"I've seen quicksand, an' quicksand," he declared, "but this is the bogs of the lot. If any steers get bogged down in there they wouldn't be able to bellow more than once before they'd sink out of sight!"
"There's a heap of them in there," remarked Carter.
It was an eery place, and the echo of their voices resounded with ever-increasing faintness.
"I never go through this damned hell-hole without gettin' the creeps," declared Carter. "An' I've got nerve enough, too, usually. There's somethin' about the place that suggests the cattle an' men it's swallowed.
"Do you see that flat section there?" he indicated a spot about a hundred yards wide and half as long, which looked like hard, baked earth, black and dead. "That's where that herd I was tellin' you about went in. The next morning you couldn't see hide nor hair of them.
"It's a fooler for distance, too," he went on, "it's more than a mile to that little spot of rock, that projectin' up, over there. College professors have been here, lookin' at it, an' they say the thing is fed from underground rivers, or springs, or somethin' that they can't even guess.
"One of them was tellin' Boss Edwards, over on the Cimarron, that that rock point that you see projectin' up was the peak of a mountain, an' that this narrow trail we're on is the back of a ridge that used to stick up high an' mighty above a lot of other things.
"I can't make it out, an' I don't try; it's here, an' that's all there is to it. An' I ain't hangin' around it any longer than I have to."
"A stampede—" began Sanderson.
"Gentlemen, shut up!" interrupted Carter. "If any cattle ever come through here, stampedin', that herd wouldn't have enough left of it to supply a road runner's breakfast!"