ight 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!"

CHAPTER XXV

OLD LARAMIE

An old gray man in buckskins sat on the ground in the shade of the adobe
stockade at old Fort Laramie, his knees high in front of him, his eyes
fixed on the ground. His hair fell over his shoulders in long curls
which had once been brown. His pointed beard fell on his breast. He sat
silent and motionless, save that constantly he twisted a curl around a
forefinger, over and over again. It was his way. He was a long-hair, a
man of another day. He had seen the world change in six short years,
since the first wagon crossed yonder ridges, where now showed yet one
more wagon train approaching.

He paid no attention to the debris and discard of this new day which lay
all about him as he sat and dreamed of the days of trap and packet. Near
at hand were pieces of furniture leaning against the walls, not bought
or sold, but abandoned as useless here at Laramie. Wagon wheels,
tireless, their fellies falling apart, lay on the ground, and other
ruins of great wagons, dried and disjointed now.

Dust lay on the