ng a road, they still
believed in the snow-clad peak which it had promised, somewhere before
them in the hidden west. They were determined to find that landmark
and strike out for it.

The scouts came back on the fourth day and reported a pass far to the
northward around the canyon head. But before the prairie-schooners
lined out on the ridge to make the long detour, the unmarried owners
of outfits banded together in a company, advising those with families
to return to Captain Hunt. They did not care, they said, to be
responsible for the lives of women and children in this unmapped
wilderness. The advice was not taken and the train set forth in two
sections, twenty wagons belonging to the Jayhawkers and their bachelor
companions and seven owned by men who traveled with their wives and
little ones.

The scouts had picked an easy route through rolling hills where
bunch-grass stood in thick clusters among the tall gray sage; the oxen
cropped the rich feed as they went along. Clear streams ran noisily in
most of the ravines. The train passed the canyon head, and one day,
after considerable aimless wandering, it turned westward to cross a
succession of wide tablelands where feed was good and water still
plentiful.

The Indian summer season was at its height now, clear balmy days
and cloudless nights. Their progress was steady for some time,
uninterrupted by ill luck of any kind. When they halted for the midday
meal it was like a great picnic in the soft warm sunshine, and
when evening came the Jayhawkers rollicked around their fires or
gathered where one of their number had tuned up his fiddle. William
Isham was his name, a great bearded fellow who hailed originally
from Rochester, New York; he would sit by the hour on the tongue
of his wagon playing "Oh Susannah" and other lively airs, or strike
up a jig tune while Negro Joe, who had fled from slavery in
Mississippi, did a double shuffle in the firelight. The children
slipped away from their mothers to set peeps at the fun from the
edges of the crowd or play hide and seek in the shadows of the
sage-brush; there were ten of these youngsters in all.

Many of these evenings would find a number of the older men clustered
around the wagon of Asahel Bennett, an Iowa pioneer whose outfit
included a young hunter by the name of William Manley. For Manley went
ahead nearly every day to spy out the country and these men were eager
for tidings of the snow-clad peak which lay befo