d with a head too insignificant to be deciphered.
Finally it was gone, absorbed into the detailless distance where the
river coiled through the green.

Twenty-four hours later they reached the Forks of the Platte. Here the
trail crossed the South Fork, slanted over the plateau that lay between
the two branches, and gained the North Fork. Up this it passed,
looping round the creviced backs of mighty bluffs, and bearing
northwestward to Fort Laramie. The easy faring of the grassed bottom
was over. The turn to the North Fork was the turn to the mountains.
The slow stream with its fleet of islands would lose its dreamy
deliberateness and become a narrowed rushing current, sweeping round
the bases of sandstone walls as the pioneers followed it up and on
toward the whitened crests of the Wind River Mountains, where the snows
never melted and the lakes lay in the hollows green as jade.

It was afternoon when they reached the ford. The hills had sunk away
to low up-sweepings of gray soil, no longer hiding the plain which lay
yellow against a cobalt sky. As the wagons rolled up on creaking
wheels the distance began to darken with the buffalo. The prospect was
like a bright-colored map over which a black liquid has been spilled,
here in drops, there in creeping streams. Long files flowed from the
rifts between the dwarfed bluffs, unbroken herds swept in a wave over
the low barrier, advanced to the river, crusted its surface, passed
across, and surged up the opposite bank. Finally all sides showed the
moving mass, blackening the plateau, lining the water's edge in an
endless undulation of backs and heads, foaming down the faces of the
sand slopes. Where the train moved they divided giving it right of
way, streaming by, bulls, cows, and calves intent on their own
business, the earth tremulous under their tread. Through breaks in
their ranks the blue and purple of the hills shone startlingly vivid
and beyond the prairie lay like a fawn-colored sea across which dark
shadows trailed.

The ford was nearly a mile wide, a shallow current, in some places only
a glaze, but with shifting sands stirring beneath it. Through the
thin, glass-like spread of water the backs of sand bars emerged, smooth
as the bodies of recumbent monsters. On the far side the plateau
stretched, lilac with the lupine flowers, the broken rear line of the
herd receding across it.

The doctor, feeling the way, was to ride in the lead, his wagon
follo