st be run straight for the distant mountains, that were now
plainly to be seen.

This experience vividly recalled that of the preceding summer, when they
were crossing the Plains towards the Rocky Mountains, and longing so
eagerly to reach them. But this was infinitely worse than that. There
they generally found water that was sweet and fit to drink, and always
had plenty of grass for their stock. Here they rarely found water, and
when they did it was nearly always so strongly impregnated with salt,
soda, and alkali as to be unfit to drink. Here, too, instead of grass,
they found only sand, sage brush, greasewood, and cacti. To be sure the
greasewood was a comfort, because it burned just as readily green as
dry, and in certain of the cacti, round ones covered with long curved
spines, they could nearly always find a mouthful of water, but none of
these things afforded any nourishment for the hungry animals. They
became so ravenous that they gnawed off one another's manes and tails,
chewed up the wagon covers, and every other piece of cloth they could
get hold of. Then they began to die so fast from starvation and
exhaustion that some dead ones were left behind with every camp, and
each day the number was increased.

At nearly every camp, too, a wagon was abandoned, and for miles they
could look back and see its white cover, looming above the dreary
expanse of sand and sage, like a monument to the faithful animals that
had fallen beside it. At length but one wagon and the two ambulances
were left. Tents, baggage, clothing, all the bedding except one blanket
apiece, and the greater part of their provisions, had been thrown away,
or left in the abandoned wagons. Within forty miles of the mountains
they gave up work on the line. The men had no longer the strength to
drag the chain or carry the instruments. They still noted their course
by compass, and the height of various elevations as they crossed them,
by the barometer. They were even able to measure the distance from one
sad camping-place to another, by means of the odometer, an instrument
that, attached to a wagon-wheel, records the number of revolutions made
by it. This number, multiplied by the circumference of the wheel, gave
them the distance in feet and inches. Everybody was now on foot, even
the chief's saddle-horse, Senor, and Glen's Nettle being harnessed to
one of the ambulances.

At last, when the mountains appeared tantalizingly near, but when they
were st