guished by the storm. About ten o'clock one Antoine died; three hours after, another, Graves; the next day another, Dolan, the day after, one more, Murphy. Plenty of man-meat now! Two went mad; the rest took turns praying. Tighter the skin cleaved to the fleshless bones, wilder and fiercer grew the sunken eyes, and fixed and more fixed the features of the ghastly faces. Hunger even left them, and they moved about their shrunken carcasses as if just dragged from the grave.
After lying under their blankets in the snow for two days and nights they struck a fire, and all but Eddy, as he says, "cut the flesh from the arms and legs of Patrick Dolan, and roasted and ate it, averting their faces from each other, and weeping." The 29th of December they departed from the Camp of Death, as they called their last halting-place, and went forward. Eddy would probably have died but for half a pound of roasted bear-meat which he accidentally found while fumbling for something in his pouch. It was wrapped in a paper on which was written in pencil, "From your own dear Eleanor."
Ah! the boundless devotion of woman. He had left his wife behind, and now she starves herself and little ones to save him. Though he struggled manfully to rescue them he never saw wife or child again. Eddy was at last obliged to succumb, and feed on his fellows or die. He reported that he "experienced no loathing or disgust, but his reason, which he thought was never more unclouded, told him that it was a horrid repast."
Swearing vengeance on Hastings, as others swore vengeance on Jesse Applegate for having decoyed them, as they called it, into his cut-off, they staggered along, leaving on the white snow of the Sierra the crimson tracks of their bloody feet. Of the party were a Mr and Mrs Fosdick. The 4th of January, 1847, Fosdick died, and the body was left about a mile back from where they camped that night.
