directed the work, and it proceeded quietly and rapidly.  R.’s sharp brattling voice might have been heard incessantly; and he was leaping about with the utmost activity, multiplying himself, after the manner of great commanders, as if his universal presence and supervision were of the last necessity.  His commands were rather amusingly inconsistent; for when he saw that the men would not do as he told them, he wisely accommodated himself to circumstances, and with the utmost vehemence ordered them to do precisely that which they were at the time engaged upon, no doubt recollecting the story of Mahomet and the refractory mountain.  Shaw smiled significantly; R. observed it, and, approaching with a countenance of lofty indignation, began to vapor a little, but was instantly reduced to silence.

The raft was at length complete.  We piled our goods upon it, with the exception of our guns, which each man chose to retain in his own keeping.  Sorel, Boisverd, Wright and Delorier took their stations at the four corners, to hold it together, and swim across with it; and in a moment more, all our earthly possessions were floating on the turbid waters of the Big Blue.  We sat on the bank, anxiously watching the result, until we saw the raft safe landed in a little cove far down on the opposite bank.  The empty wagons were easily passed across; and then each man mounting a horse, we rode through the stream, the stray animals following of their own accord.

CHAPTER VI

THE PLATTE AND THE DESERT

We were now arrived at the close of our solitary journeyings along the St. Joseph’s trail.  On the evening of the 23d of May we encamped near its junction with the old legitimate trail of the Oregon emigrants.  We had ridden long that afternoon, trying in vain to find wood and water, until at length we saw the sunset sky reflected from a pool encircled by bushes and a rock or two.  The water lay in the bottom of a hollow, the smooth prairie gracefully rising in oceanlike swells on every side.  We pitched our tents by it; not however before the keen eye of Henry Chatillon had discerned some unusual object upon the faintly-defined outline of the distant swell.  But in the moist, hazy atmosphere of the evening, nothing could be clearly distinguished.  As we lay around the fire after supper, a low and distant sound, strange enough amid the loneliness of the prairie, reached our ears—­peals of laughter, and the faint voices of men and women.  For eight days we had not encountered a human being, and this singular warning of their vicinity had an effect extremely wild and impressive.

About dark a sallow-faced fellow descended the hill on horseback, and splashing through the pool rode up to the tents.  He was enveloped in a huge cloak, and his broad felt hat was weeping about his ears with the drizzling moisture of the evening.  Another followed, a stout, square-built, intelligent-looking man, who announced himself as leader of an emigrant party encamped a mile in advance of us.  About twenty wagons, he said, were with him; the rest of his party were on the other side of the Big Blue, waiting for a woman who was in the pains of child-birth, and quarreling meanwhile among themselves.