"We will speak of them lovingly," Deale had declared, "when we have a little breath to spare."

The day after making this promise to the deceased, he had joined their number, his body giving out as they ploughed through a snow field. His corpse remained unburied, at least by human hand. The snow was coming down so thickly that by the time his few provisions had been divided up among the remaining travelers, his body had disappeared from sight.

That night, Evan Babcock and his wife, Alice, both perished in their sleep, and Mary Willcocks, who had outlived all five of her children, and seen her husband wither and die from grief, succumbed with a sob that was still ringing off the mountain-face after the tired heart that had issued it was stilled.

Daylight came, but it brought no solace. The snowfall was as heavy as ever. Nor was there now a single crack in the clouds to show the pioneers what lay ahead. they went with heads bowed, too weary to speak, much less sing, as they had sung in the blithe months of May and June, raising hosannas to the heavens for the glory of this adventure.

A few of them prayed in silence, asking God for the strength to survive. And some, perhaps, made promises in their prayers, that if they were granted that strength, and came through this white wilderness to a green place, their gratitude would be unbounded, and they would testify to the end of their lives that for all the sorrows of this life, no man should turn from God, for God was hope, and Everlasting.

At the beginning of the journey west there had been a total of thirty-two children in the caravan. Now there was only one. Her name was Maeve O'Connell; a plain twelve-year-old whose thin body belied a fortitude which would have astonished those who'd shaken their heads in the spring and told her widowed father she would never survive the journey.