d miles from the starting point in Oregon.

The young wife of one of the missionaries was glad enough to take
passage thus for the East; and there was the silent Threlka. Those two
could offer company, even did not the little Indian maid, adopted by the
baroness, serve to interest her. Their equipment and supplies were as
good as any purchasable. What could be done, we now had done.

Yet after all Helena von Ritz had her own way. I did not see her again
after we parted that evening at the Mission. I was absent for a couple
of days with a hunting party, and on my return discovered that she was
gone, with no more than brief farewell to those left behind! Meek was
anxious as herself to be off; but he left word for me to follow on at
once.

Gloom now fell upon us all. Doctor Whitman, the only white man ever to
make the east-bound journey from Oregon, encouraged us as best he could;
but young Lieutenant Peel was the picture of despair, nor did he indeed
fail in the prophecy he made to me; for never again did he set eyes on
the face of Helena von Ritz, and never again did I meet him. I heard,
years later, that he died of fever on the China coast.

It may be supposed that I myself now hurried in my plans. I was able to
make up a small party of four men, about half the number Meek took with
him; and I threw together such equipment as I could find remaining, not
wholly to my liking, but good enough, I fancied, to overtake a party
headed by a woman. But one thing after another cost us time, and we did
not average twenty miles a day. I felt half desperate, as I reflected on
what this might mean. As early fall was approaching, I could expect, in
view of my own lost time, to encounter the annual wagon train two or
three hundred miles farther westward than the object of my pursuit
naturally would have done. As a matter of fact, my party met the wagons
at a point well to the west of Fort Hall.

It was early in the morning we met them coming west,--that long, weary,
dust-covered, creeping caravan, a mile long, slow serpent, crawling
westward across the desert. In time I came up to the head of the
tremendous wagon train of 1845, and its leader and myself threw up our
hands in the salutation of the wilderness.

The leader's command to halt was passed back from one wagon to another,
over more than a mile of trail. As we dismounted, there came hurrying up
about us men and women, sunburned, lean, ragged, abandoning their wagons
and cr