istress under loads too heavy for their draft. It was by no means a
solid and compact army, after all, this west-bound wave of the first men
with plows. All these things sat heavily on the soul of Jesse Wingate,
who daily grew more morose and grim.

As the train advanced bands of antelope began to appear. The striped
prairie gophers gave place to the villages of countless barking prairie
dogs, curious to the eyes of the newcomers. At night the howling and
snarling of gray wolves now made regular additions to the coyote chorus
and the voices of the owls and whippoorwills. Little by little, day by
day, civilization was passing, the need for organization daily became
more urgent. Yet the original caravan had split practically into three
divisions within a hundred and fifty miles from the jump-off, although
the bulk of the train hung to Wingate's company and began to shake down,
at least into a sort of tolerance.

Granted good weather, as other travelers had written, it was indeed
impossible to evade the sense of exhilaration in the bold, free life. At
evening encampment the scene was one worthy of any artist of all the
world. The oblong of the wagon park, the white tents, the many fires,
made a spectacle of marvelous charm and power. Perhaps within sight, at
one time, under guard for the evening feed on the fresh young grass,
there would be two thousand head of cattle. In the wagon village men,
women and children would be engaged as though at home. There was little
idleness in the train, and indeed there was much gravity and devoutness
in the personnel. At one fireside the young men might be roaring "Old
Grimes is dead, that good old man," or "Oh, then, Susannah"; but quite
as likely close at hand some family group would be heard in sacred
hymns. A strange envisagement it all made, in a strange environment, a
new atmosphere, here on the threshold of the wilderness.[1]

[Footnote 1: To get the local descriptions, the color, atmosphere,
"feel" of a day and a country so long gone by, any writer of to-day must
go to writers of another day. The Author would acknowledge free use of
the works of Palmer, Bryant, Kelly and others who give us journals of
the great transcontinental trail.]

CHAPTER XII

THE DEAD MEN'S TALE

The wilderness, close at hand, soon was to make itself felt. Wingate's
outriders moved out before noon of one day, intending to locate camp at
the ford of the Big Vermilion. Four miles in advance the