"Want to stay and work for me?"
"Can't. I have to get to Oregon."
"It's late in the season, and almost 700 miles to Laramie. You'll have to have smooth going all the way to get there ahead of the fall storms. If the storms don't get you, the Indians might. There won't be anybody else heading out this late in the year. You're all alone, a lost wagon."
"We'll get there and we're not lost."
"I'll make it thirty dollars a mule and promise you work all winter."
"Have to get to Oregon."
"You emigrants for Oregon," lamented Jake Favors, who had grown wealthy selling them horses and mules, "don't have a lick of common sense among the lot of you!"
The Towers broke up camp, and returned to Jake the boards and chairs they had borrowed. Barbara scoured the camp site for toys and scraps of clothing the young ones might have dropped in the grass.
Emma stood quietly for a moment looking at the charred stones of the fireplace where she had prepared so many meals in the past three weeks. She reflected that the spot where a woman prepares meals to feed her family has the oddest way of becoming precious. Even though she wanted, just as much as Joe did, to move on now to their final camping site, to the land on which their new home would stand, she had a queer little hankering to stay on here under these trees.
When the wagon began to move away from the apple trees, she looked back, winking angrily to dispose of the tears that came into her eyes. Joe, without turning to look at her, laid his hand, just for a moment, over hers.