a few minutes before camping-time, when I was walking for exercise. I
didn’t want a scene at camp, so I agreed to meet him out here alone, if
he would keep out of sight.”
“You’re a bigger fool than Thompson’s colt, and he swam the river to
get a drink,” said Jean. “But we mustn’t linger here. He may have a
confederate.”
“Not he, Jean. He’s too suspicious to trust a confederate.”
“Let’s go back to camp, anyhow, Sally; mother will be missing us. But
you needn’t be afraid of Sam again. I’ve settled his hash,” she said, as
they hurried to the open. “Isn’t it a terrible thing to be married?” she
added, as soon as she could speak again.
“No, Jean. Marriage under right conditions is the world’s greatest
blessing. All enlightened men and women prefer to live in pairs, and
make each other and their children as happy as possible. I admit that I
made a big mistake when I married; but your mother didn’t, because your
father is one of God’s noblemen. The fault isn’t in marriage, but in the
couple, one or both of whom make the trouble, when there is trouble. But
the conditions between husbands and wives are not equal. Law and usage
make the husband and wife one, and the husband that one. Where both
the parties to the compact are better than the law, it doesn’t pinch
either one; but when a woman finds herself chained for life to a sordid,
disagreeable, stingy, domineering man, the advantages of law and custom
are all on his side. It is no wonder that trouble ensues in such cases.”
“But, young as I am, I have seen wives that could discount almost any man
for meanness,” said Jean. “There are women, now and then, who take all
the rights in the matrimonial category, and their husbands haven’t any
rights at all.”
“Women sometimes inherit the strongest traits of their fathers; I admit
that. And such women can outwit the very best husbands.”
“I’ve read of a woman,” said Jean, musingly, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton by
name, who went before a legislative assembly in New York a few years
ago, and secured the passage of a law enabling a married woman of that
State to hold, in her own right, the property bequeathed to her by her
father. And then, as if to prove that women are idiots, there were women
in Albany who refused to associate with their financial savior any more.
They said she had left her sphere. But never mind. The world is moving,
and women are moving with it.”
The camp-fires had died to heaps of embers, the lights were out in the
tents and wagons, and all except themselves were settled for the night.
“Don’t say anything to anybody about my meeting with Sam, will you, Jean?”
“Not unless he annoys you again. Then I’ll be ready to meet him with
facts.”
“He might put your life in jeopardy, my dear.”
“Jeopardy nothin’!” cried Jean, adopting the slang of the road. “He’s too
big a coward to put his neck in danger. But just you wait! I’ll live to
see an end to one-sided laws and a one-sexed government. See if I don’t!
And the men will fight our battle for us, too, as soon as they are wise
enough.”
“If you don’t come across a matrimonial fate that’ll change your tune, my
name isn’t Sally O’Dowd,” exclaimed her companion, as they drew near the
camp.
“Your name isn’t O’Dowd, but Danover,” cried Jean. “You’re safe in making
such a prophecy on such a basis.”
XIII
_AN APPROACHING STORM_
“We came eighteen miles to-day,” wrote Jean, under date of May 28, “and
halted for the night opposite Grand Island, in the Platte River, where
we find both wood and pasture. All day we floundered through the muddy
roads, occasionally getting almost swamped in heavy and treacherous
bogs, with ‘water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ I’m too
tired to write, and too sleepy to think.”
On the evening of May 29 she added: “We started early, and reached
Fort Kearney after eight miles of heavy wheeling, where we halted to
write letters for the folks at home, and examine many things quaint and
crude and curious. The old fort is weather-worn, and a general air of
dilapidation pervades its very atmosphere. There are two substantial
dwellings for the officers, though; and they (I mean the officers) keep
up a show of military pomp, very amusing to us, but quite necessary to
maintain in an Indian country, to hold the savage instinct in check. The
officers were very gracious to daddie, and very kind and condescending
to the rest of us. They made us a present of some mounted buffalo-horns,
some elks’ antlers, and the stuffed head of a mountain sheep, all of
which, mother says, we’ll be glad to leave at the roadside before the
weary oxen haul them very far.
“A week ago a party passed us, going westward with a four-wheeled wagon,
two yokes of discouraged oxen, two anxious-looking men, two dispirited
women, and about fourteen snub-nosed, shaggy-headed children. On their
wagon-cover was a sign, done in yellow ochre, which read: ‘Oregon or
bust!’ To-day we met the same outfit coming back, and no description
from my unpractised pen can do it justice. The party, doubtless from
over-crowding, had quarrelled; and the two families had settled their
dispute by dividing the wagon into two parts of two wheels each. On the
divided and dilapidated cover of each cart were smeared in yellow ochre
the words, ‘Busted, by thunder!’
“May 30. We forded the Platte to-day. It is a broad, lazy, milky sheet of
silt-thickened water, with a quicksand bottom. It is about two miles wide
at this season of the year at the ford, and is three feet deep.
“The day was as hot as a furnace, and the sunshine burned us like
blisters of Spanish flies. Our wagon-beds were hoisted to the tops of
their standards to keep them from taking water, and at a given signal
from daddie, they were all plunged pell-mell into the quicksand, over
which teams, drivers, wagons, and all were compelled to move quickly to
avoid catastrophe.
“Poor dear mother suffered from constant nervous fear because of the
quicksand and the danger that some of the children might be drowned.
It took us two and a half hours to ford the stream; but we reached the
opposite bank without accident, and camped near an old buffalo wallow,
where we get clearer water than that of the Platte, but we are not
allowed to drink it till it has been boiled. Cholera has broken out in
the trains both before and behind us; and daddie lays our escape from
attack thus far to drinking boiled water. We have no fuel but buffalo
chips, and almost no grass for the poor stock. The game has disappeared
altogether, and the fishes in the Platte don’t bite. But we have plenty
of beans and bacon, coffee, flour, and dried apples; so we shall not
starve.
“June 1. The day has been intensely hot. The stifling air shimmers, and
the parched earth glitters as it bakes in the sun. The mud has changed to
a fine, impalpable dust, and the loaded air is too oppressive to breathe,
if it could be avoided. We passed a number of newly made graves during
the day. We meet returning teams every day that have given up the journey
as a bad job. Daddie often says he’d die before he’d retrace his tracks,
and then he wouldn’t do it! We found at sundown, just as we were losing
hope, a bountiful spring of clear, cold water, beside which we have
halted for the night.
“June 3. Another insufferably hot day. But we encountered at nightfall
a stiff west wind, which soon arose to a gale, in the teeth of which we
with difficulty made camp and cooked our food. Heavy clouds blacken the
sky as I write, and vivid flashes of sheet lightning, which blind us for
a moment, are followed by thunder that startles and stuns.
“June 4. The storm passed to the south of us, on the other side of the
Platte. But daddie has ordered the tents and wagons staked to the ground
hereafter every night, as long as we are travelling in these treeless,
unsheltered bottom-lands, as he says we would have been swept away _en
masse_ into the river if last night’s storm had squarely struck our camp.”
The hoods of the wagons, so white and clean at the outset, were now of an
ashen hue, disfigured by spots of grease, and askew in many places from
damage to their supporting arches of hickory bows. Heavy log-chains, for
use in possible emergencies, dangled between axles, and the inevitable
tar-bucket rode adjacent on a creaking hook, from which it hung suspended
by a complaining iron bail.
* * * * *
“The incessant heat by day, followed by the chilly air of night, is
perilous to health, John,” said Mrs. Ranger, one evening, as she
lay wrapped in blankets in the big family wagon, watching the usual
preparations for the evening meal.
He gazed into her pinched, white face with sudden apprehension.
“Don’t be afraid of the cholera, dear,” he said tenderly. “I understand
the nature of the epidemic, and I don’t fear it at all. Cholera is a
filth disease, and we are guarding against it at every point. Your blood
is pure, darling. There’s nothing the matter with you but a little
debility, the result of past years of overwork. Time and rest and change
of climate will cure all that. No uncooked food or unboiled water is used
by any of us, and no cold victuals are allowed to be eaten after long
exposure to this pernicious, cholera-laden air. You can’t get the germs
of cholera unless you eat or drink them.”
That Captain Ranger should have thus imbibed the germ theory of cholera
long in advance of its discovery by medical schools, is only another
proof that there is nothing new under the sun. A newer system of medical
treatment than that of the Allopathic School, styled the Eclectic by its
founders, had come into vogue before his departure from the States.
Many different decoctions of fiery liquid, of which capsicum was supposed
to be the base,—conspicuous among them a compound called “Number
Six,”—proved efficacious in effecting many cures in the early stages of
cholera; and the contents of Captain Ranger’s medicine chest were in
steady demand long after his supplies for general distribution had been
exhausted.
* * * * *
“Can you imagine what this wild-goose chase of ours is for?” asked Mrs.
Benson.
“I undertook it to gratify my good husband,” was Mrs. Ranger’s prompt
reply.
“And I to gratify my daughter.”
“Excuse me, ladies; but I came along to please myself,” interposed Mrs.
O’Dowd.
“I, too, came to please myself,” cried Jean; “that is, I made a virtue of
necessity, and compelled myself to be pleased. There are two things that
mother says we must never fret about: one is what we can, and the other
what we cannot, help. Every human being belongs primarily to himself or
herself, and to satisfy one’s self is sure to please somebody.”
“But a married couple belong, secondarily, at least, to each other,” said
Mrs. Ranger. “No couple can pull in double and single harness at the same
time.”
“Some day,” said Mrs. Benson, “it will become the fashion to read your
journal, Jean; and then the dear public will both praise and pity our
unsophisticated Captain, who led these hapless emigrants out on these
plains to die.”
“That’s so, Mrs. Benson,” exclaimed Jean; “and they won’t see that it’s
all a part of the eternal programme. Evolution is the order of nature,
and one generation of human beings is a very small fraction of the race
at large.”
“Haven’t you gossiped long enough, mamma?” asked Mrs. McAlpin,
petulantly. “Your supper is ready and waiting. What has detained you so
long?”
“I was listening to the chat of the Ranger family. They are an uncommon
lot; very clever and original.”
“Yes, mamma; they talk like oracles. A little brusque and unpolished,
but that will be outgrown in time. You’re looking splendid, mamma! The
society of your neighbors is a tonic. You must take it often.”
“I wish we might all stop here, Daphne.”
“We’ve no more right to these lands of the Indians than we have to—”
“Oregon,” interrupted her mother. “Oregon was Indian territory
originally.”
Jean approached with a plate of hot cakes, saying: “I fell to thinking so
deeply over the problems we had been talking about that I forgot what I
was doing, and baked too many cakes. They’re sweet and light, and we hope
you’ll like them.”
“Thank you ever so much, Miss Jean!” said Mrs. McAlpin. “I congratulate
you with all my heart upon the way you cheer your mother, my dear. You
are a jewel of the first water!”
“We all try to keep mother in good spirits,” replied Jean. “Dear soul!
she’s weak and nervous; and what seem trifles to us often appear like
mountains to her. Never can I forget, to my dying day, the look of terror
that came into her gentle eyes when we were crossing the Platte that day
in the quicksands. The raised wagon-bed had tilted, for some cause. I
suppose the weight of so many of us was not evenly distributed; and we
should all have been pitched into the water if it had not been that dear
mother hustled us to the other side. She forgot her own danger in her
effort to save the children, giving her orders like a sea captain in a
storm. Each of us grabbed a baby,—Susannah’s coon fell to my lot,—and we
clung like death to the upper edge of the wagon-bed till the danger was
over, and the great lopsided thing settled back to its place.
“But I must go now. Daddie’s calling me to write up that pestilent old
journal!”
* * * * *
On the evening of the 4th of June, the train had its first encounter with
a blizzard.
Captain Ranger, seeing the approach of the storm, as did the cattle and
horses, ordered a sudden halt a little way from the banks of the Platte.
The day, like a number of its predecessors, had been oppressively hot;
but about five o’clock a sudden squall came up, though not without
premonitory warning in the way of a calm so dead that not a blade of
grass was quivering. The wagon-hoods flapped idly, like sails becalmed in
the tropics. Suddenly the air grew icy cold, bringing at first a moment
of relief to suffocating man and beast.
“Gather your buffalo chips in a hurry,” exclaimed the Captain, addressing
the girls. “Get ’em under cover in the tents, under the wagon-beds;
anywhere so they’ll keep dry. Turn out the stock in a jiffy, boys. Head
’em away from the river. Drive ’em up yonder gulch. Be on the alert,
everybody!”
XIV
_A CAMP IN CONSTERNATION_
“Stake down the wagons,” was the next order. “Don’t stop to pitch any
more tents. Don’t try to kindle any fires.”
Scarcely had the orders been obeyed before a darkness as black as Erebus
had settled upon the camp like a gigantic pall. It was a peculiar
darkness, permeated by an ominous, silent, intangible, vibrating,
appalling Something! A silence that could be felt was in the air. The
oxen in the gulch bellowed in terror; the horses neighed. The stillness
of the air was oppressive, portentous, awful. The women clasped the
children in close embrace. The children clung to their protectors in
silent terror. All hands save the teamsters, who were out with the stock
at the mouth of the ravine, where they were stationed to guard the
animals against stampede, crouched under the wagons in the Cimmerian
blackness. Anon, a blinding flash of sheet lightning, followed by others
and yet others in bewildering succession, awoke a rolling, roaring,
reverberating cannonade of thunder. Guided by the flashes of lightning,
the frightened men left the cattle to their fate and, returning to the
camp, took refuge under the wagons. Hailstones as big as hens’ eggs fell
by hundreds of tons, displacing the awful silence with a cannonade like
unto the heaviest artillery of a great army in battle.
The wind blew a terrific gale. The chained wagons rocked like cradles.
Several heavy vehicles in a neighboring train, not being chained to the
ground, as the Ranger wagons had been, were upset and their contents
ruined by the hail and rain. Others were blown bodily into the river.
Luckily no lives were lost. The cattle and horses, pelted by the hail
till their bodies were bruised and bleeding, huddled together at the head
of the gulch for mutual protection.
The storm lasted less than twenty minutes, and ceased as suddenly as it
began. The black clouds soared away to the northward, leaving a blue
starlit sky overhead, and underfoot a mass of hail and mud. The Platte,
having caught the full fury of a cloud-burst a few miles above the camp,
rose rapidly, threatening the frightened refugees in the wagons with a
new danger. But the shallow banks were high enough to confine the mad
rush of muddy water within an inch or two of the top, thus averting the
horror of a flood which, had it come, would have completed the havoc of
the storm.
The lightning, as though weary of its display of power, retreated to the
distant hills, and played at hide-and-seek on the horizon’s edge, while
Heaven’s Gatling guns answered each pyrotechnic display with a distant,
growling, intermittent roar.
Mrs. McAlpin’s carriage was a total wreck; but her wagons remained
intact, and she and her mother escaped to them in safety.
The morning revealed a scene of desolation. The earth in all directions
as far as the eye could see had been torn into gulleys by the mad rush
of falling hail and rain, each seeking its level in frantic haste.
Hailstones lay in heaps, some soiled by contact with the liquid mud, some
as clean and white as freshly fallen snow.
The contents of Mrs. McAlpin’s carriage were entirely gone. Nothing
remained of the vehicle but one of its wheels and some shreds of its
cover, which were found half buried in the mud. Of the harness, nothing
was left but a bridle bit, in which was lodged a woman’s glove, and near
it the remains of a palm-leaf fan.
“We should all be thankful that no lives were lost,” said Mrs. Ranger,
who was looking on while Sally O’Dowd and Susannah assisted her
daughters, who, with Mrs. Benson and Mrs. McAlpin, were exposing the wet
and dilapidated paraphernalia of the camp to the hot rays of the morning
sun.
“But we’d have a heap mo’ to thank Gahd fo’, missus, if He’d hel’ off dat
stawm,” exclaimed Susannah, with a characteristic “yah! yah! yah!”
At eleven o’clock the order was given to bring in the stock, and prepare
to move on, when it was discovered that Scotty was missing.
“We s’posed he was helpin’ Mrs. McAlpin’s men, as he generally does, to
get her things to rights, so we didn’t bother our heads about him,” said
Sawed-off, who was Scotty’s partner of the whip and yoke. “I’ve been
doing the most of his share of the work ever since we’ve been on the
road.”
Scotty was nowhere to be found. An organized search was begun at once,
and all thought of moving on was abandoned till the Captain should learn
his fate. The cattle and horses were turned out on the range for another
badly needed half-holiday. Through all the remainder of the day the
anxious quest continued. Mrs. McAlpin was as pale as death. Her sombre
weeds, worn for no known reason, formed a fitting frame for her pinched
and anxious face and bright, abundant hair. Her mother was visibly
agitated. Mrs. Ranger lay on her feather bed all through the trying
afternoon, her eyes closed and her lips moving as if in prayer.
“Night again, and no Scotty!” exclaimed Captain Ranger, his voice husky
with feeling. As no trace of the man had been discovered, the organized
search was called off.
“Scotty’s death was one of the freaks of the flood,” said Hal.
“None of you ever did Scotty justice,” exclaimed Mary, as she descended
upon the party with a heaped plate of their staple food.
“That’s what,” echoed Jean, as she brought on the beans and bacon.
“Scotty knew more in a minute than half of us can ever learn,” cried
Marjorie, with whom he was a favorite.
“Yes,” said the Captain, dryly. “He’s a genius, Scotty is! He’ll turn
up presently. Doubtless he’s off somewhere studying a new stratum of
storm-clouds. He has killed two of my leaders already by making them
start the whole load while his mind was on the incomprehensible and
unknowable in nature. But I’ll wager he knows enough to look out for
himself in a crisis.”
“He was a whole mine of information about other things, if he didn’t know
much about driving oxen,” sobbed Jean.
“He isn’t dead!” exclaimed Mrs. McAlpin. “I mean to continue the search
myself to-night.”
“You’ll get caught by a panther!” cried Bobbie. “I haven’t seen ’em, but
I know they’re there!”
“Where, Bobbie?” asked Marjorie.
“Up in the gulch. I can see ’em with my eyes shut!” and the child, not
understanding the laugh that followed at his expense, hastened to the
wagon where his mother lay, to receive the consolation that never failed
him.
* * * * *
“It won’t be against the laws of God or man for me to love Rollin if he
is dead,” said Mrs. McAlpin to herself, as she crept shivering from her
retreat in her wagon to the ground. Throwing a shawl over her head, she
hastened out in the direction in which Scotty was hurrying when she had
last seen him. The cattle, quite satisfied from the unusual effects of
a day’s rest and a full meal, chewed their cuds quietly, or lay asleep
in the best sheltered spots they could command, breathing heavily. She
wandered fearlessly among them, calling frequently for the lost man, but
received no response save an occasional “moo” from an awakened cow, or a
friendly neigh from Sukie, who was tethered near.
The morning star rose in the clear blue of the bending sky as her search
went on, and she knew that the long June day was breaking. Flowers of
every hue, newly born from the convulsions of the recent storm, smiled at
her in their dewy fragrance; and in the branches of a crippled cottonwood
a robin began his matin song. A meadow lark, disturbed in its languorous
wooing by the lone watcher’s footsteps, soared upward in the crystal
ether, sending back, when out of her sight, a swelling note of triumph,
prolonged, triumphant, sweet.
“Rollin! Rollin Burns!” she called, repeating the name in every note of
the scale.
At length a long, low moan startled her. She listened eagerly for a
moment, and repeated her call. Whence had come that moan? There was no
repetition of the sound. She spoke again, calling the name in a higher
key.
Another moan—it might have been an echo from the canyon’s walls—came,
more distinct than the first, but the echoing gulch gave no indication of
its location.
“Call again, Rollin! It is I,—your own Daphne!”
“Is it indeed you, Daphne?”
She pinched herself to see if she was really awake. She had never heard
her Christian name spoken by Burns before. The name sounded strangely
sweet in the breaking twilight, and in spite of her apprehension and
uncertainty her soul was glad.
“Call again, Rollin! Help is near.”
“Come this way, Daphne! I am in a cave, almost under your feet. A bowlder
that I stepped upon rolled over, loosened by the storm, and let me
through into the bowels of the earth. My leg is broken. I must have been
unconscious. I have swooned or slept, or both. Be careful how you tread.
There are badgers in this hole, and I have heard rattlesnakes.”
“Which way, Rollin? Where are you?”
The sound of his voice seemed to come from beneath her feet.
“Is the storm over?”
“Yes, long ago. It’s been over for thirty-six hours. But I can’t locate
you.”
“Here, I tell you! Under this rock. If it had fallen directly on me, I
should have been a goner. For God’s sake, be careful, or you’ll break
your own dear neck! Don’t get excited. Run for help, and don’t stir up
the rattlesnakes.”
The injured man had fallen at first by the turning of the rock, as he had
stated, giving his leg a twist that broke it, and, by the turning of his
body in falling farther, had overturned the bowlder again, and thus was
held a prisoner.
Mrs. McAlpin peered into a narrow aperture through which the coming
daylight had entered. Their eyes met.
“Daphne!”
“Rollin!”
“So near and yet so far!” cried the prisoner, as he struggled to free
himself. A spasm of pain overspread his face, and a dew, like the death
damp, settled on his hair and forehead.
“O God! he has fainted again!” she cried, running with all her might and
screaming for help.
“What in thunder is the matter now?” exclaimed Captain Ranger, as he
emerged, half dressed, from his tent.
“I’ve found Rollin! He’s imprisoned in a cave, with a broken leg! Fetch
spades and a mattock to dig away the dirt from the rock! Be quick!” cried
Mrs. McAlpin, leading the way.
Nobody heard the robins sing, or paused to enjoy the triumphant melody of
the lark.
Scotty was still in a merciful swoon. Very carefully the men loosened the
rock from its hold on his legs, and with their united strength rolled it
away from the mouth of the cave.