h's
waters. He wrought nowhere a more beautiful effect than in the Platte
islands of Nebraska. It was well that at this point we had an extra
amount of kindness tendered us and so much unusual beauty to look upon,
for a great sorrow was about to come upon us.

Just as we were leaving the Little Blue, thirty-three miles back, one of
our party, Robert Nelson, became ill, and in spite of the best nursing
and treatment that the company could give he rapidly grew worse, and it
soon became evident that his disease was cholera, which was already
quite prevalent thereabout. Mrs. Wadsworth, that most excellent woman,
gave to him her special care, taking him into the tent occupied by
herself and husband, which, in fact, was the only tent in the outfit. It
was Lew Wallace who once said that "God couldn't be everywhere, and so
He made mothers." Our captain's wife was a true mother to the sick boy,
but she couldn't save him. At 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon, May 27th,
about sixty miles beyond Kearney, his soul passed on, and we were bowed
under our first bereavement. We dug his grave in the sand a little way
off the trail. We wrapped his blanket about him and sewed it, and at
sunrise Monday morning laid him to rest. The end-gate from my wagon had
been shaped into a grave-board and, with his name cut upon it, was
planted to mark his resting-place. It was a sorrowful little company
that performed these last services for one who was beloved by all.

Just before dying, Robert had requested that his grave might be covered
with willow branches, and so a comrade and myself rode our horses out to
one of the islands and brought in big bunches of willows and tucked them
about him, as he had desired.

Truly our prairies have been a stage upon which much more of tragedy
than of comedy has been enacted.

CHAPTER III.

"BUT SOMEWHERE THE MASTER HAS A COUNTERPART OF EACH."

"O Lord Almighty, aid Thou me to see my way more clear. I find it hard
to tell right from wrong, and I find myself beset with tangled wires. O
God, I feel that I am ignorant, and fall into many devices. These are
strange paths wherein Thou hast set my feet, but I feel that through Thy
help and through great anguish, I am learning."

This modern prayer, as prayed by the hero of a modern tale, would have
fitted most completely into the spirit and conditions prevailing in our
camp on a certain morning in early June, 1852, as we were completing
arrangements preparatory