The three got under way again, proceeding carefully, so as not to
raise the dust, and headed due southwest. Scantier and scantier
grew the grass; the hollows were washes of sand; steely gray
dunes, like long, flat, ocean swells, ribbed the prairie. The
gray day declined. Late into the purple night they traveled, then
camped without fire.

In the gray morning Jones climbed a high ride and scanned the
southwest. Low dun-colored sandhills waved from him down and
down, in slow, deceptive descent. A solitary and remote waste
reached out into gray infinitude. A pale lake, gray as the rest
of that gray expanse, glimmered in the distance.

"Mirage!" he muttered, focusing his glass, which only magnified
all under the dead gray, steely sky. "Water must be somewhere;
but can that be it? It's too pale and elusive to be real. No
life--a blasted, staked plain! Hello!"

A thin, black, wavering line of wild fowl, moving in beautiful,
rapid flight, crossed the line of his vision. "Geese flying
north, and low. There's water here," he said. He followed the
flock with his glass, saw them circle over the lake, and vanish
in the gray sheen.

"It's water." He hurried back to camp. His haggard and worn
companions scorned his discovery. Adams siding with Rude, who
knew the plains, said: "Mirage! the lure of the desert!" Yet
dominated by a force too powerful for them to resist, they
followed the buffalo-hunter. All day the gleaming lake beckoned
them onward, and seemed to recede. All day the drab clouds