Step-and-a-Half, keep your cooked grub handy for the boys, and yo' all pack up and pull out.

We'll turn the cattle loose and follow.

If there's any water in this damned country they'll find it." Years afterwards, Buddy learned that his father had sent men out to hunt water, and that they had not found any.

He was ten when this was discussed around a spring roundup fire, and he had studied the matter for a few minutes and then had spoken boldly his mind.
"You oughta kept your horses as thirsty as the cattle was, and I bet they'd a' found that water," he criticized, and was sent to bed for his tactlessness.

Bob Birnie himself had thought of that afterwards, and had excused the oversight by saying that he had depended on the map, and had not foreseen a three-day dry drive.
However that may be, that night was a night of panicky desperation.
Ezra walked beside the oxen and shouted and swung his lash, and the oxen strained forward bellowing so that not even Dulcie could sleep, but whimpered fretfully in her mother's arms.