Now they would set foot on Oregon, passing from one great series of waterways to another and even vaster, leading down to the western sea—­the unknown South Sea marked as the limits of their possessions by the gallants of King Charles when, generations earlier, and careless of all these intervening generations of toil and danger, they had paused at the summit of Rockfish Gap in the Appalachians and waved a gay hand each toward the unknown continent that lay they knew not how far to the westward.

But these, now arrived halfway of half that continent, made no merriment in their turn.  Their wounded and their sick were with them.  The blazing sun tried them sore.  Before them also lay they knew not what.

And now, coming in from the northeast in a vast braided tracing of travois poles and trampling hoofs, lay a trail which fear told them was that of yet another war party waiting for the white-topped wagons.  It led on across the Pass.  It could not be more than two days old.

“It’s the Crows!” exclaimed Sam Woodhull, studying the broad trail.  “They’ve got their women and children with them.”

“We have ours with us,” said Caleb Price simply.

Every man who heard him looked back at the lines of gaunt cattle, at the dust-stained canvas coverings that housed their families.  They were far afield from home or safety.

“Call Wingate.  Let’s decide what to do,” exclaimed Price again.  “We’ll have to vote.”

They voted to go on, fault of any better plan.  Some said Bridger’s post was not far ahead.  A general impatience, fretful, querulous, manifested itself.  Ignorant, many of these wanted to hurry on to Oregon, which for most meant the Williamette Valley, in touch with the sea, marked as the usual end of the great trek.  Few knew that they now stood on the soil of the Oregon country.  The maps and journals of Molly Wingate were no more forthcoming, for Molly Wingate no more taught the evening school, but lay delirious under the hothouse canvas cover that intensified the rays of the blazing sun.  It was life or death, but by now life-and-death issue had become no unusual experience.

It was August, midsummer, and only half the journey done.  The heat was blinding, blistering.  For days now, in the dry sage country, from the ford of the North Fork of the Platte, along the Sweetwater and down the Sandy, the white alkali dust had sifted in and over everything.  Lips cracked open, hands and arms either were raw or black with tan.  The wagons were ready to drop apart.  A dull silence had fallen on the people; but fatuously following the great Indian trail they made camp at last at the ford of the Green River, the third day’s march down the Pacific Slope.  No three days of all the slow trail had been harder to endure than these.

“Play for them, Jed,” counseled Caleb Price, when that hardy youth, leaving his shrunken herd, came in for his lunch that day at the ford.