“Dear me! How much you know—or think you do—about horses,” Jessie returned wearily. “You’re worse than old Joe.” She dropped the whip back into its socket with a petulant gesture. “I’m sorry we started, Leslie. Here we’ve been on the road six or eight hours—”
“A little over three hours, Jessie.”
“Well, we’re not in sight of the promised land yet, and I’m nearly roasted; I shall just melt if we keep on this way much longer.”
“Me is melted; me is all water!” cried Ralph, waking up suddenly, and immediately giving way to forlorn tears. The tears plowed tiny furrows through the dust that clung to his moist cheeks, and had settled in grayish circles underneath his eyes. Jessie looked down at the piteous little figure and her own ill-temper vanished.
“Come up here and look round, you poor hot little mite!” she exclaimed, extending one hand and a foot as a sort of impromptu step-ladder. Ralph clambered up with some difficulty and looked around as directed, but the prospect did not have an enlivening effect on him.
“Where is we?” he demanded, turning his large, dust-encircled eyes on each of us in turn.
“On the plains,” I responded briefly. I was driving; the load was heavy, and the horses, worn with fatigue and the heat, lagged more and more; therefore my anxiety grew, and I had no time to waste on trivialities.
“One need not ask why it never rains here, though,” I suddenly observed, “for behold! Jessie, there is the thing that makes rain unnecessary.”
A glimmer of white had been, for some minutes, slowly growing on the horizon. I had thought at first, that it must be a mirage, but it kept its place so steadily, without that swift, undulating, gliding motion that these familiar plains spectacles always present that I presently became convinced that the white glimmer was a lake, and so that we were within a few miles of our objective point.