set in and make travel over unmade roads much worse than it already was.

When he arose he noiselessly crept away from her side and quietly called the boy to go and bring up the horses and the cow, cautioning him to take off the horse-bell and carry it so as not to arouse the mother when he came to camp. Quietly as possible he made the fire and prepared their breakfast of fare that was daily becoming scantier. Then, when all was ready, he tiptoed through the sand to where she lay under the spreading arms of a little desert juniper, such as are occasionally found in the deserts, and where she had said the night before she wished she could sleep forever. She looked so calm and restful he hesitated to wake her; it seemed like robbery to take from her one moment of the longed-for and hard-earned rest. Yet it was time they were on their road, and the day was fine; so after a few minutes he called, gently, “Mother, you’re getting a nice rest, aren’t you?”

She did not stir. He then stooped to kiss the languid lips––they were cold. She was dead. They had been seeking a home by the shores of the sunset sea; she had found the sunrise land.

It is a sad, solemn, and sacred thing to be with our dead, but to be alone, hundreds of miles from the face of any friend, in such an hour, is an experience few ever have to meet. Pioneer-like, the father scans the horizon, locating all the prominent features of the landscape. He makes a rude map, not forgetting the juniper. As best he can he prepares the body for the burying. And such a burying! No lumber with which to make even a rough box; nothing but their daily clothing and nightly bedding was to be had. The unlined grave was more than usually forbidding. The desert demon had trailed that brave body and was now swallowing it up. They made the grave by the juniper where she last slept, and, sorrowing, the father and the son went on, firm in the resolve that the loved one should not always lie in a desert grave.

Forty years later a man past middle-age, riding a horse and leading another, to whose packsaddle was fastened a box, went slowly along that old trail in Southern Idaho, now almost obliterated by many-footed Progress. He was scanning the hills and consulting a piece of age-yellowed 28 paper, broken at all its ancient creases. It was the son obeying the dying request of the old father––going to find, if possible, the spot where the tired mother went to sleep so long ago, and bring all that remained to rest by his side.

It was no easy task. Fertile fields, whose irrigated areas now presented billowy breasts of ripening grain; mighty ditches like younger and better-behaved rivers; a railway following the general direction of the old trail; ranch-houses and fat haystacks indenting the sky-line once so bare of all except clumps of sagebrush––these all conspired to make the task next to impossible.

Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the mountains; they were unchanged. The map he carried was the one his father made on the spot more than a generation before. It had been well made and the specifications were minute. After a long while, carefully measuring and comparing, he found the spot to him so sacred. The juniper tree, so rare in that section, had not been disturbed by the new owner of the land, and 29 as the precious burden, secured at last, was borne away, it still stood on guard––as if lonely now. Like father, like son. Both were faithfully bound by the strongest tie in the universe––love!

THE DESERT

Much of the Old Overland Trail lay across the “Great American Desert,” as it was named in the earlier geographies. Irrigation and progressive energy have made these wastes in many instances literally to “blossom as the rose”; but until that was done these stretches were weary enough.

He who knows only the desert of the geography naturally conceives it an absolutely forsaken and empty region where nothing but dust-storms are born unattended and die “without benefit of the clergy.” But the desert has character and is as variable as many another creature.

THE SAND STORM

An experience in an actual sand storm is food upon which the reminiscent may ruminate many a day, being much more pleasant in memory than in the making. First come the scurrying outriders, lithe and limber whisking gusts, dancing and whirling like 34 Moslem dervishes, coyly brushing the traveler or boldly flinging fierce fistfuls of dirt into his eyes; then off with a swish of invisible skirts––vanishing possibly in the same direction whence they came. They go leaving him wiping his astonished eyes disgustedly, for the act was so sudden and tragic as to excite tears. Before he is aware of it other and stronger gusts duplicate the dastardly deed of the first wingless wizard of the plains, and the hapless voyager is left gasping. Almost immediately there are to be seen the regular “desert devils,” as they are called, bringing a dozen or more whirling columns of yellow silt rapidly through the air, each pirouetting on one foot, assuming meanwhile all sorts of fantastic shapes.

Now for the fierce onset. Like blasts of a blizzard, the shrapnel of the desert is hurled into eyes, face, ears, and nostrils; little rivers pour down the back and fill every discoverable wrinkle and cranny of the clothing with their gritty load.

If in summer, buttoning the clothing is suffocation, and the perspiration soon makes one a mass of grime; if in winter, it is 35 not so unbearable, for a comfortable fencing can be made against the sand and the cold.

The whole landscape is obliterated by and by, and the trails are so often drift-filled that unless one is himself accustomed to such methods of travel or has an experienced plainsman as his driver and guide, there is danger of becoming lost, or so out of the way that night may overtake him and compel a waterless camp for himself and team.

TWILIGHT AND DAWN

But to see the morning slip off its night clothes and step out into daylight, or watch day don her night-wraps and snuggle down into twilight on the quiet sand-ocean! In summer it is a scene of splendor, often coming after a day or an evening of sandy wrath.

At early dawn, lining the eastern horizon, are the soft pencils of bashful day over-topping the jagged sawteeth of the yet sleeping mountains, fifty or more miles away. A faint hinting of the lightening of the sky only deepens the blackness of the 36 snow-streaked peaks. The cowardly coyote’s yelp comes more and more faintly, the burrowing owl’s “to-whit, to-whoo” falls dying on the moveless air, and the white sparrow of the sagebrush starts up as if to