“I don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t know? Haven’t you any orders?” I asked, surprised.
“Won’t get any until they pull me back to-morrow. This is the end of the road, isn’t it?” he asked.
I was about to remark, “It certainly is,” when it occurred to me that I wasn’t supposed to know as much about a railroad as a real railroad man like the foreman of a gang of Mexicans, so I replied cautiously, “Well, I don’t know. I thought this might be the beginning of a railroad; if this is the end of one, what was the use of building it?”
He looked at me curiously for a minute. It certainly was hot there in the sun and he had no way of knowing we had just been to water, so he said, “You had better take a drink. You can have what you want from my tank car; and you had better fill your barrels too; no knowing when you will get any more.”
After filling our barrels we ate lunch and tried to get a shot at a coyote that had crossed the trail just below us, but we would have been cooler if we had let him go without trying. From about noon to four o’clock it is pretty hot in the sun, but we were now where we could ride,--Doc and I and Tuck in the wagon under the canvas top, and Bob on Kate. Sometimes during the middle of the day we would all ride in the wagon, and at other times would take turns riding the saddle, so as to make it easier on the team horses.
We had come twenty miles before lunch so did not start very early. When we did, however, we headed right northeast for Dry Lake and got nearly across before we decided to camp, Kate having lost a shoe. We saw another coyote just before reaching the lake, but as usual our 30-30 wasn’t handy to the fellow who saw him first, and that is sufficient explanation in that country where everything is the same color as the coyote and little draws and gulches are handy.
This Dry Lake was just that and nothing more. At times during the year, or some years, there must be water here, but I guess it is not often. It was really a wonderful place to look at, flat as a floor, almost as smooth as a tennis court, hard as a board, creamy white in color, and I should say seven miles long and about two and a half miles across at the widest part, surrounded by sage brush and grease-wood. I should hate to cross it in the middle of the day--it must be awfully hot; but at night it would make a racecourse for horses or automobiles, if one could only scrape up an audience.
We camped at 6:30 P. M. that evening on the lake bed, where it was smooth and cool. Our coal oil stove was proving a great success in a land without wood, and even where there was any, it saved time, as did our water barrels, and our fireless cooker saved coal oil, and gave us better oatmeal, prunes, and rice than we could have had at home.
The next morning before starting we put a new shoe on Kate; that is, Doc blacksmithed an old one we had on hand and I nailed it on, and the surprising thing about it was that it stayed on.