Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering pens day after day, all unconscious of its power. When the steers had trailed for about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water for them began to be a serious one. The preceding winter had been unusually mild, the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in the recollection of the oldest plains-man. Summer had begun early and waxed hot and dry. The earth began to wrinkle, and cracked into trenches, like gaping mouths, thirsty for the water that came not. Such streams as had not dried shrank and crawled among the willows like slimy things, that the herd, thirsty though it was from the long drives, had to be coaxed to drink from. Discontent grew. The acting foreman, who was a “XXX” man, and a comparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult with the “W-square” men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the ground. The acting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him, “put on dog”; and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven due west instead of skirting to the north by the longer route, where they would have had the advantage of drinking at several creeks before crossing Green River. Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard, and he insisted upon his order in spite of the Wetmore men’s protestations. The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the color of blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the landscape; sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as ulcers. All the animal trails led back from the country into which they were proceeding. The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped earthward. The sun looked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no sign of life in all the land. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the sun, the silence, and the desolation. To ears accustomed to the incessant shrilling of the insects, the cessation was ominous, like the sudden stopping of a clock in a chamber of death. Above the angry bellow of the thirsty herd the men strained their ears again and again for this familiar sound of life, but there was nothing but the bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of their hoofs, and sometimes the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threw back his head in seeming demand to know the justice of this thing. Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a thousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the red silence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once it had flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came upon it, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to living things.