disregard of tire and bolt and axle. In the main, it was a motor-
driven procession. There were, to be sure, occasional teams of
fine imported draft horses, but for every head of live stock there
were a dozen huge trucks, and for every truck a score of passenger
cars. These last were battered and gray with mud, and their dusty
occupants were of a color to match, for they drove blindly through
an asphyxiating cloud. Even the thirsty vegetation beside the
roads was coated gray, and was so tinder dry that it seemed as if
a lighted match would explode it.

The sun glared cruelly, and the pyramidal piles of iron pipe
chained to the groaning trucks and plunging trailers were hot
enough to fry eggs upon, but neither they nor the steaming
radiators gave off more heat than the soil and the rocks.

Detours were common--testimony to man's inherent optimism--but
each was worse than the other, the roadbeds everywhere were
rutted, torn, broken up as if from long-continued heavy shell
fire.

From every ridge skeleton derricks were in sight as far as the eye
could reach, the scattered ones, whose clean timbers gleamed in
the sunlight, testifying to dry holes; the blackened ones, usually
in clumps, indicating "production"--magic word.

There were a few crossroads settlements--"hitch-rail towns"
--unpainted and ramshackle, but nowhere was there an attempt at
farming, for this part of Texas had gone hog wild over oil.
Abandoned straw stacks had settled and molded, cornfields had
grown up to weeds, what few head of cattle still remained lolled