When the wagon halted he was called outside by the driver, who wished instructions regarding the camp to be made.  A few moments later he was back, and raised the side of the wagon cover to let in the light.  The look on her face alarmed him.  It seemed to tell unmistakably that the great change was near.  Already she looked moribund.  An irregular gasping for breath, an occasional delirious mutter, were the only signs of life.  She was too weak to show restlessness.  Her pinched and faded face was covered with tiny cold beads.  The pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, and the eyes themselves were glazed.  There was no pulse at her wrist, and from her heart only the faintest beating could be heard.  In quick terror he called to a boy working at a wagon near by.

“Go for Bishop Wright and tell him to bring that apothecary with him.”

The two came up briskly a few moments later, and he stood aside for them in an agony of suspense.  The Bishop turned toward him after a long look into the wagon.

“She’s gone to be with your pa, Joel.  You can’t do anything—­only remember they’re both happy now for bein’ together.”

It made little stir in the busy encampment.  There had been other deaths while they lay out on the marshy river flats.  Others of the sorry band were now sick unto death, and many more would die on the long march across the Iowa prairie, dropping out one by one of fever, starvation, exposure.  He stood helpless in this chaos of woe, shut up within himself, knowing not where to turn.

Some women came presently from the other wagons to prepare the body for burial.  He watched them dumbly, from a maze of incredulity, feeling that some wretched pretense was being acted before him.

The Bishop and Keaton came up.  They brought with them the makeshift coffin.  They had cut a log, split it, and stripped off its bark in two half-cylinders.  They led him to the other side of the wagon, out of sight.  Then they placed the strips of bark around the body, bound them with hickory withes, and over the rough surface the women made a little show of black cloth.

For the burial they could do no more than consign the body to one of the waves in the great billowy land sea about them.  They had no tombstone, nor were there even rocks to make a simple cairn.  He saw them bury her, and thought there was little to choose between hers and the grave of his father, whose body was being now carried noiselessly down in the bed of the river.  The general locality would be kept by landmarks, by the bearing of valley bends, headlands, or the fork and angles of constant streams.  But the spot itself would in a few weeks be lost.

When the last office had been performed, the prayer said, a psalm sung, and the black dirt thrown in, they waited by him in sympathy.  His feeling was that they had done a monstrous thing; that the mother he had known was somewhere alive and well.  He stood a moment so, watching the sun sink below the far rim of the prairie while the white moon swung into sight in the east.  Then the Bishop led him gently by the arm to his own camp.