The great wagon train of 1848 lay banked along the Vermilion in utter and abject confusion.  Organization there now was none.  But for Banion’s work with the back fires the entire train would have been wiped out.  The effects of the storm were not so capable of evasion.  Sodden, wretched, miserable, chilled, their goods impaired, their cattle stampeded, all sense of gregarious self-reliance gone, two hundred wagons were no more than two hundred individual units of discontent and despair.  So far as could be prophesied on facts apparent, the journey out to Oregon had ended in disaster almost before it was well begun.

Bearded men at smoking fires looked at one another in silence, or would not look at all.  Elan, morale, esprit de corps were gone utterly.

Stout Caleb Price walked down the wagon lines, passing fourscore men shaking in their native agues, not yet conquered.  Women, pale, gaunt, grim, looked at him from limp sunbonnets whose stays had been half dissolved.  Children whimpered.  Even the dogs, curled nose to tail under the wagons, growled surlily.  But Caleb Price found at last the wagon of the bugler who had been at the wars and shook him out.

“Sound, man!” said Caleb Price.  “Play up Oh, Susannah!  Then sound the Assembly.  We’ve got to have a meeting.”

They did have a meeting.  Jesse Wingate scented mutiny and remained away.

“There’s no use talking, men,” said Caleb Price, “no use trying to fool ourselves.  We’re almost done, the way things are.  I like Jess Wingate as well as any man I ever knew, but Jess Wingate’s not the man.  What shall we do?”

He turned to Hall, but Hall shook his head; to Kelsey, but Kelsey only laughed.

“I could get a dozen wagons through, maybe,” said he.  “Here’s two hundred.  Woodhull’s the man, but Woodhull’s gone—­lost, I reckon, or maybe killed and lying out somewhere on these prairies.  You take it, Cale.”

Price considered for a time.

“No,” said he at length.  “It’s no time for one of us to take on what may be done better by someone else, because our women and children are at stake.  The very best man’s none too good for this job, and the more experience he has the better.  The man who thinks fastest and clearest at the right time is the man we want, and the man we’d follow—­the only man.  Who’ll he be?”

“Oh, I’ll admit Banion had the best idea of crossing the Kaw,” said Kelsey.  “He got his own people over, too, somehow.”

“Yes, and they’re together now ten miles below us.  And Molly Wingate—­she was caught out with her team by the fire—­says it was Banion who started the back-fire.  That saved his train and ours.  Ideas that come too late are no good.  We need some man with the right ideas at the right time.”

“You think it’s Banion?” Hall spoke.

“I do think it’s Banion.  I don’t see how it can be anyone else.”

“Woodhull’d never stand for it.”