Columbia—of all people—was turning his back on the West.

However, this would not do: Columbia, you see, had all the ammo. Columbia's daughter, you understand, had perished alongside the Platte during the Sioux's most peripatetic season.

We were just about midway to Fort Kearney, early enough for a distraught man to turn back, but late enough for the ones who pushed forward to worry about self-defense and hunting.

As members of the hunted herd always can, my fellow travelers sensed their leader's desperation—and they had tragically physical evidence of his failure to make good on the promise to ferry us West safely, no matter how little that can be said to have been his fault.

As adamant as Columbia and his wife had been to try to save their daughter by the only means left to them, they showed equal drive in their desire to turn around completely. Yet, it was the desire of a dazed and forsaken couple, fleeing blindly to the familiar—their desperation now converted to a need to break free of the terrible nightmare they had conjured in the face of death. Surely, to their thinking, the West was death itself.

Many more would draw such a conclusion with even more unassailable logic.

I will remind you that I was blind to their desperation and simply consumed by my own needs and my paramount desire to declare myself rational and right in the face of an utterly reckless choice that I myself had made—and one that I relished daily. Such is youth. Such is inexperience. But all the youth and inexperience in the world couldn't blind me to the sight of the former Reverend White's desperation as he bullied a grieving, now childless father for bullets and powder.

I was not the only one who saw it.

The young couple was too despondent even to build a fire at camp, too lost and panicked to sleep. The former Reverend White walked by just past sunset, when the missing fire was not yet an egregious sin, merely an oddity. He strode over eyebrows peaked, the King James Bible in one hand and his Federal charter in the other, as though to demonstrate comfort and authority to be one in the same, as any churchman bent on getting his way will do.

Columbia mumbled and shook and the former Reverend White soon saw there was no passage in his dog-eared book that could accomplish his objective and he surmised with terrible fear that these two had no plans at all to build a fire and he heard only the coyotes howling nearer and nearer. So, he did all he could do: he lit some kindling, left some sticks, and informed these two forsaken souls that he was commandeering their ammunition as a proxy for the United States Government.

They said not a word in objection as he combed through nearly all their eastward-facing possessions for any bullet he could find, leaving the grieving members of his flock but a box or two.

The very instant the sun reappeared, Columbia and his wife started toward it, alone.