"Listen!" he shouted again and again, and at last was given a grudged hearing. "Let's prove this question, for it's a mighty serious one," he cried. "Last year, where th' trail hit th' Cimarron, which had some water in it then, a team of mules, frantic from thirst, ran away with a Dearborn carriage as the driver was getting out. When we came up with them we found one of them with a broken leg, struggling in the wreckage of the carriage. I have not been out of your sight all morning, and if I tell you where to find that wrecked carriage, and you _do_ find it, you'll know that I'm tellin' th' truth, an' that this is th' Cimarron. Go along this bank, about four hundred yards, an' you'll find a steep-walled ravine some thirty feet higher than th' bed of th' river. At th' bottom of it, a hundred yards from th' river bank, you'll find what's left of th' Dearborn. When you come back we'll show you how to relieve your thirst and to get enough water to let you risk goin' on to th' spring." Sneers and ridicule replied to him, but a skeptical crowd, led by the man he had lectured the night before, followed his suggestion and soon returned with the word that the wrecked carriage had been found just where Tom had said it would be. The contentious became softened and made up in sullenness what they lacked in pugnacity; for there are some who, proven wrong, find cause for anger in the correction, their stubbornness of such a quality that it seems to prefer to hold to an error and take the penalties than to accept safety by admitting that they are wrong. In the meanwhile the experienced travelers had gone down into the river bed and dug holes in the sand which, thanks to the recent rains, was a masked reservoir and yielded all the water needed at a depth of two or three feet. After a hard struggle with the thirsty animals to keep them from stampeding for the water their nostrils scented, at last all had been watered and the wagons formed for the noon camp. Humbled greenhorns who had neglected the "water scrape" at the Arkansas were silently digging holes along the river bed and filling every vessel they could spare. They were making the acquaintance of a river of a kind they never had seen before.