A wagon wheel in the bitter salt desert doesn’t fail with a roar. It fails with a dry, splintering crack that sounds like a hunter stepping on a frozen bough in dead winter.
Tomas was returning from the northern picket lines with an armload of dry tamarisk roots. Just then, the sound rolled across the camp. It came from the eastern outer edge track. The rough dirt swale where the refugee teams hauled scrap wood and thorn scrub from the dry washes three miles out.
By the time Tomas dropped his firewood beside the hearth trench, twenty people were already running toward the outer edge.
A heavy two-horse supply heavy cart sat tilted at a vicious twenty-degree angle in the center of the track, its left rear hub buried six inches in the white bitter salt dust. The heavy cart was loaded with eight hundredweight of split thorn wood and four iron water drums, the deadweight pressing down upon the shattered carriage until the hickory side-slats bowed like drawn bows.
The horses—two rib-sprung roan geldings with foam drying white on their flanks—stood trembling in their harness. Their eyes were wide with fear as the heavy wagon tongue twisted sideways, threatening to snap the oak neck-yoke.
