ss to
guess; and later, patches of snow about the peaks.

The minutes were as hours; and their passing tantalized us: noting how
the dim view grew so very slowly into hazy outlines of mountains, and
finally of tree-tops.

On we labored, overcoming distance inch by inch; nodding in our
saddles; occasionally dismounting, to shake off the almost
overpowering grasp of sleep.

Half awake, we dreamed of water, green trees, and fragrant flowers.
Rising hope, anon, took the place of long-deferred fruition, and we
forgot for a moment how hard the pull was; till, with returning
consciousness of thirst and painful drowsiness, we saw the landscape
ahead presented still another, and another line of sand-dunes yet to
be overcome.

Luke and I reached the Truckee at nine o'clock in the forenoon, just
ahead of the vanguard of cattle, and about three miles in advance of
the foremost wagon.

We tried to regulate the cattle's consumption of water, but did not
prevent their drinking all they could hold. Ten men, on ten mules,
could not have stopped one cow from plunging into that river, once
she got sight of it, and remaining as long as she desired. We could
not even prevent the mules we rode from rushing into it--that cold,
rippling Truckee. Yet our elders had sent us two boys to hold back a
hundred cattle, and make them drink in installments--in homeopathic
doses, for their stomachs' sake.

They dashed into the stream _en masse_; and seeing the futility of
interfering, we gladly joined the cattle, in the first good, long,
cool swallow of clear, clean water, within a period of six weeks.

Our little mules did not stop till they reached the middle of the
river, and stuck their heads, ears and all, under the water. Luke's
diminutive, snuff-colored beast was so overcome by the sight and feel
of water that she lay down in it, with him astride, giving herself and
her master the first real bath since the time that she did the same
thing, in the Platte River, some three months previously.

To us, the long-time sun-dried, thirsty emigrants; covered from head
to foot with dust from the Black Hills, overlaid with alkali powder
from the Humboldt, veneered with ashes of the desert; all ingrained by
weeks of dermatic absorption, rubbed in by the wear of travel,
polished by the friction of the wind--to us said the Truckee, flowing
a hundred feet wide, transparent, deep, cool; rattling and singing and
splashing over the rocks; and the sparkle