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.

The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst.  The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit.  Creek after creek that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.

The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun, tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions.  The naked red plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its tortuous way over the red world.  Sometimes it was as unreal as a fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen, perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper’s bed.  Sometimes the dragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they were milling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed back at it, after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying wedge, fought their way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted from their thirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the dull, sullen roar.  Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way over the red waste-lands.