SENTINEL PEAK-HUNGRY BILL'S RANCH KNAPSACK TRIP (Continued)

At once I recalled how Lewis Manly and John Rogers had stumbled on "Captain Culverwell's body, as they neared the camp on their return from the long trek to the coast for help.
"And 'nother die," continued Bill, "Left behind. Top of Towne Pass. All alone in the rocks."
"Where did you say?"
"Top of Towne Pass, You know - where the road crosses now to Lone Pine." He paused again. Here was something new, and I realized that I must not disturb him. For four years I had been trying, without success, to get his story of the first white men. Tonight he seemed ready to talk. I waited.
Who could it have been, this lone man in the pass? Clearly not anyone from the Bennett party; they all escaped to the south and west all except poor Culverwell. Nor one of the Jayhawkers; they were all accounted for after crossing the Panamint Valley. Not the Briers, nor the "Mississippi Boys", under Captain Towne; they also followed a different route.
But there was another group, seldom spoken of by the few survivors who wrote accounts of their sufferings, and known only as the "Georgians" - they who turned over their remaining oxen to the Reverend Briar in Death Valley the day after that tragic Christmas of 1949, and then struck due west afoot, with barely enough food to last a week. They were never heard from again. Here possibly, was a clue.
"Did you say this man was dead?", I asked finally.
"Sure." said Bill, "Him dead all right. Big bullet hole in forehead." He paused, "My father saw him. One leg broke-two places."
A broken leg, so little food, and the long trek to safety still ahead across the desert.
I shivered. It wasn't cold, but under an almost instinctive compulsion I got up and tossed another pinon log on the fire. A fountain of sparks shot upward, and the resultant blaze lit up the wrinkled face of the old Indian, crouching there by the cliff, with the dark, windswept pinons and junipers round about. Out beyond reach of the flame the peak rose indistinct in the starlight. Down there, now ghostly-white in the surrounding darkness lay that vast, salt playa.
"Bill," I ejaculated at last, "Is this true about that man on Towne's Pass?"
"Sure," said Bill, "My father tell it straight, That feller broke leg in rocks. Can't walk. Can't' carry pack no more. His friends all scared. All in a hurry. Can't carry him. No water there."
It had been a long speech for Bill I waited impatiently.
"And so?", I queried.
"So his friend shot him." He spat into the fire, "Better die like that, than wait on desert."
Bill rose. His camp was over the ridge. I could see that he had talked all he wanted to that night.
"Will I see you in. the morning?", I asked. "I want to talk some more."
"Mebby so," said he - and as he walked away, "Leg broke. All alone."
In a moment he was gone, and I, too, was alone.
I gazed out over the dark valley, with its strange, glistening floor. The fire died away. A faint breeze from the snowy peak whispered down through the junipers. It was late but I did not feel like sleep. The picture of that lone man out on the pass, with the broken leg and the bullet hole in his forehead, would not leave me.
At last I turned, and with a final kick at the fire, rolled into my blankets. Across the valley, the glow of the rising moon lightened the sky over the Funeral Range, Already, high above me, the moonlight glinted on the snow.
"Better die like that than wait on desert."
I lay there watching the light creep down the mountains, a living thing in that vast loneliness.
"Can't walk. Can't carry pack no more."
 
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