Bright and early the next morning, they all, even the polygamous wives and little children, in apparent sorrow, bade us good-bye, and were off, leaving us alone with our two poor, lonely, four-footed companions, who were very anxious to follow the band of horses.  After the rather melancholy parting we arranged our packs, and about ten o’clock started out on what then seemed, and afterwards proved, to be a perilous voyage through deserts, and over rough mountains.  To avoid a high range of mountains, our course was for a time northeast but, after passing that range we bore to the northwest.

The days were quite warm, but the nights were cold.  During the first day we killed and ate one small rabbit, and this, with a few seed buds gathered from wild rose bushes, constituted two days’ rations.  On the third we did not have even the rabbit or rose seed buds, but late in the afternoon we found some small red berries, similar in appearance to what I, in my childhood, knew and relished as Solomon’s seal berries.  I being a natural coward, and fearing that they might poison me, did not eat any of them, but generously allowed my good friend to eat them all.

We had now been almost entirely without water for two days and nights.  When night came on we picketed our animals in a grass plot and lay down near them to see that they did not get tangled in the ropes and hurt, or that some red skin, not having the fear of the Lord in his heart, did not come and take them away.  About ten o’clock my companion began to complain of pain in his stomach and bowels, and was soon vomiting at a fearful rate; so violently, indeed, that I was apprehensive that he might die.  If I had had an emetic I would have given it to him to have assisted nature in pumping those devilish little red berries out of him, for I felt quite sure that they were the cause of his illness.  Perhaps it was fortunate that there was no medecine at hand, for if there had been I might have killed him with it.

He suffered most intensely, and soon became very thirsty, and, there being no water within many miles of us, he appealed to me to bleed one of the animals and let him drink the blood; I refused:  he insisted; I again refused:  he commanded; I still refused.  He swore, and called me almost everything except a good Christian; he even expressed the wish that I, his friend, might be sent to a certain place where the heat is most intense, and the fire is never quenched.

At about eleven o’clock, when his pains were most severe, a dark cloud, the first we had seen for months, came over us, and a little rain began to fall, when I at once opened our little camp kettle and turned the lid upside down, and into both kettle and lid there fell perhaps two or three teaspoonfuls of pure water, every drop of which I gave to the sufferer, whereupon he expressed thanks for another God-send, and at once apologized for bestowing unmerited abuse on me.  He afterwards often asserted that he believed