r they drowned under
their loads, or were smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped
their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with
their packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the
slime, and they were disembowelled in the bogs where the corduroy logs
turned end up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to death, and when
they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more. Some did not
bother to shoot them,--stripping the saddles off and the shoes and
leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone--those which
did not break--and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.

"It was there I met a man with the heart of a Christ and the patience.
And he was honest. When he rested at midday he took the packs from the
horses so that they, too, might rest. He paid $50 a hundred-weight for
their fodder, and more. He used his own bed to blanket their backs when
they rubbed raw. Other men let the saddles eat holes the size of water-
buckets. Other men, when the shoes gave out, let them wear their hoofs
down to the bleeding stumps. He spent his last dollar for horseshoe
nails. I know this because we slept in the one bed and ate from the one
pot, and became blood brothers where men lost their grip of things and
died blaspheming God. He was never too tired to ease a strap or tighten
a cinch, and often there were tears in his eyes when he looked on all
that waste of misery. At a passage in the rocks, where the brutes
upreared hindlegged and stretched their forelegs upward like cats to
clear the wall, the way was piled with carcasses where they had toppled
back. And here he stood, in the stench of hell, with a cheery word and a
hand on the rump at the right time, till the string passed by. And when
one bogged he blocked the trail till it was clear again; nor did the man
live who crowded him at such time.

"At the end of the trail a man who had killed fifty horses wanted to buy,
but we looked at him and at our own,--mountain cayuses from eastern
Oregon. Five thousand he offered, and we were broke, but we remembered
the poison grass of the Summit and the passage in the Rocks, and the man
who was my brother spoke no word, but divided the cayuses into two
bunches,--his in the one and mine in the other,--and he looked at me and
we understood each other. So he drove mine to the one side and I drove
his to the other, and we took with us our rifles and