il. But if one wagon sticks to the San
Bernardino road I'll stay with that wagon, for I passed my word to
take you that way."

It was sometime near midnight when the crowd left the fire, but the
sun was barely up the next morning before the wagons were lined out
along the side hill. Far ahead of them where the trail forked, John
Hunt stood waiting alone.

The white-topped prairie-schooners came on slowly toward him from the
northward through the sage; the heads of the long-horned oxen swinging
low from side to side before their heavy wooden yokes. The first span
reached the solitary figure of the captain and went straight on south;
the wagon rumbled by and Hunt knew by its passing that he must keep to
the San Bernardino trail.

But the second driver halted his team and leaned out from his seat to
take the hand which Hunt extended him. "We'll try the short route," he
said.

"Good-by," the captain bade him; "good luck." The man called to his
lead span; the great yokes creaked and the front wheels whined against
the wagon-box as the animals swung the prairie-schooner to the west.

And now wagon after wagon halted briefly while its occupants exchanged
a brief farewell with the bearded man beside the road; then the outfit
struck out straight westward up the long steep slope; until, when Hunt
turned to rejoin his remnant of a following, three quarters of its
members had forsaken the Sand Walking Company.

The prairie-schooners of the seceders made a slender white line in the
wilderness of sage which reached on before them, up and up. Beyond the
crest which rose gray-brown against the cloudless Indian summer sky,
the desert waited silent as Death itself.

They traveled for three days up that long steep slope and when they
reached the summit to look down upon the other side they discovered
that the Williams map was worthless as a guide. Here, where it
promised easy going, a steep-walled canyon led down from the north
blocking their road. Beyond, a wilderness of sandstone pinnacles and
naked cliffs dropped away and away to depths invisible.

Then most of the drivers turned back their oxen to follow Captain Hunt
and overtake him on the San Bernardino trail by which he led his
company in safety to Los Angeles. But twenty-seven wagons remained
parked among the twisted junipers, their occupants biding the return
of scouts whom they had sent ahead to seek a pass. Although the map
had proved of no value when it came to showi