's inherent optimism--but each was
worse than the other, the roadbeds everywhere were rutted, torn, broken
up as if from long-continued heavy shell fire.

From every ridge skeleton derricks were in sight as far as the eye
could reach, the scattered ones, whose clean timbers gleamed in the
sunlight, testifying to dry holes; the blackened ones, usually in
clumps, indicating "production"--magic word.

There were a few crossroads settlements--"hitch-rail towns"--unpainted
and ramshackle, but nowhere was there an attempt at farming, for this
part of Texas had gone hog wild over oil. Abandoned straw stacks had
settled and molded, cornfields had grown up to weeds, what few head of
cattle still remained lolled near the artificial surface tanks, all but
dried into mud holes.

It was a farm of this character that Gray's driver finally pointed out
as the Briskow ranch. The house, an unsightly story-and-a-half affair,
stood at the back of what had once been a cultivated field, and the
place was distinctive only in the fact that it gave evidence of a good
water well, or a capacious reservoir, in the form of a vivid green
garden patch and a few flourishing peach trees immediately behind the
residence--welcome relief to the eye.

Nobody answered Gray's knock at the front door, so he walked around the
house. Over the garden fence, grown thick with brambles, he beheld two
feminine figures, or rather two faded sunbonnets topping two pairs of
shoulders, and as he drew nearer he saw that one woman was bent and
slow moving, while the other was a huge creature, wide of hip and deep
of bosom, whose bare arms, burnt to a rich golden brown, were like
those of a bla