In the midst of threescore goats whose feet had made the yellow cloud of dust was a man, tall, gaunt, dressed in the garb of the desert, and burned by the sun as black as a Soudanese.

There came then a low, whining wail, like the beginning of the "death-song" of a husky doga wail that grew in length and in strength and in volume until it rose weirdly among the mountains and swept far out over the plainsthe hunt call of the wolf on the trail, which calls to him the famished, gray-gaunt outlaws of the wilderness, as the bugler's notes call his fellows on the field of battle.

In another place "the survivors," he says, "were like walking skeletonsthe men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand.