oothed their crying
children, and the drivers turned the oxen back toward the trail which
they had forsaken for the lure of the mirage. There was no word of
grief among the men, no outcry of despair; but the shoulders of some
were sagging when they made their dry camp that night, and there was a
new hardness in the eyes of all of them. For they had looked upon the
desert and they knew it for what it was.

As they were sitting about their little fires a man came staggering
among them out of the darkness. It was Manley, the young hunter of the
Bennett outfit, who had been away for two days on one of his
reconnoitering expeditions. They gathered around him in silence but he
read the question in their eyes and shook his head.

"No water," he answered, "nor sign, of it, but I have seen a snow
mountain straight west of us."

He told them how he had lain out on the summit of a high butte the
night before until dawn came revealing a dead world. Dark ragged
mountains of volcanic rock lay to the north, and to the south a tangle
of naked ridges whose sides were discolored as though by fire. Between
these scorched ranges a plain stretched for a good one hundred miles
into the west, as level as a floor and gleaming white. Beyond that
plain a low chain of mountains rose, as black as ink, and behind this
gloomy range he saw a snow-clad peak that glistened in the morning
sun.

They talked the situation over; all of them were convinced that Manley
had found the peak described by the Williams map, and now they argued
for different routes. Of the four points of the compass there was only
one which lacked an advocate. For, while some urged a northward
circuit and others believed there would be greater safety to the south
and many were determined to push straight on west across the gleaming
plain of alkali, there was not one word said of turning back into the
east.

Survivors tell how some of the women wept under the covers of the
prairie-schooners that night, but none of those mothers raised her
voice in favor of retreat. They were pioneers, these people, and it
seemed as if they did not know how to turn back.

None can ever set the fulness of their story down in words; for the
Amargossa Desert has a wicked beauty which is beyond the telling, and
one must journey out beyond the black escarpments of the Funeral
Mountains and fight for his life in the silent reaches of that broken
wilderness if he would begin to realize what they wen