All
the way along the final stretch, the animals were mad for water. They
could scent it from afar, they could hear it dipped or poured from a
canteen. They stampeded and were unmanÂageable.
Not
the animals only rushed down the sloping ground at first sight of the
ribbon of green that marked the Carson River's course. Men and women
threw themselves down and sucked up the water greedily, wallowed in it,
surfeited themselves.
At
the Carson River was another great deposit of wagons, ironware,
feather-beds, wagon-covers, furniture; the witness of who knows what
trouble and what hopes, what dreams and what disappointments. Ragtown
was the name given that first station on the Carson River. A vast
junkshop, with the wind blowing the lighter stuff along the shore and
the plain, and a trader's tent where the only commodity was whisky at
twenty-five cents a drink!
