“Swing out!” shouted Jenks, from rear. “We’re noonin’.” The lead wagons had halted beside the trail and all the wagons following began to imitate.
CHAPTER XIV
I TAKE A LESSON
From this hour’s brief camp, early made, we should have turned southward, to leave the railroad line and cross country for the Overland Stage trail that skirted the southern edge of the worse desert before us. But Captain Hyrum was of different mind. With faith in the Lord and bull confidence in himself he had resolved to keep straight on by the teamster road which through league after league ever extended fed supplies to the advance of the builders.
Under its adventitious guidance we should strike the stage road at Bitter Creek, eighty or one hundred miles; thence trundle, veering southwestward, for the famed City of the Saints, near two hundred miles farther.
Therefore after nooning at a pool of stagnant, scummy water we hooked up and plunged ahead, creaking and groaning and dust enveloped, constantly outstripped by the hurrying construction trains thundering over the newly laid rails, we ourselves the tortoise in the race.
My Lady did not join me again to-day, nor on the morrow. She abandoned me to a sense of dissatisfaction 206 with myself, of foreboding, and of a void in the landscape.
Our sorely laden train went swaying and pitching across the gaunt face of a high, broad plateau, bleak, hot, and monotonous in contour; underfoot the reddish granite pulverized by grinding tire and hoof, over us the pale bluish fiery sky without a cloud, distant in the south the shining tips of a mountain range, and distant below in the west the slowly spreading vista of a great, bared ocean-bed, simmering bizarre with reds, yellows and deceptive whites, and ringed about by battlements jagged and rock hewn.