me one got food for
the journey and found a route between water-holes. They appointed
Manley, the young hunter, and an ox-driver named John Rogers for the
venture, and the pair set out across the Panamints just north of
Telescope Peak with the beef from an ox in their knapsacks, while the
others sat down to await their return--or death.

There were two wagon outfits of unmarried men among them; they had
forsaken the Jayhawkers at about the time the Brier family joined that
section. When several days had passed these bachelors departed to seek
the trail of their former companions in the valley's north arm. They
said that the chances were ten to one that Manley and Rogers would
never get through alive, and if they did they would be fools to
attempt coming back. The others watched the two prairie-schooners
crawling off into the gray plain until a mirage engulfed them and
lifted them distorted into the blazing sky.

And now the families faced the question which these men had left with
them. Would Manley and Rogers get through? They did not know what
hazards lay beyond those mountains to the west, but none of them had
the Jayhawkers' faith in a fertile valley leading to the north. As it
turned out Mount Whitney was the snow-clad peak to which the faulty
Williams map referred and the valley was the Owens Lake country, many
a weary mile from this sink.

If the pair did survive the desert, would they be men enough to face
it for the second time? The marooned ones could only hope. That hope
had become an abiding faith in Bennett's wife. She had given the two
young fellows a double handful of rice--half her store of grain--on
the morning of their departure, and pointed mutely to her children as
she placed the little bag in Manley's hand. "They will come back," she
told the others many times.

The food was running low; the few remaining oxen could not last them
long. There was a dog with the Bennett wagons; he had followed them
all the way from Iowa; and in this time of dire extremity some talked
of killing him. But even in his starved condition he was able to wag
his tail when the children came near him; sometimes he comforted them
by his presence when their mothers could not. The men had not the
heart to do away with him.

Hope lingered within those people like the breath in an old man who is
dying hard. Rogers and Manley had gone northward on the burning plain
to reach a ridge which mounted toward the Panamints. Now as th