Jackson advanced an idea.

“At Fort Hall,” he said, “I’ve seed ’em cut a wagon in two an’ make a two-wheel cart out’n hit.  They’re easier to git through mountains that way.”

“Now listen to that, Jesse!” Mrs. Wingate commented.  “It’s getting down to less and less every day.  But I’m going to take my bureau through, and my wheat, and my rose plants, if I have to put wheels on my bureau.”

The men determined to saw down three wagons of the train which now seemed doubtful of survival as quadrupeds, and a general rearrangement of cargoes was agreed.  Now they must jettison burden of every dispensable sort.  Some of the sore-necked oxen were to be thrown into the loose herd and their places taken for a time by cows no longer offering milk.

A new soberness began to sit on all.  The wide reaches of desert with which they here were in touch appalled their hearts more than anything they yet had met.  The grassy valley of the Platte, where the great fourfold tracks of the trail cut through a waving sea of green belly deep to the oxen, had seemed easy and inviting, and since then hardship had at least been spiced with novelty and change.  But here was a new and forbidding land.  This was the Far West itself; silent, inscrutable, unchanged, irreducible.  The mightiness of its calm was a smiting thing.  The awesomeness of its chill, indifferent nights, the unsparing ardors of its merciless noons, the measureless expanses of its levels, the cold barrenness of its hills—­these things did not invite as to the bosom of a welcoming mother; they repelled, as with the chill gesture of a stranger turning away outcasts from the door.

“Here resolution almost faints!” wrote one.

A general requisition was made on the scant stores Bridger had hurried through.  To their surprise, Bridger himself made no attempt at frontier profits.

“Chardon,” commanded the moody master of the post to his head clerk, “take down your tradin’ bar an’ let my people in.  Sell them their flour an’ meal at what it has cost us here—­all they want, down to what the post will need till my partner Vasquez brings in more next fall, if he ever does.  Sell ’em their flour at four dollars a sack, an’ not at fifty, boy.  Git out that flag I saved from Sublette’s outfit, Chardon.  Put it on a pole for these folks, an’ give it to them so’s they kin carry it on acrost to Oregon.  God’s got some use for them folks out yan or hit wouldn’t be happenin’ this way.  I’m goin’ to help ’em acrost.  Ef I don’t, old Jim Bridger is a liar!”

That night Bridger sat in his lodge alone, moodily smoking.  He heard a shaking at the pegs of the door flap.

“Get out!” he exclaimed, thinking that it was his older associate, or else some intruding dog.

His order was not obeyed.  Will Banion pulled back the flap, stooped and entered.

“How!” exclaimed Bridger, and with fist smitten on the blankets made the sign to “Sit!” Banion for a time also smoked in silence, knowing the moody ways of the old-time men.