away the slow hours and the humdrum miles.
The women and children were stowed away on bundles of baggage and camp
stuff in the wagons, some of them asleep perhaps, rocked in their
"schooner" cradles. A few of the men and boys perchance were
strolling off the way, in the hope of starting a sage grouse or
rabbit from some sheltering clump of brush. During a specially quiet
routine like this; the cattle lolling behind the wagons, mostly
unattended, keeping the snail pace set by the patient teams; a steer
now and again turning aside to appropriate a tuft of bunch-grass;
their white horns rising and falling in the brilliant sunlight, with
the swaying motion of their bodies as they walked, shimmered like
waves of a lake at noonday before a gentle breeze: quickly as a clap
of the hands, every loose beast in the band, in the wildest fashion of
terror, started, straight in the course of the moving line--pell-mell,
they went, veering for nothing that they could run over; sweeping on,
with a roaring tramp, like muffled thunder, they passed along both
sides of the train. The teams, catching the frenzy, took up the race,
as best they could with their heavy impedimenta; all beyond control
of their drivers or the herders, who, startled from the reverie of
the moment, could do no better than dodge to such place of safety as
they found, and stand aghast at the spectacle. Fortunately the draft
oxen usually were forced to stop running before they went far, owing
to the weight of the wagons they hauled and their inability to break
the yokes.

In this particular instance the most serious casualty was the death of
a boy, about eight years of age, the son of Dr. Kidd. The child was
probably asleep in a wagon, and being aroused by the unusual
commotion, may have attempted to look out, when a jolt of the wagon
threw him to the ground, and he was trampled to death. The body was
kept in camp overnight, and the next morning wrapped in a sheet and
buried by the roadside.

This was in a vast stretch of lonely plain. As we journeyed through
it, viewing the trackless hills and rockribbed mountains not far away
on either side, mostly barren and uninviting, it was difficult to
conceive of that territory ever becoming the permanent homes of men.
Yet it is possible, and probable, that the grave of Dr. Kidd's little
boy is today within the limits of a populous community, or even
beneath a noisy thoroughfare of some busy town.

CHAPTER VIII.

DI