He could not
understand what it was.
Then abruptly he raised his eyes.
Before him lay the desert, but a desert suddenly and miraculously
changed, a desert he had never seen before. Mile after mile it
swept away before him, hot, dry, suffocating, lifeless. The
sparse vegetation was grey with the alkali dust. The heat hung
choking in the air like a curtain. Lizards sprawled in the sun,
repulsive. A rattlesnake dragged its loathsome length from under
a mesquite. The dried carcass of a steer, whose parchment skin
drew tight across its bones, rattled in the breeze. Here and
there rock ridges showed with the obscenity of so many skeletons,
exposing to the hard, cruel sky the earth's nakedness. Thirst,
delirium, death, hovered palpable in the wind; dreadful,
unconquerable, ghastly.
The desert showed her teeth and lay in wait like a fierce beast.
The little soul of man shrank in terror before it.
Buck Johnson stared, recalling the phrases of the letter,
recalling the words of his foreman, Jed Parker. "It's too
lonesome for me," "I'm afraid," "I hate it all," "I'd go crazy
here," "The desert would make anyone bad," "The country is
awful." And the musing voice of the old cattleman, "I wonder if
she'll like the country!" They reiterated themselves over and
over; and always as refrain his own confident reply, "Like the
country? Sure! Why SHOULDN'T she?"
And then he recalled the summer just passing, and the woman
who had made no fuss.
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