ps get fresh men to complete the pitiful work which they had
been forced to abandon.

When Messrs. Reed and Greenwood closed their account of the terrible
physical and mental strain their party had undergone, "Mr. Woodworth
asked his own men of the relay camp, if they would go with him to
rescue those unfortunates at 'Starved Camp,' and received an answer in
the negative."[10]

The following morning there was an earnest consultation, and so
hazardous seemed the trail and the work to be done that for a time all
except Eddy and Foster refused to go farther. Finally, John Stark
stepped forward, saying,

"Gentlemen, I am ready to go and do what I can for those sufferers,
without promise of pay."

[Illustration: ARRIVAL OF THE CARAVAN AT SANTA FE]

[Illustration: ON THE BANKS OF THE SACRAMENTO RIVER]

By guaranteeing three dollars per day to any man who would get supplies
to the mountain camps, and fifty dollars in addition to each man who
should carry a helpless child, not his own, back to the settlement,
Mr. Eddy[11] secured the services of Hiram Miller, who had just come
down with the Second Relief; and Mr. Foster hired, on the same terms,
Mr. Thompson from the relay camp. Mr. Woodworth offered like
inducements, on Government account, to the rest of his men, and before
the morning was far advanced, with William H. Eddy acting as leader,
William Foster, Hiram Miller, Mr. Thompson, John Stark, Howard Oakley,
and Charles Stone (who had left us little ones at the lake camp)
shouldered their packs and began the ascent.

Meanwhile how fared it at Starved Camp? Mr. and Mrs. Breen being left
there with their own five suffering children and the four other poor,
moaning little waifs, were tortured by situations too heart-rending for
description, too pitiful to seem true. Suffice it to relate that Mrs.
Breen shared with baby Graves the last lump of loaf sugar and the last
drops of tea, of that which she had denied herself and had hoarded for
her own babe. When this was gone, with quivering lips she and her
husband repeated the litany and prayed for strength to meet the
ordeal,--then, turning to the unburied dead, they resorted to the only
means left to save the nine helpless little ones.

When Mr. Eddy and party reached them, they found much suffering from
cold and crying for "something to eat," but not the wail which precedes
delirium and death.

This Third Relief Party settled for the night upon the snow near these
ref