re was lots of quarrelling, of course," said our narrator.
"Everybody was on edge. There were fights, that we had to settle
somehow, and bad feeling."

They had several minor skirmishes with Indians, lost from their party by
disease, suffered considerable hardships and infinite toil.

"We thought we'd had a hard time," said our friend wonderingly. "Lord!"

At the very start of the journey they had begun to realize that they
were overloaded, and had commenced to throw away superfluous goods.
Several units of the party had even to abandon some of their wagons.

"We chucked everything we thought we could get along without. I know we
spent all one day frying out bacon to get the grease before we threw it
away. We used the grease for our axles."

They reached the head of the Humboldt. Until this point they had kept
together, but now demoralization began. They had been told at Salt Lake
City that they had but four hundred miles to go to Sacramento. Now they
discovered that at the Humboldt they had still more than that distance
to travel; and that before them lay the worst desert of all.

"Mind you," said our friend, "we had been travelling desperately. Our
cattle had died one by one; and we had doubled up with our teams. We had
starved for water until our beasts were ready to drop and our own
tongues had swollen in our mouths, and were scared--_scared_, I
tell you--scared!"

He moistened his lips slowly, and went on. "Sometimes we took two or
three hours to go a mile, relaying back and forth. We were down to a
fine point. It wasn't a question of keeping our property any more; it
was a case of saving our lives. We'd abandoned a good half of our wagons
already. When we got to the Humboldt and learned from a mountain man
going the other way that the great desert was still before us, and when
we had made a day or two's journey down the river toward the Sink, I
tell you we lost our nerve--and our sense." He ruminated a few moments
in silence. "My God! man!" he cried. "That trail! From about halfway
down the river the carcasses of horses and oxen were so thick that I
believe if they'd been laid in the road instead of alongside you could
have walked the whole way without setting foot to ground!"

And then the river disappeared underground, and they had to face the
crossing of the Sink itself.

"That was a real desert," the immigrant told us sombrely. "There were
long white fields of alkali and drifts of ashes across them so