"I only did what I thought was the best, my dear," interposed Trailey meekly. "Somebody had to kill the beastly thing. And even now you might get blood-poisoning."
"And you wouldn't care if I did. I know very well you've been wanting to get rid of me for years. I'm not blind. The trouble is——"
"Rubbish, my dear."
"——I've been too fond of you. But I'll go away. You just give me the money and I'll show you. It would suit you to see me go without a penny, wouldn't it? But I'm your wife, remember. Nobody would think so, though, if they knew the way you treated me. But I've got my rights. I'm no simpleton, if I have spoilt you. You—just—give—me—the—money, that's all," and, with this admirable attempt at a marital reconciliation, Martha Trailey dropped three large tears into the dirty pots.
Bits of fire still smouldered in the bluffs. The prairie was carpeted with ashes of burnt grass, which crunched beneath boots, and rose in a black, powdery dust. Clothes became permeated with it. The tramping horses and the wagon-wheels raised clouds of the stuff, and in the complete absence of wind it enveloped everything like an irritating fog. As the little convoy slowly made its way over the blackened ground, the men and women soon began to resemble nigger minstrels.
Fortunately, the fire, because of its speed, had left long, narrow strips of grass unburnt. Sloughs had turned aside the devouring blaze, which, in its raging haste to overwhelm everything, had occasionally blown itself completely out rather than retrace its course against the wind to lick up the patches it had missed.
It was upon these tiny areas of feed, and the coarse, rank, thatch grass standing above the water in the sloughs, that the hundreds of horses and oxen belonging to the colonists (and the freighters) had to depend for subsistence. A couple of weeks of this diet, followed by the new, sappy, green grass over which they positively went mad, put the finishing touches on scores of emaciated animals. In more ways than one, the scattered fragments of miserably thin pasture left by the fire were "the last straws" for many a dying horse.
Later on dozens of transport animals perished. Lack of care; the hardships of the two-hundred-mile trek; ignorant mishandling; swamp fever, and a feed ration entirely devoid of oats, put out of commission for a very long time even those which survived.
It was in the region where the Trailey party almost met with disaster by fire that the Rev. Isaac M. Barr gave final and complete demonstration that, although by profession a parson, he was by nature really a highwayman. He tried to corner the oat market for the benefit of the heroic colonists and their suffering horses. He bought all the oats available in the district at forty cents a bushel, and, without handling them, or even seeing them, left instructions with the vendors that they were to be retailed to the members of his party at one dollar per bushel. Such a modest profit must nearly have broken his Shylock heart.
By this time many of the colonists' horses were nothing but staggering bags of skeletons. Galled, neglected, literally dying through exposure, lack of care and proper feed, their ghastly condition wrung the spirit of one, Peter Paynter, from whom Barr had purchased most of the oats, and through whose yard the trail the colonists were following led.