And shouldn't we all be so bowed by the burdens the rest of the world carries! Shouldn't we all care to know! Shouldn't we all be bullied into some sick kind of empathy for any man who might stick a knife in your chest as you labor—just as surely as he labors—simply to survive!

[He is now bright red and deeply ashamed—yet determined to be angrier more than anything—if only so he might not feel that shame.

He perhaps acts out this physically, but finally calms down before doing any real damage.]

Feeling against Reed had been running hot and high as the terrain for some time now. Not an hour after the incident, a German named Keseberg offered up his wagon tongue to hang the likes of James Frazier Reed. Margaret overcame her one legitimate migraine headache to plead for her husband's life. A vote was taken and, following some frantic politicking, Mrs. Reed got her way—though Mr. Reed was banished.

The following morning, Reed was forced to ride ahead, alone through the Ruby Mountains on the back of a racing mare he had not incongruously named Glaucus—for the soldier in the Iliad who gave away his golden armor worth 100 oxen, even more than Reed had bid farewell in the desert.

[Aside:] Ah, Dear Reader, I did read my Classics!

[Extravagantly pleased with himself:] So, Reed rode on into the sunset! Now and then he left notes (not unlike MY OWN) so that his family knew what to expect of the landscape ahead—and that he remained alive.

The day after Reed rode off, Keseberg, the self-appointed hanging judge, turned a septuagenarian Belgian named Hardkoop out of his wagon so that he might lighten his load. Although his feet were so swollen that they had split open and were trailing pools of blood, Hardkoop was told to walk or die.

Nobody else took him in.

He was last seen sitting by the side of the road.

A few nights later, members of the Party awoke to hear furious cackling and the death-groans of livestock: local Paiute youths had decided to shoot poison arrows into their oxen for fun.

Would you deny a lad his lark? Christ, it was only some poison-tipped arrows!

More than 100 head of cattle had by this point perished.

Somewhere, Homer doubtlessly cackled with those Indian boys.

Their eyes clasped the craggy surroundings as they groped forward with crooked hands, ringed with the white ground below and azure world above and the cackling, always the cackling that never ceased to echo. In such din they undoubtedly thought of salt and they undoubtedly thought of light and perhaps mused that no one is exactly sure what the hell that parable means. But such is the nature of suffering itself; such are the ways of dumb beasts such as we; such is how we maintain ourselves in these our most desperate hours—in which he we have toiled since cast from the Garden.

Perhaps, Dear Reader, you, too, have known such desperation. Perhaps you, too, have heard such cackling...The fiendish ways of villains who refuse to show their cowardly faces, but whom you must trust were there—the YELLOW-BELLIED COWARDS!—lest the cackling simply be that of your own dearly held hopes and loves and highest expectations. Or worse yet, of your loved ones.

I suspect, Dear Reader, you know such cackling.

Around this time, another German, Wolfinger, decided it would be wisest to cache his goods. He paused at the Humboldt Sink for this purpose and took two other men, Joseph Reinhardt and Augustus Spitzer, with him to do the digging. The latter two returned in a panic around nightfall, spilling out of the juniper and tripping over the sage against the failing pink and orange autumn light, screaming that the very same Injuns who had killed the oxen had also shot Wolfinger fatally with a poison-tipped arrow! The pair barely escaped with their lives!