Below in the plain the white dots of an encampment showed like a growth
of mushrooms. Near this, as they crawled down upon it, the enormous
form of Independence Rock detached itself from the faded browns and
grays to develop into a sleeping leviathan, lost from its herd and
fallen exhausted in a sterile land.
Courant was curious about the encampment, and after the night halt rode
forward to inspect it. He returned in the small hours reporting it a
train of Mormons stopped for sickness. A boy of fifteen had broken his
leg ten days before and was now in a desperate condition. The train
had kept camp hoping for his recovery, or for the advent of help in one
of the caravans that overhauled them. Courant thought the boy beyond
hope, but in the gray of the dawn the doctor mounted, and with Susan,
David, and Courant, rode off with his case of instruments strapped to
his saddle.
The sun was well up when they reached the Mormon camp. Scattered about
a spring mouth in the litter of a three days' halt, its flocks and
herds spread wide around it, it was hushed in a sullen dejection. The
boy was a likely lad for the new Zion, and his mother, one of the wives
of an elder, had forgotten her stern training, and fallen to a common
despair.
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