t through.

They made their last camp together at a brackish water-hole near the
edge of the plain which Manley had described. Beyond it they could see
the snow-clad peak. They repeated to one another the legends on the
Williams map, its promise of a pass close by that summit and of a
fertile valley leading to the gold-fields in the north. If they could
only reach the mountain, they agreed their hardships would be over,
their journey as good as ended.

They separated here to set forth by two different routes. The
Jayhawkers struck straight out across the flat, while the little
company of families kept to a more roundabout course in the south,
hoping to find water in the mountains there. From this time on,
although their trails converged and crossed, the wagons never united
in one train again.

In that silent land where the skeletons of dead mountain ranges lie
strewn among the graves of seas that died in ages past, they held
their eyes on the one sign of life that rose into the clear sky
beyond, the peak whose promise kept them moving on into the west.

Days passed and the smaller party found no water in any of the canyons
which came down to them from the south. They used the last drops from
their casks; and now they could not eat for thirst, they could not
sleep. The children wailed for drink until their voices died away to
dry whisperings, and when the mothers strove to comfort them they
found their arid tongues had lost the power of shaping any words.

At last Mauley, the young hunter with the Bennett wagons, discovered a
warm spring near a canyon head, but the oxen lay down in their traces
on their way up the gorge and the men were obliged to bring water down
to them in buckets before they could get the unhappy brutes to rise.
They filled the barrels with the tepid fluid and goaded the teams on,
seeking some sign of a pass in the low black range which lay between
them and the snow peak. If there were only an opening, it seemed as if
they might win through.

Meantime the Jayhawkers were pressing hard across the gleaming plain.
The surface of that plain was white as snow, as level as a floor. It
was so hard that the wheels left no track on it; no shrub grew from
it, only a low bitter weed that crumbled to a gray powder at the
slightest touch. The oxen plodded along with their heads hung so low
that their muzzles almost swept the ground; they stood about the camp
at night, emaciated beyond belief, swaying from w