“How far would it be?” asked Bourne.
“Ah, that we must find out from the man who lives nearest to the edge,” replied Griggs. “He’s pretty sure to have been some distance into the desert shooting, and even if he doesn’t know he’ll be able to tell us where we can find water, for that’s what we must always go by. When it’s too far off for a day’s journey we must take our bottles and the little casks full.”
The mules soon steadied down; the day was hot, but not unpleasantly so, and after crossing a very wild patch some miles in extent they picked up a track and followed it, to come upon cultivated land again, and the track led them to a shanty built upon the bank of a river also dried into a series of pools; but as they approached the house and obtained a near inspection of the cultivated ground it became very plain that no hoe had been between the rows of fruit-trees that year, and on riding up to the shingled wood house, they found no sign of living creature—no ducks paddling in the pool, or fowls pecking about near the enclosed yard; all was still and silent. They had come upon another sign of failure, for, as far as they could see, the place had been deserted for quite a year.
“A sign that we are not alone in giving up,” said the doctor; “but it will make a capital place for our first halt. Go and see what the water is like in that farthest pool, Chris. This one is nearly all mud.”
Chris urged his mustang forward towards where there was a glint of water through some trees four or five hundred yards ahead, but he had not gone one-fourth of the distance before he was overtaken by Ned, who was as eager as he to see what the place was like.
They soon knew—a carefully-tended Far West estate, given up and allowed to go back to a state of nature. Fruit-trees had been planted in abundance, but as the boys got farther from the house the wild vines and weeds were gradually mastering the useful trees, and in another year or two the plantations would have lost all trace of the hand of man and be wild jungle once more.
“I dare say there’ll be fish enough,” said Chris. “This is a deeper pool than we generally see. I say, how sandy the ground is here!”
The next minute they realised why it was so sandy, for instead of its being a cleared track it proved to be the dried-up bed of a little sandy river, one that linked the pools together when the wet season came on.
“It looks as if no water had been along here for a twelvemonth,” said Chris. “Look there.”
His cob had seen the object at which he pointed first, and stopped short with its ears pricked forward to where, grey and glistening, a snake lay basking in the hot sunshine amongst some stones, but now, alarmed by the snort given by Chris’s mustang, it began to glide away, passing amongst some dried-up reeds and leaves, giving forth its strange soft rattling sound with its tail the while.