on of
soldiers was miraculously expanding into a regiment--Ballou said they had
already increased to five hundred! Presently he stopped his horse and
said:

"Boys, these are our own tracks, and we've actually been circussing round
and round in a circle for more than two hours, out here in this blind
desert! By George this is perfectly hydraulic!"

Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive. He called Ollendorff all
manner of hard names--said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and
ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much
as a logarythm!"

We certainly had been following our own tracks. Ollendorff and his
"mental compass" were in disgrace from that moment.

After all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again,
with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snow-fall. While
we were considering what to do, the young Swede landed from the canoe and
took his pedestrian way Carson-wards, singing his same tiresome song
about his "sister and his brother" and "the child in the grave with its
mother," and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white
oblivion. He was never heard of again. He no doubt got bewildered and
lost, and Fatigue delivered him over to Sleep and Sleep betrayed him to
Death. Possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became
exhausted and dropped.

Presently the Overland stage forded the now fast receding stream and
started toward Carson on its first trip since the flood came. We
hesitated no longer, now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted
merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver's bump of
locality. But our horses were no match for the fresh stage team. We
were soon left out of sight; but it was no matter, for we had the deep
ruts the wheels made for a guide. By this time it was three in the
afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came--and
not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a
cellar door, as is its habit in that country. The snowfall was still as
thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us;
but all about us the white glare of the snow-bed enabled us to discern
the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in
front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling
and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks.

Now those sage-bushes were all about the same height--three or