“Investigate this.” Bryant kicked a tuft of vegetation at their feet, sending up a puff of residue. “Have you taken note? The grass is dry for this season.”
They had been going on a level plain throughout recent days, the skyline an extended length of tall grassland grass and clean. Flanking the path on one or the other side somewhere far off, sand slopes of gold and coral rose and fell, some jagged as fingers, pointing straightforwardly to paradise. Stanton squatted low and pulled a couple of strands of grass. The sharp edges were short, close to nine or ten inches in length, and were at that point blurred to a dull caramel green. “It would appear that there was a dry season in the no so distant past,” Stanton said. He stood, smacking the earth of his palms, looking toward the far-away cloudy purple scrim. The land appeared to extend until the end of time.
“Furthermore, we’re simply entering the plain,” Bryant called attention to.
His importance was clear: There probably won’t be sufficient grass for their bulls and animals to eat. Grass, water, wood: the three things a cart train required. “Conditions are more regrettable than we suspected they’d be, and we have far to go. See that mountain range off somewhere far off? That is only the start, Charles. There are more mountains behind those—and desert and grassland, and streams more extensive and more profound than any we’ve crossed up until now. All among us and the Pacific Ocean.”
Stanton had heard this reiteration previously. Bryant had said little else since the time they had gone over the catcher’s shack at Ash Hollow two days prior. The unfilled shack had been transformed into a boondocks station of sorts for the pioneers crossing the fields, who had taken to abandoning letters for the following eastward explorer to convey to a genuine mail center for conveyance forward. Large numbers of these letters were collapsed bits of paper left under a stone with the expectation that they would, at last, arrive at the proposed beneficiary back home.
Stanton had been oddly supporting by seeing every one of those letters. They had appeared to be a demonstration of the explorers’ affection for the opportunity and want for more prominent freedom, regardless of the danger. In any case, Bryant had gotten fomented. Take a gander at all these letters. Should be many of them, perhaps 100. The pioneers who thought of them are in front of us on the path. We’re among the last to take off this season and you understand what that implies, isn’t that right? he’d asked Stanton. We may be past the point of no return. The mountain passes will be stopped by snow come winter, and winter comes right off the bat in higher heights.
“Persistence, Edwin,” Stanton said now. “We’ve scarcely put Independence behind us—”
“However here it is the center of June. We’re moving too gradually.”
Throwing the towel back behind him, Stanton checked out him: The sun had been awake for hours but then they hadn’t broken camp. Surrounding him, families were all the while completing their morning meals over the remaining parts of their pit fires. Moms stood dandling children in their arms as they traded tattle. A kid was out playing with a canine as opposed to crowding the family’s bulls in from the field.
“Would you be able to put them on a fine morning?” he asked gently. After weeks on the path, nobody was restless to confront one more day. A large portion of the men was just in a rush when it came time to break out the container of crush. Bryant just glared. Stanton scoured the rear of his neck. “At any rate, Russell is the man to converse with.”
Bryant scowled as he went as far as recovering his espresso mug. “I’ve conversed with Russell about it and he concurs, but then fails to address it. The man can’t deny anybody. Prior in the week—you recollect that—he let those men go off on a bison chase, and the train sat inactive for two days to smoke and dry the meat.”
“We may be glad for that meat farther down the path.”
“I promise you that we’ll see more wild ox. Yet, we’ll never get those days back.”
Stanton saw the sense in what Bryant said, and didn’t have any desire to contend. “Look. I’ll go with you around evening time and we’ll address Russell together. We’ll make him see that we’re not kidding.”