oxen were to be thrown into
the loose herd and their places taken for a time by cows no longer
offering milk.

A new soberness began to sit on all. The wide reaches of desert with
which they here were in touch appalled their hearts more than anything
they yet had met. The grassy valley of the Platte, where the great
fourfold tracks of the trail cut through a waving sea of green belly
deep to the oxen, had seemed easy and inviting, and since then hardship
had at least been spiced with novelty and change. But here was a new and
forbidding land. This was the Far West itself; silent, inscrutable,
unchanged, irreducible. The mightiness of its calm was a smiting thing.
The awesomeness of its chill, indifferent nights, the unsparing ardors
of its merciless noons, the measureless expanses of its levels, the cold
barrenness of its hills--these things did not invite as to the bosom of
a welcoming mother; they repelled, as with the chill gesture of a
stranger turning away outcasts from the door.

"Here resolution almost faints!" wrote one.

A general requisition was made on the scant stores Bridger had hurried
through. To their surprise, Bridger himself made no attempt at frontier
profits.

"Chardon," commanded the moody master of the post to his head clerk,
"take down your tradin' bar an' let my people in. Sell them their flour
an' meal at what it has cost us here--all they want, down to what the
post will need till my partner Vasquez brings in more next fall, if he
ever does. Sell 'em their flour at four dollars a sack, an' not at
fifty, boy. Git out that flag I saved from Sublette's outfit, Chardon.
Put it on a pole for these folks, an' give it to them so's they kin
carry it on acrost to Oregon. God's got some use for them folks out yan
or hit wouldn't be happenin' this way. I'm goin' to help 'em acrost. Ef
I don't, old Jim Bridger is a liar!"

That night Bridger sat in his lodge alone, moodily smoking. He heard a
shaking at the pegs of the door flap.

"Get out!" he exclaimed, thinking that it was his older associate, or
else some intruding dog.

His order was not obeyed. Will Banion pulled back the flap, stooped and
entered.

"How!" exclaimed Bridger, and with fist smitten on the blankets made the
sign to "Sit!" Banion for a time also smoked in silence, knowing the
moody ways of the old-time men.

"Ye came to see me about her, Miss Molly, didn't ye?" began Bridger
after a long time, kicking the embers of the tepee