“mental compass” were in disgrace from that moment.
After all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again,
with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snow-fall. While
we were considering what to do, the young Swede landed from the canoe and
took his pedestrian way Carson-wards, singing his same tiresome song
about his “sister and his brother” and “the child in the grave with its
mother,” and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white
oblivion. He was never heard of again. He no doubt got bewildered and
lost, and Fatigue delivered him over to Sleep and Sleep betrayed him to
Death. Possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became
exhausted and dropped.
Presently the Overland stage forded the now fast receding stream and
started toward Carson on its first trip since the flood came. We
hesitated no longer, now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted
merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver’s bump of
locality. But our horses were no match for the fresh stage team. We
were soon left out of sight; but it was no matter, for we had the deep
ruts the wheels made for a guide. By this time it was three in the
afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came–and
not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a
cellar door, as is its habit in that country. The snowfall was still as
thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us;
but all about us the white glare of the snow-bed enabled us to discern
the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in
front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling
and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks.
Now those sage-bushes were all about the same height–three or four feet;
they stood just about seven feet apart, all over the vast desert; each of
them was a mere snow-mound, now; in any direction that you proceeded (the
same as in a well laid out orchard) you would find yourself moving down a
distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds an either side
of it–an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its
breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way, by reason of
the mounds. But we had not thought of this. Then imagine the chilly
thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the
night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago
been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush
avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away
from it all the time. Having a cake of ice slipped down one’s back is
placid comfort compared to it. There was a sudden leap and stir of blood
that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the
drowsing activities in our minds and bodies. We were alive and awake at
once–and shaking and quaking with consternation, too. There was an
instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of
the road-bed. Useless, of course; for if a faint depression could not be
discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly
could not with one’s nose nearly against it.
CHAPTER XXXII.
We seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof. We tested this by
walking off in various directions–the regular snow-mounds and the
regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the
true road, and that the others had found only false ones. Plainly the
situation was desperate. We were cold and stiff and the horses were
tired. We decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning.
This was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the
snow-storm continued another day our case would be the next thing to
hopeless if we kept on.
All agreed that a camp fire was what would come nearest to saving us,