The men were in the water all day long, for four days, swimming, wading, digging.  Perhaps the first plow furrow west of the Kaw was cast when some plows eased down the precipitous bank which fronted one of the fording places.  Beyond that lay no mark of any plow for more than a thousand miles.

They now had passed the Plains, as first they crossed the Prairie.  The thin tongue of land between the two forks, known as the Highlands of the Platte, made vestibule to the mountains.  The scenery began to change, to become rugged, semi-mountainous.  They noted and held in sight for a day the Courthouse Rock, the Chimney Rock, long known to the fur traders, and opened up wide vistas of desert architecture new to their experiences.

They were now amid great and varied abundance of game.  A thousand buffalo, five, ten, might be in sight at one time, and the ambition of every man to kill his buffalo long since had been gratified.  Black-tailed deer and antelope were common, and even the mysterious bighorn sheep of which some of them had read.  Each tributary stream now had its delicious mountain trout.  The fires at night had abundance of the best of food, cooked for the most part over the native fuel of the bois des vaches.

The grass showed yet shorter, proving the late presence of the toiling Mormon caravan on ahead.  The weather of late June was hot, the glare of the road blinding.  The wagons began to fall apart in the dry, absorbent air of the high country.  And always skeletons lay along the trail.  An ox abandoned by its owners as too footsore for further travel might better have been shot than abandoned.  The gray wolves would surely pull it down before another day.  Continuously such tragedies of the wilderness went on before their wearying eyes.

Breaking down from the highlands through the Ash Hollow gap, the train felt its way to the level of the North Fork of the great river which had led them for so long.  Here some trapper once had built a cabin—­the first work of the sort in six hundred miles—­and by some strange concert this deserted cabin had years earlier been constituted a post office of the desert.  Hundreds of letters, bundles of papers were addressed to people all over the world, east and west.  No government recognized this office, no postage was employed in it.  Only, in the hope that someone passing east or west would carry on the inclosures without price, folk here sent out their souls into the invisible.

“How far’ll we be out, at Laramie?” demanded Molly Wingate of the train scout, Bridger, whom Banion had sent on to Wingate in spite of his protest.

“Nigh onto six hundred an’ sixty-seven mile they call hit, ma’am, from Independence to Laramie, an’ we’ll be two months a-makin’ hit, which everges around ten mile a day.”

“But it’s most to Oregon, hain’t it?”

“Most to Oregon?  Ma’am, it’s nigh three hundred mile beyond Laramie to the South Pass, an’ the South Pass hain’t half-way to Oregon.  Why, ma’am, we ain’t well begun!”