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marched and marched and camped toward the sunset. In the buffalo country the Indians peeped like blackbirds over the hills and disappeared. In September, dashing across a cut-off, Dr. Whitman reached Fort Hall three days before the train. Thither to his great joy he found his faithful Cayuses had packed a quantity of provisions on their plump little ponies. There they were, riding and swaying and swinging, clinging with their legs under the ponies' bellies and waving their arms in greeting the poetry of Delsarte before Delsarte was heard of.
We can well imagine Dr. Whitman's first words, "My wife?" and the answer, "Watching for you," in Indian pantomime. Something of the May-feast he may have learned and of the burned mill as he shook hands with his red retainers.
Against the crackling sage-brush the dust-covered train came rolling in.
"What are you going to Oregon for? You cannot get the wagons through," said Captain Grant, the Hudson's Bay factor at Fort Hall. "'T is a physical impossibility. A small immigration passed through here last year. I told them as I tell you, wagons never have passed, never can pass through the Snake country and the Blue Mountains. They believed me, left their wagons, bought pack animals, and got through safely. My advice to you is the same, get pack animals and go through, but I advise you to go to California. The route is shorter and safer, and there is the better country."
"Can't get the wagons through," was the word that passed from lip to lip.
"No," said Captain Grant; "there you see the ones abandoned last year."
