“Roll out!  Roll out!” mocked the man who had abandoned his plow.  “This way for Californy!”

The council ended in turmoil, where hitherto had been no more than a sedate daily system.  Routine, become custom, gave way to restless movement, excited argument.  Of all these hundreds now encamped on the sandy sagebrush plain in the high desert there was not an individual who was not affected in one way or another by the news from California, and in most cases it required some sort of a personal decision, made practically upon the moment.  Men argued with their wives heatedly; women gathered in groups, talking, weeping.  The stoic calm of the trail was swept away in a sort of hysteria which seemed to upset all their world and all its old values.

Whether for Oregon or California, a revolution in prices was worked overnight for every purchase of supplies.  Flour, horses, tools, everything merchantable, doubled and more than doubled.  Some fifty wagons in all now formed train for California, which, in addition to the long line of pack animals, left the Sangamon caravan, so called, at best little more than half what it had been the day before.  The men without families made up most of the California train.

The agents for California, by force of habit, still went among the wagons and urged the old arguments against Oregon—­the savage tribes on ahead, the forbidding desolation of the land, the vast and dangerous rivers, the certainty of starvation on the way, the risk of arriving after winter had set in on the Cascade Range—­all matters of which they themselves spoke by hearsay.  All the great West was then unknown.  Moreover, Fort Hall was a natural division point, as quite often a third of the wagons of a train might be bound for California even before the discovery of gold.  But Wingate and his associates felt that the Oregon immigration for that year, even handicapped as now, ultimately would run into thousands.

It was mid-morning of the next blazing day when he beckoned his men to him.

“Lets pull out,” he said.  “Why wait for the Californians to move?  Bridger will go with us across the Snake.  ’Twill only be the worse the longer we lie here, and our wagons are two weeks late now.”

The others agreed.  But there was now little train organization.  The old cheery call, “Catch up!  Catch up!” was not heard.  The group, the family, the individual now began to show again.  True, after their leaders came, one after another, rattling, faded wagons, until the dusty trail that led out across the sage flats had a tenancy stretched out for over a half mile, with yet other vehicles falling in behind; but silent and grim were young and old now over this last defection.

“About that old man Greenwood,” said Molly Wingate to her daughter as they sat on the same jolting seat, “I don’t know about him.  I’ve saw elders in the church with whiskers as long and white as his’n, but you’d better watch your hog pen.  For me, I believe he’s a liar.  It like enough is true he used to live back in the Rockies in Injun times, and he may be eighty-five years old, as he says, and California may have a wonderful climate, the way he says; but some things I can’t believe.