At such times life for the country people was scarcely less burdensome than during the droughts, for the heavy bottom lands became quagmires, and the clay of the higher levels turned into putty or a devilish agglutinous substance that rendered travel for man or beast or vehicle almost impossible.
There appeared to be no law of average here.

In dry times it was a desert, lacking wholly, however, in the beauty, the mystery, and the spell of a desert; in wet times it was a gehenna of mud and slush and stickiness, and entirely minus that beauty and freshness that attends the rainy seasons in a tropic clime.

It was a land peopled by a hard-bitten race of nesters--come from God knows where and for God knows why--starved in mind and body, slaves of a hideous environment from which they lacked means of escape.
Geologists had claimed for some time that there must be coal in these north Texas counties, a contention perhaps based upon a comfortable belief in the law of compensation, upon a theory that a region so poor aboveground must of necessity contain values of some sort beneath the surface.

But as for other natural resources, they scouted the belief in such.

Other parts of the state yielded oil, for instance, but here the formation was all wrong.