All the animals are struggling. For the last three hundred miles, the ground has been hard and rocky, wearing out joints and splitting hooves. Jefferson and I walk all the time now, to spare our horses. He might be sneaking his water rations to the dogs, but most of mine are going to Peony. I won’t lose her, no matter what.

Dust coats our trail, sometimes gravelly and coarse, sometimes fine as flour. We wear kerchiefs over our noses, but I still chew grit all day. My eyes crust over every night, and I wake each morning to find them blurry and swollen. The back of my throat is a patch of desert. My lungs burn. Andy started coughing a few days ago and hasn’t stopped. And all day long the sun pours fire on our heads.

The occasional grass is rough and sparse, and the mules ahead of us eat the best of it. Whenever I find a missed clump, I yank it up for Peony or the sorrel mare. We burn sagebrush for fuel, but it turns to ash too fast for proper cooking. My belly aches from eating little more than prickly pear.

Our trail follows the lazy Humboldt River, which was lovely and clear at first, but the water has slowed and thickened until it’s little more than a marsh, and too brackish to drink. We soak our kerchiefs in it to keep out more dust, but that’s all it’s good for. The poor oxen drink it until they fall down sick. Soon enough, we’ll start drinking it too.

“Wagon train ahead,” calls Major Craven from the bench. I crane my neck. The Missouri wagons are taking a short break, circled near a wide puddle. Men and animals alike stand knee-deep in the water to cool off. With a start, I realize we’ve come to the end of the river.

“This godforsaken trickle of a river just ends,” Therese says. “It turns into nothing.”

“Know what we’ll find when we get there?” Craven says.

“All the good grass eaten and all the best water drunk or gone?” she says.

“Besides that.”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll find them packing up to leave without us,” he says.

Therese mutters a few words under her breath that I’m pretty sure she learned from Frank Dilley.

As our weary group of five wagons—two for the Hoffmans, one for Reverend Lowrey, one for the college men, and one for the Joyners—rolls into the camp, Dilley steps up onto an abandoned trunk to address everyone.

“Fifteen minutes until we roll out again,” he calls out.

“Fifteen minutes?” I can’t believe my ears. “We need longer than that.”

“We can’t afford to wait. That’s fifty-four miles of waterless desert ahead of us. We’re going to go straight through, day and night, until we reach the other side.”