"Now's a fine time for this train to shake into place," he added. "You, Price, take your men and go down the lines. Tell your kinfolk and families and friends and neighbors to make bands and hang together. Let 'em draw cuts for place if they like, but stick where they go. We can't tell how the grass will be on ahead, and we may have to break the train into sections on the Platte; but we'll break it ourselves, and not see it fall apart or fight apart. So?"
He wheeled and went away at a trot. All he had given them was the one thing they lacked.
[pg 123]
The Wingate wagons came in groups and halted at the river bank, where the work of rafting and wagon boating went methodically forward. Scores of individual craft, tipsy and risky, two or three logs lashed together, angled across and landed far below. Horsemen swam across with lines and larger rafts were steadied fore and aft with ropes snubbed around tree trunks on either bank. Once started, the resourceful pioneer found a dozen ways to skin his cat, as one man phrased it, and presently the falling waters permitted swimming and fording the stock. It all seemed ridiculously simple and ridiculously cheerful.
Toward evening a great jangling of bells and shouting of young captains announced the coming of a great band of the stampeded livestock--cattle, mules and horses mixed. Afar came the voice of Jed Wingate singing, "Oh, then Susannah," and urging Susannah to have no concern.
But Banion, aloof and morose, made his bed that night apart even from his own train. He had not seen Wingate--did not see him till the next day, noon, when he rode up and saluted the former leader, who sat on his own wagon seat and not in saddle.
"My people are all across, Mr. Wingate," he said, and the last of your wagons will be over by dark and straightened out. I'm parked a mile ahead."
"You are parked? I thought you were elected--by my late friends--to lead this whole train."