uld sit up and seemed quite
composed, although he was no more than the shadow of a man. But by noon
he could walk around and seemed very anxious to be moving. Late that
afternoon I saddled the horses and assisted him to mount one of them,
and we left the place. He said he had thought that place would be his
last resting place.

We had ridden slowly for about five miles when we came to a stream of
cool water, and where we could have a shady place to lie down and
rest, and I made a camp there and spread a blanket for my sick man and
prepared some supper for us both. I had to remind him many times to be
careful and not eat too much in his weak state, for he was so hungry and
the food tasted so good that he found it difficult to restrain himself
from eating more than was good for him.

For two days it seemed almost impossible for him to get enough to eat,
and although I pitied him, I knew I must not give him all he would have
eaten.

The morning of the third day after I found him, he seemed more rational
than he had since I had been with him. That morning he asked where we
were going, and when I told him we were going to Bent's Fort, where his
comrade was waiting for us, he seemed surprised. He did not remember
that I had told him how the herder at the Fort had found him, and that
it was through his faithful struggle to get help for his starving
friends that I had started out to find them. When I told it all to him
again, he sat and cried like a child.

He said: "How can I ever pay this friend for suffering so much for
me, and you, a stranger, for seeking to find me in the trackless
wilderness?"

And then he told me what each of his comrades said before they died.

He said they were all raised together in one town in Missouri and were
as dear to each other as though they had been brothers, and all their
parents were in Denver, Colorado, where the four sons had left them when
they started out prospecting for gold, and he said with tears in his
eyes, "How can I ever tell their mothers what we all suffered, and how
the two died and their bodies left laying unburied?"

After we had talked as long as I thought was best for him to dwell on
the sad events, I cheered him up as well as I could. I assisted him to
mount the horse I had selected for him to ride, and we pulled out on the
trail for the Fort.

He was so weak that we could not ride over ten miles a day, and we were
seven days going back the same distance that I h