“Who was he—­some thief?”

“Like enough.  He was crawlin’ up towards yore wagon, I halted him an’ he run.”

“You don’t know who he was?”

“No.  I’ll see his tracks, come day.  Go on to bed.  I’ll set out a whiles, boy.”

When dawn came, before he had broken his long vigil, Jackson was bending over footmarks in the moister portions of the soil.

“Tall man, young an’ tracked clean,” he muttered to himself.  “Fancy boots, with rather little heels.  Shame I done missed him!”

But he said nothing to Banion or anyone else.  It was the twentieth time Bill Jackson, one of Sublette’s men and a nephew of one of his partners, had crossed the Plains, and the lone hand pleased him best.  He instituted his own government for the most part, and had thrown in with this train because that best suited his book, since the old pack trains of the fur trade were now no more.  For himself, he planned settlement in Eastern Oregon, a country he once had glimpsed in long-gone beaver days, a dozen years ago.  The Eastern settlements had held him long enough, the Army life had been too dull, even with Doniphan.

“I must be gittin’ old,” he muttered to himself as he turned to a breakfast fire.  “Missed—­at seventy yard!”

CHAPTER VIII

MAN AGAINST MAN

There were more than two thousand souls in the great caravan which reached over miles of springy turf and fat creek lands.  There were more than a thousand children, more than a hundred babes in arm, more than fifty marriageable maids pursued by avid swains.  There were bold souls and weak, strong teams and weak, heavy loads and light loads, neighbor groups and coteries of kindred blood or kindred spirits.

The rank and file had reasons enough for shifting.  There were a score of Helens driving wagons—­reasons in plenty for the futility of all attempts to enforce an arbitrary rule of march.  Human equations, human elements would shake themselves down into place, willy-nilly.  The great caravan therefore was scantily less than a rabble for the first three or four days out.  The four columns were abandoned the first half day.  The loosely knit organization rolled on in a broken-crested wave, ten, fifteen, twenty miles a day, the horse-and-mule men now at the front.  Far to the rear, heading only the cow column, came the lank men of Liberty, trudging alongside their swaying ox teams, with many a monotonous “Gee-whoa-haw!  Git along thar, ye Buck an’ Star!” So soon they passed the fork where the road to Oregon left the trail to Santa Fe; topped the divide that held them back from the greater valley of the Kaw.

[Illustration:  A Paramount Picture.

The Covered Wagon.

Molly coaxes Sam Woodhull to let her ride Banion’s horse.]