The men of the meeting passed back among their neighbors and families, and spoke with more seriousness than hitherto.  The rifle firing ended, the hilarity lessened that afternoon.  In the old times the keel-boatmen bound west started out singing.  The pack-train men of the fur trade went shouting and shooting, and the confident hilarity of the Santa Fe wagon caravans was a proverb.  But now, here in the great Oregon train, matters were quite otherwise.  There were women and children along.  An unsmiling gravity marked them all.  When the dusky velvet of the prairie night settled on almost the last day of the rendezvous it brought a general feeling of anxiety, dread, uneasiness, fear.  Now, indeed, and at last, all these realized what was the thing that they had undertaken.

To add yet more to the natural apprehensions of men and women embarking on so stupendous an adventure, all manner of rumors now continually passed from one company to another.  It was said that five thousand Mormons, armed to the teeth, had crossed the river at St. Joseph and were lying in wait on the Platte, determined to take revenge for the persecutions they had suffered in Missouri and Illinois.  Another story said that the Kaw Indians, hitherto friendly, had banded together for robbery and were only waiting for the train to appear.  A still more popular story had it that a party of several Englishmen had hurried ahead on the trail to excite all the savages to waylay and destroy the caravans, thus to wreak the vengeance of England upon the Yankees for the loss of Oregon.  Much unrest arose over reports, hard to trace, to the effect that it was all a mistake about Oregon; that in reality it was a truly horrible country, unfit for human occupancy, and sure to prove the grave of any lucky enough to survive the horrors of the trail, which never yet had been truthfully reported.  Some returned travelers from the West beyond the Rockies, who were hanging about the landing at the river, made it all worse by relating what purported to be actual experiences.

“If you ever get through to Oregon,” they said, “you’ll be ten years older than you are now.  Your hair will be white, but not by age.”

The Great Dipper showed clear and close that night, as if one might almost pick off by hand the familiar stars of the traveler’s constellation.  Overhead countless brilliant points of lesser light enameled the night mantle, matching the many camp fires of the great gathering.  The wind blew soft and low.  Night on the prairie is always solemn, and to-night the tense anxiety, the strained anticipation of more than two thousand souls invoked a brooding melancholy which it seemed even the stars must feel.

A dog, ominous, lifted his voice in a long, mournful howl which made mothers put out their hands to their babes.  In answer a coyote in the grass raised a high, quavering cry, wild and desolate, the voice of the Far West.

CHAPTER IV