d Jesse Wingate
succinctly.

"I know what I wish," said Caleb Price at last as he stared moodily at
the coals, "and I know it mighty well--I wish the other wagons were up.
Yes, and--"

He did not finish. A nod or so was all the answer he got. A general
apprehension held them all.

"If Bridger hadn't gone on ahead, damn him!" exclaimed Kelsey at last.

"Or if Carson hadn't refused to come along, instead of going on east,"
assented Hall. "What made him so keen?"

Kelsey spoke morosely.

"Said he had papers to get through. Maybe Kit Carson'll sometime carry
news of our being wiped out somewhere."

"Or if we had Bill Jackson to trail for us," ventured the first speaker
again. "If we could send back word--"

"We can't, so what's the use?" interrupted Price. "We were all together,
and had our chance--once."

But buried as they were in their gloomy doubts, regrets, fears, they got
through that night and the next in safety. They dared not hunt, though
the buffalo and antelope were in swarms, and though they knew they now
were near the western limit of the buffalo range. They urged on, mile
after mile. The sick and the wounded must endure as they might.

Finally they topped the gentle incline which marked the heights of land
between the Sweetwater and the tributaries of the Green, and knew they
had reached the South Pass, called halfway to Oregon. There was no
timber here. The pass itself was no winding canon, but only a flat,
broad valley. Bolder views they had seen, but none of greater interest.

Now they would set foot on Oregon, passing from one great series of
waterways to another and even vaster, leading down to the western
sea--the unknown South Sea marked as the limits of their possessions by
the gallants of King Charles when, generations earlier, and careless of
all these intervening generations of toil and danger, they had paused
at the summit of Rockfish Gap in the Appalachians and waved a gay hand
each toward the unknown continent that lay they knew not how far to the
westward.

But these, now arrived halfway of half that continent, made no merriment
in their turn. Their wounded and their sick were with them. The blazing
sun tried them sore. Before them also lay they knew not what.

And now, coming in from the northeast in a vast braided tracing of
travois poles and trampling hoofs, lay a trail which fear told them was
that of yet another war party waiting for the white-topped wagons. It
led on acros