on't ye
make no break, in the dark especial, fer we kin track ye anywhere's.
Ye'll fight fair fer once--an' ye'll fight!"

By now the group massed about these scenes had begun to relax, to
spread. Women had Molly in hand as her eyes opened. Jed came up at a run
with the mule team and the light wagon from the grove, and they got the
girl into the seat with him, neither of them fully cognizant of what had
gone on in the group of tight-mouthed men who now broke apart and
sauntered silently back, each to his own wagon.

CHAPTER VII

THE JUMP-OFF

With the first thin line of pink the coyotes hanging on the flanks of
the great encampment raised their immemorial salutation to the dawn.
Their clamorings were stilled by a new and sterner voice--the notes of
the bugle summoning sleepers of the last night to the duties of the
first day. Down the line from watch to watch passed the Plains command,
"Catch up! Catch up!" It was morning of the jump-off.

Little fires began at the wagon messes or family bivouacs. Men, boys,
barefooted girls went out into the dew-wet grass to round up the
transport stock. A vast confusion, a medley of unskilled endeavor marked
the hour. But after an hour's wait, adjusted to the situation, the next
order passed down the line:

"Roll out! Roll out!"

And now the march to Oregon was at last begun! The first dust cut by an
ox hoof was set in motion by the whip crack of a barefooted boy in jeans
who had no dream that he one day would rank high in the councils of his
state, at the edge of an ocean which no prairie boy ever had envisioned.

The compass finger of the trail, leading out from the timber groves,
pointed into a sea of green along the valley of the Kaw. The grass, not
yet tall enough fully to ripple as it would a half month later, stood
waving over the black-burned ground which the semicivilized Indians had
left the fall before. Flowers dotted it, sometimes white like bits of
old ivory on the vast rug of spindrift--the pink verbena, the wild
indigo, the larkspur and the wild geranium--all woven into a wondrous
spangled carpet. At times also appeared the shy buds of the sweet wild
rose, loveliest flower of the prairie. Tall rosinweeds began to thrust
up rankly, banks of sunflowers prepared to fling their yellow banners
miles wide. The opulent, inviting land lay in a ceaseless succession of
easy undulations, stretching away illimitably to far horizons, "in such
exchanging pictures of