"
CHAPTER VII
By noon the next day the doctor's train had left the New York Company
far behind. Looking back they could see it in gradual stages of
diminishment--a white serpent with a bristling head of scattered
horsemen, then a white worm, its head a collection of dark particles,
then a white thread with a head too insignificant to be deciphered.
Finally it was gone, absorbed into the detailless distance where the
river coiled through the green.
Twenty-four hours later they reached the Forks of the Platte. Here the
trail crossed the South Fork, slanted over the plateau that lay between
the two branches, and gained the North Fork. Up this it passed,
looping round the creviced backs of mighty bluffs, and bearing
northwestward to Fort Laramie. The easy faring of the grassed bottom
was over. The turn to the North Fork was the turn to the mountains.
The slow stream with its fleet of islands would lose its dreamy
deliberateness and become a narrowed rushing current, sweeping round
the bases of sandstone walls as the pioneers followed it up and on
toward the whitened crests of the Wind River Mountains, where the snows
never melted and the lakes lay in the hollows green as jade.
Pages:
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194