Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: He gathered her in his arms, and bending low carried her
back into the darkened cavern.]
THE EMIGRANT TRAIL
BY
GERALDINE BONNER
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
Published, April, 1910
CONTENTS
PART I
THE PRAIRIE
PART II
THE RIVER
PART III
THE MOUNTAINS
PART IV
THE DESERT
PART V
THE PROMISED LAND
THE EMIGRANT TRAIL
PART I
The Prairie
CHAPTER I
It had rained steadily for three days, the straight, relentless rain of
early May on the Missouri frontier. The emigrants, whose hooded wagons
had been rolling into Independence for the past month and whose tents
gleamed through the spring foliage, lounged about in one another's
camps cursing the weather and swapping bits of useful information.
The year was 1848 and the great California emigration was still twelve
months distant. The flakes of gold had already been found in the race
of Sutter's mill, and the thin scattering of men, which made the
population of California, had left their plows in the furrow and their
ships in the cove and gone to the yellow rivers that drain the Sierra's
mighty flanks. But the rest of the world knew nothing of this yet.
They were not to hear till November when a ship brought the news to New
York, and from city and town, from village and cottage, a march of men
would turn their faces to the setting sun and start for the land of
gold.
Those now bound for California knew it only as the recently acquired
strip of territory that lay along the continent's Western rim, a place
of perpetual sunshine, where everybody had a chance and there was no
malaria. That was what they told each other as they lay under the
wagons or sat on saddles in the wet tents. The story of old Roubadoux,
the French fur trader from St. Joseph, circulated cheeringly from mouth
to mouth--a man in Monterey had had chills and people came from miles
around to see him shake, so novel was the spectacle. That was the
country for the men and women of the Mississippi Valley, who shook half
the year and spent the other half getting over it.
The call of the West was a siren song in the ears of these waiting
companies. The blood of pioneers urged them forward. Their
forefathers had moved from the old countries across the seas, from the
elm-shaded towns of New England, from the unkempt villages that
advanced into the virgin lands by the Great Lakes, from the peace and
plenty of the splendid South. Year by year they had pushed the
frontier westward, pricked onward by a ceaseless unrest, "the old land
hunger" that never was appeased. The forests rang to the stroke of
their ax, the slow, untroubled rivers of the wilderness parted to the
plowing wheels of their unwieldy wagons, their voices went before them
into places where Nature had kept unbroken her vast and pondering
silence. The distant country by the Pacific was still to explore and
they yoked their oxen, and with a woman and a child on the seat started
out again, responsive to the cry of "Westward, Ho!"
As many were bound for Oregon as for California. Marcus Whitman and
the missionaries had brought alluring stories of that great domain once
held so cheaply the country almost lost it. It was said to be of a
wonderful fertility and league-long stretches of idle land awaited the
settler. The roads ran together more than half the way, parting at
Green River, where the Oregon trail turned to Fort Hall and the
California dipped southward and wound, a white and spindling thread,
across what men then called "The Great American Desert." Two days'
journey from Independence this road branched from the Santa Fé Trail
and bent northward across the prairie. A signboard on a stake pointed
the way and bore the legend, "Road to Oregon." It was the starting
point of one of the historic highways of the world. The Indians called
it "The Great Medicine Way of the Pale-face."
Checked in the act of what they called "jumping off" the emigrants wore
away the days in telling stories of the rival countries, and in
separating from old companies and joining new ones. It was an
important matter, this of traveling partnerships. A trip of two
thousand miles on unknown roads beset with dangers was not to be
lightly undertaken. Small parties, frightened on the edge of the
enterprise, joined themselves to stronger ones. The mountain men and
trappers delighted to augment the tremors of the fearful, and round the
camp fires listening groups hung on the words of long-haired men clad
in dirty buckskins, whose moccasined feet had trod the trails of the
fur trader and his red brother.
This year was one of special peril for, to the accustomed dangers from
heat, hunger, and Indians, was added a new one--the Mormons. They were
still moving westward in their emigration from Nauvoo to the new Zion
beside the Great Salt Lake. It was a time and a place to hear the
black side of Mormonism. A Missourian hated a Latter Day Saint as a
Puritan hated a Papist. Hawn's mill was fresh in the minds of the
frontiersmen, and the murder of Joseph Smith was accounted a righteous
act. The emigrant had many warnings to lay to heart--against Indian
surprises in the mountains, against mosquitoes on the plains, against
quicksands in the Platte, against stampedes among the cattle, against
alkaline springs and the desert's parching heats. And quite as
important as any of these was that against the Latter Day Saint with
the Book of Mormon in his saddlebag and his long-barreled rifle across
the pommel.
So they waited, full of ill words and impatience, while the rain fell.
Independence, the focusing point of the frontier life, housing
unexpected hundreds, dripped from all its gables and swam in mud. And
in the camps that spread through the fresh, wet woods and the oozy
uplands, still other hundreds cowered under soaked tent walls and in
damp wagon boxes, listening to the rush of the continuous showers.
CHAPTER II
On the afternoon of the fourth day the clouds lifted. A band of yellow
light broke out along the horizon, and at the crossings of the town and
in the rutted country roads men and women stood staring at it with its
light and their own hope brightening their faces.
David Crystal, as he walked through the woods, saw it behind a veining
of black branches. Though a camper and impatient to be off like the
rest, he did not feel the elation that shone on their watching faces.
His was held in a somber abstraction. Just behind him, in an opening
under the straight, white blossoming of dogwood trees, was a new-made
grave. The raw earth about it showed the prints of his feet, for he
had been standing by it thinking of the man who lay beneath.
Four days before his friend, Joe Linley, had died of cholera. Three of
them--Joe, himself, and George Leffingwell, Joe's cousin--had been in
camp less than a week when it had happened. Until then their life had
been like a picnic there in the clearing by the roadside, with the
thrill of the great journey stirring in their blood. And then Joe had
been smitten with such suddenness, such awful suddenness! He had been
talking to them when David had seen a suspension of something, a
stoppage of a vital inner spring, and with it a whiteness had passed
across his face like a running tide. The awe of that moment, the hush
when it seemed to David the liberated spirit had paused beside him in
its outward flight, was with him now as he walked through the rustling
freshness of the wood.
The rain had begun to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter
among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air
play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already
longer than city fashions dictated, and a first stubble of black beard
was hiding the lines of a chin perhaps a trifle too sensitive and
pointed. Romantic good looks and an almost poetic refinement were the
characteristics of the face, an unusual type for the frontier. With
thoughtful gray eyes set deep under a jut of brows and a nose as finely
cut as a woman's, it was of a type that, in more sophisticated
localities, men would have said had risen to meet the Byronic ideal of
which the world was just then enamored. But there was nothing Byronic
or self-conscious about David Crystal. He had been born and bred in
what was then the Far West, and that he should read poetry and regard
life as an undertaking that a man must face with all honor and
resoluteness was not so surprising for the time and place. The West,
with its loneliness, its questioning silences, its solemn sweep of
prairie and roll of slow, majestic rivers, held spiritual communion
with those of its young men who had eyes to see and ears to hear.
The trees grew thinner and he saw the sky pure as amber beneath the
storm pall. The light from it twinkled over wet twigs and glazed the
water in the crumplings of new leaves. Across the glow the last
raindrops fell in slanting dashes. David's spirits rose. The weather
was clearing and they could start--start on the trail, the long trail,
the Emigrant Trail, two thousand miles to California!
He was close to the camp. Through the branches he saw the filmy,
diffused blueness of smoke and smelled the sharp odor of burning wood.
He quickened his pace and was about to give forth a cheerful hail when
he heard a sound that made him stop, listen with fixed eye, and then
advance cautiously, sending a questing glance through the screen of
leaves. The sound was a woman's voice detached in clear sweetness from
the deeper tones of men.
There was no especial novelty in this. Their camp was just off the
road and the emigrant women were wont to pause there and pass the time
of day. Most of them were the lean and leathern-skinned mates of the
frontiersmen, shapeless and haggard as if toil had drawn from their
bodies all the softness of feminine beauty, as malaria had sucked from
their skins freshness and color. But there were young, pretty ones,
too, who often strolled by, looking sideways from the shelter of
jealous sunbonnets.
This voice was not like theirs. It had a quality David had only heard
a few times in his life--cultivation. Experience would have
characterized it as "a lady voice." David, with none, thought it an
angel's. Very shy, very curious, he came out from the trees ready at
once and forever to worship anyone who could set their words to such
dulcet cadences.
The clearing, green as an emerald and shining with rain, showed the
hood of the wagon and the new, clean tent, white as sails on a summer
sea, against the trees' young bloom. In the middle the fire burned and
beside it stood Leff, a skillet in his hand. He was a curly-headed,
powerful country lad, twenty-four years old, who, two months before,
had come from an Illinois farm to join the expedition. The frontier
was to him a place of varied diversion, Independence a stimulating
center. So diffident that the bashful David seemed by contrast a man
of cultured ease, he was now blushing till the back of his neck was red.
On the other side of the fire a lady and gentleman stood arm in arm
under an umbrella. The two faces, bent upon Leff with grave attention,
were alike, not in feature, but in the subtly similar play of
expression that speaks the blood tie. A father and daughter, David
thought. Against the rough background of the camp, with its litter at
their feet, they had an air of being applied upon an alien surface, of
not belonging to the picture, but standing out from it in sharp and
incongruous contrast.
The gentleman was thin and tall, fifty or thereabouts, very pale,
especially to one accustomed to the tanned skins of the farm and the
country town. His face held so frank a kindliness, especially the eyes
which looked tired and a little sad, that David felt its expression
like a friendly greeting or a strong handclasp.
The lady did not have this, perhaps because she was a great deal
younger. She was yet in the bud, far from the tempering touch of
experience, still in the state of looking forward and anticipating
things. She was dark, of medium height, and inclined to be plump.
Many delightful curves went to her making, and her waist tapered
elegantly, as was the fashion of the time. Thinking it over
afterwards, the young man decided that she did not belong in the
picture with a prairie schooner and camp kettles, because she looked so
like an illustration in a book of beauty. And David knew something of
these matters, for had he not been twice to St. Louis and there seen
the glories of the earth and the kingdoms thereof?
But life in camp outside Independence had evidently blunted his
perceptions. The small waist, a round, bare throat rising from a
narrow band of lace, and a flat, yellow straw hat were the young
woman's only points of resemblance to the beauty-book heroines. She
was not in the least beautiful, only fresh and healthy, the flat straw
hat shading a girlish face, smooth and firmly modeled as a ripe fruit.
Her skin was a glossy brown, softened with a peach's bloom, warming
through deepening shades of rose to lips that were so deeply colored no
one noticed how firmly they could come together, how their curving,
crimson edges could shut tight, straighten out, and become a line of
forceful suggestions, of doggedness, maybe--who knows?--perhaps of
obstinacy. It was her physical exuberance, her downy glow, that made
David think her good looking; her serene, brunette richness, with its
high lights of coral and scarlet, that made her radiate an aura of
warmth, startling in that woodland clearing, as the luster of a firefly
in a garden's glooming dusk.
She stopped speaking as he emerged from the trees, and Leff's
stammering answer held her in a riveted stare of attention. Then she
looked up and saw David.
"Oh," she said, and transferred the stare to him. "Is this he?"
Leff was obviously relieved:
"Oh, David, I ain't known what to say to this lady and her father.
They think some of joining us. They've been waiting for quite a spell
to see you. They're goin' to California, too."
The gentleman lifted his hat. Now that he smiled his face was even
kindlier, and he, too, had a pleasant, mellowed utterance that linked
him with the world of superior quality of which David had had those two
glimpses.
"I am Dr. Gillespie," he said, "and this is my daughter Susan."
David bowed awkwardly, a bow that was supposed to include father and
daughter. He did not know whether this was a regular introduction, and
even if it had been he would not have known what to do. The young
woman made no attempt to return the salutation, not that she was rude,
but she had the air of regarding it as a frivolous interruption to
weighty matters. She fixed David with eyes, small, black, and bright
as a squirrel's, so devoid of any recognition that he was a member of
the rival sex--or, in fact, of the human family--that his
self-consciousness sunk down abashed as if before reproof.
"My father and I are going to California and the train we were going
with has gone on. We've come from Rochester, New York, and everywhere
we've been delayed and kept back. Even that boat up from St. Louis was
five days behind time. It's been nothing but disappointments and
delays since we left home. And when we got here the people we were
going with--a big train from Northern New York--had gone on and left
us."
She said all this rapidly, poured it out as if she were so full of the
injury and annoyance of it, that she had to ease her indignation by
letting it run over into the first pair of sympathetic ears. David's
were a very good pair. Any woman with a tale of trouble would have
found him a champion. How much more a fresh-faced young creature with
a melodious voice and anxious eyes.
"A good many trains have gone on," he said. And then, by way of
consolation for her manner demanded, that, "But they'll be stalled at
the fords with this rain. They'll have to wait till the rivers fall.
All the men who know say that."
"So we've heard," said the father, "but we hoped that we'd catch them
up. Our outfit is very light, only one wagon, and our driver is a
thoroughly capable and experienced man. What we want are some
companions with whom we can travel till we overhaul the others. I'd
start alone, but with my daughter----"
She cut in at once, giving his arm a little, irritated shake:
"Of course you couldn't do that." Then to the young men: "My father's
been sick for quite a long time, all last winter. It's for his health
we're going to California, and, of course, he couldn't start without
some other men in the party. Indians might attack us, and at the hotel
they said the Mormons were scattered all along the road and thought
nothing of shooting a Gentile."
Her father gave the fingers crooked on his arm a little squeeze with
his elbow. It was evident the pair were very good friends.
"You'll make these young men think I'm a helpless invalid, who'll lie
in the wagon all day. They won't want us to go with them."
This made her again uneasy and let loose another flow of authoritative
words.
"No, my father isn't really an invalid. He doesn't have to lie in the
wagon. He's going to ride most of the time. He and I expect to ride
all the way, and the old man who goes with us will drive the mules.
What's been really bad for my father was living in that dreadful hotel
at Independence with everything damp and uncomfortable. We want to get
off just as soon as we can, and this gentleman," indicating Leff, "says
you want to go, too."
"We'll start to-morrow morning, if it's clear."
"Now, father," giving the arm she held a renewed clutch and sharper
shake, "there's our chance. We must go with them."
The father's smile would have shown something of deprecation, or even
apology, if it had not been all pride and tenderness.
"These young men will be very kind if they permit us to join them," was
what his lips said. His eyes added: "This is a spoiled child, but even
so, there is no other like her in the world."
The young men sprang at the suggestion. The spring was internal, of
the spirit, for they were too overwhelmed by the imminent presence of
beauty to show a spark of spontaneity on the outside. They muttered
their agreement, kicked the ground, and avoided the eyes of Miss
Gillespie.
"The people at the hotel," the doctor went on, "advised us to join one
of the ox trains. But it seemed such a slow mode of progress. They
don't make much more than fifteen to twenty miles a day."
"And then," said the girl, "there might be people we didn't like in the
train and we'd be with them all the time."
It is not probable that she intended to suggest to her listeners that
she could stand them as traveling companions. Whether she did or not
they scented the compliment, looked stupid, and hung their heads,
silent in the intoxication of this first subtle whiff of incense. Even
Leff, uncouth and unlettered, extracted all that was possible from the
words, and felt a delicate elation at the thought that so fine a
creature could endure his society.
"We expect to go a great deal faster than the long trains," she
continued. "We have no oxen, only six mules and two extra horses and a
cow."
Her father laughed outright.
"Don't let my daughter frighten you. We've really got a very small
amount of baggage. Our little caravan has been made up on the advice
of Dr. Marcus Whitman, an old friend of mine. Five years ago when he
was in Washington he gave me a list of what was needed for the journey
across the plains. I suppose he's the best authority on that subject.
We all know how successfully the Oregon emigration was carried through."
David was glad to show he knew something of that. A boy friend of his
had gone to Oregon with this, the first large body of emigrants that
had ventured on the great enterprise. Whitman was to him a national
hero, his ride in the dead of winter from the far Northwest to
Washington, as patriotically inspiring as Paul Revere's.
There was more talk, standing round the fire, while the agreements for
the start were being made. No one thought the arrangement hasty, for
it was a place and time of quick decisions. Men starting on the
emigrant trail were not for wasting time on preliminaries. Friendships
sprang up like the grass and were mown down like it. Standing on the
edge of the unknown was not the propitious moment for caution and
hesitation. Only the bold dared it and the bold took each other
without question, reading what was on the surface, not bothering about
what might be hidden.
It was agreed, the weather being fair, that they would start at seven
the next morning, Dr. Gillespie's party joining David's at the camp.
With their mules and horses they should make good time and within a
month overhaul the train that had left the Gillespies behind.
As the doctor and his daughter walked away the shyness of the young men
returned upon them in a heavy backwash. They were so whelmed by it
that they did not even speak to one another. But both glanced with
cautious stealth at the receding backs, the doctor in front, his
daughter walking daintily on the edge of grass by the roadside, holding
her skirts away from the wet weeds.
When she was out of sight Leff said with an embarrassed laugh:
"Well, we got some one to go along with us now."
David did not laugh. He pondered frowningly. He was the elder by two
years and he felt his responsibilities.
"They'll do all right. With two more men we'll make a strong enough
train."
Leff was cook that night, and he set the coffee on and began cutting
the bacon. Occupied in this congenial work, the joints of his tongue
were loosened, and as the skillet gave forth grease and odors, he gave
forth bits of information gleaned from the earlier part of the
interview:
"I guess they got a first rate outfit. The old gentleman said they'd
been getting it together since last autumn. They must be pretty well
fixed."
David nodded. Being "well fixed" or being poor did not count on the
edge of the prairie. They were frivolous outside matters that had
weight in cities. Leff went on,
"He's consumpted. That's why he's going. He says he expects to be
cured before he gets to California."
A sudden zephyr irritated the tree tops, which bent away from its touch
and scattered moisture on the fire and the frying pan. There was a
sputter and sizzle and Leff muttered profanely before he took up the
dropped thread:
"The man that drives the mules, he's a hired man that the old
gentleman's had for twenty years. He was out on the frontier once and
knows all about it, and there ain't nothing he can't drive"--turning of
the bacon here, Leff absorbed beyond explanatory speech--"They got four
horses, two to ride and two extra ones, and a cow. I don't see how
they're goin' to keep up the pace with the cow along. The old
gentleman says they can do twenty to twenty-five miles a day when the
road's good. But I don't seem to see how the cow can keep up such a
lick."
"A hired man, a cow, and an outfit that it took all winter to get
together," said David thoughtfully. "It sounds more like a pleasure
trip than going across the plains."
He sat as if uneasily debating the possible drawbacks of so elaborate
an escort, but he was really ruminating upon the princess, who moved
upon the wilderness with such pomp and circumstance.
As they set out their tin cups and plates they continued to discuss the
doctor, his caravan, his mules, his servant, and his cow, in fact,
everything but his daughter. It was noticeable that no mention of her
was made till supper was over and the night fell. Then their comments
on her were brief. Leff seemed afraid of her even a mile away in the
damp hotel at Independence, seemed to fear that she might in some way
know he'd had her name upon his tongue, and would come to-morrow with
angry, accusing looks like an offended goddess. David did not want to
talk about her, he did not quite know why. Before the thought of
traveling a month in her society his mind fell back reeling, baffled by
the sudden entrance of such a dazzling intruder. A month beside this
glowing figure, a month under the impersonal interrogation of those
cool, demanding eyes! It was as if the President or General Zachary
Taylor had suddenly joined them.
But of course she figured larger in their thoughts than any other part
or all the combined parts of Dr. Gillespie's outfit. In their
imaginations--the hungry imaginations of lonely young men--she
represented all the grace, beauty, and mystery of the Eternal Feminine.
They did not reason about her, they only felt, and what they
felt--unconsciously to themselves--was that she had introduced the
last, wildest, and most disturbing thrill into the adventure of the
great journey.
CHAPTER III
The next day broke still and clear. The dawn was yet a pale promise in
the East when from Independence, out through the dripping woods and
clearings, rose the tumult of breaking camps. The rattle of the yoke
chains and the raucous cry of "Catch up! Catch up!" sounded under the
trees and out and away over valley and upland as the lumbering wagons,
freighted deep for the long trail, swung into the road.
David's camp was astir long before the sun was up. The great hour had
come. They were going! They sung and shouted as they harnessed Bess
and Ben, a pair of sturdy roans bought from an emigrant discouraged
before the start, while the saddle horses nosed about the tree roots
for a last cropping of the sweet, thick grass. Inside the wagon the
provisions were packed in sacks and the rifles hung on hooks on the
canvas walls. At the back, on a supporting step, the mess chest was
strapped. It was a businesslike wagon. Its contents included only one
deviation from the practical and necessary--three books of David's.
Joe had laughed at him about them. What did a man want with Byron's
poems and Milton and Bacon's "Essays" crossing the plains? Neither Joe
nor Leff could understand such devotion to the printed page. Their
kits were of the compactest, not a useless article or an unnecessary
pound, unless you counted the box of flower seeds that belonged to Joe,
who had heard that California, though a dry country, could be coaxed
into productiveness along the rivers.
Dr. Gillespie and his daughter were punctual. David's silver watch,
large as the circle of a cup and possessed of a tick so loud it
interrupted conversation, registered five minutes before seven, when
the doctor and his daughter appeared at the head of their caravan. Two
handsome figures, well mounted and clad with taste as well as
suitability, they looked as gallantly unfitted for the road as armored
knights in a modern battlefield. Good looks, physical delicacy, and
becoming clothes had as yet no recognized place on the trail. The
Gillespies were boldly and blithely bringing them, and unlike most
innovators, romance came with them. Nobody had gone out of
Independence with so confident and debonair an air. Now advancing
through a spattering of leaf shadows and sunspots, they seemed to the
young men to be issuing from the first pages of a story, and the
watchers secretly hoped that they would go riding on into the heart of
it with the white arch of the prairie schooner and the pricked ears of
the six mules as a movable background.
There was no umbrella this morning to obscure Miss Gillespie's vivid
tints, and in the same flat, straw hat, with her cheeks framed in
little black curls, she looked a freshly wholesome young girl, who
might be dangerous to the peace of mind of men even less lonely and
susceptible than the two who bid her a flushed and bashful good
morning. She had the appearance, however, of being entirely oblivious
to any embarrassment they might show. There was not a suggestion of
coquetry in her manner as she returned their greetings. Instead, it
was marked by a businesslike gravity. Her eyes touched their faces
with the slightest welcoming light and then left them to rove, sharply
inspecting, over their wagon and animals. When she had scrutinized
these, she turned in her saddle, and said abruptly to the driver of the
six mules:
"Daddy John, do you see--horses?"
The person thus addressed nodded and said in a thin, old voice,
"I do, and if they want them they're welcome to them."
He was a small, shriveled man, who might have been anywhere from sixty
to seventy-five. A battered felt hat, gray-green with wind and sun,
was pulled well down to his ears, pressing against his forehead and
neck thin locks of gray hair. A grizzle of beard edged his chin, a
poor and scanty growth that showed the withered skin through its
sparseness. His face, small and wedge-shaped, was full of ruddy color,
the cheeks above the ragged hair smooth and red as apples. Though his
mouth was deficient in teeth, his neck, rising bare from the band of
his shirt, corrugated with the starting sinews of old age, he had a
shrewd vivacity of glance, an alertness of poise, that suggested an
unimpaired spiritual vitality. He seemed at home behind the mules, and
here, for the first time, David felt was some one who did not look
outside the picture. In fact, he had an air of tranquil acceptance of
the occasion, of adjustment without effort, that made him fit into the
frame better than anyone else of the party.
It was a glorious morning, and as they fared forward through the
checkered shade their spirits ran high. The sun, curious and
determined, pried and slid through every crack in the leafage, turned
the flaked lichen to gold, lay in clotted light on the pools around the
fern roots. They were delicate spring woods, streaked with the white
dashes of the dogwood, and hung with the tassels of the maple. The
foliage was still unfolding, patterned with fresh creases, the prey of
a continuous, frail unrest. Little streams chuckled through the
underbrush, and from the fusion of woodland whisperings bird notes
detached themselves, soft flutings and liquid runs, that gave another
expression to the morning's blithe mood.
Between the woods there were stretches of open country, velvet smooth,
with the trees slipped down to where the rivers ran. The grass was as
green as sprouting grain, and a sweet smell of wet earth and seedling
growths came from it. Cloud shadows trailed across it, blue blotches
moving languidly. It was the young earth in its blushing promise,
fragrant, rain-washed, budding, with the sound of running water in the
grass and bird voices dropping from the sky.
With their lighter wagons they passed the ox trains plowing stolidly
through the mud, barefoot children running at the wheel, and women
knitting on the front seat. The driver's whip lash curled in the air,
and his nasal "Gee haw" swung the yoked beasts slowly to one side.
Then came detachments of Santa Fé traders, dark men in striped serapes
with silver trimmings round their high-peaked hats. Behind them
stretched the long line of wagons, the ponderous freighters of the
Santa Fé Trail, rolling into Independence from the Spanish towns that
lay beyond the burning deserts of the Cimarron. They filed by in slow
procession, a vision of faded colors and swarthy faces, jingle of spur
and mule bell mingling with salutations in sonorous Spanish.
As the day grew warmer, the doctor complained of the heat and went back
to the wagon. David and the young girl rode on together through the
green thickness of the wood. They had talked a little while the doctor
was there, and now, left to themselves, they suddenly began to talk a
good deal. In fact, Miss Gillespie revealed herself as a somewhat
garrulous and quite friendly person. David felt his awed admiration
settling into a much more comfortable feeling, still wholly admiring
but relieved of the cramping consciousness that he had entertained an
angel unawares. She was so natural and girlish that he began to
cherish hopes of addressing her as "Miss Susan," even let vaulting
ambition carry him to the point where he could think of some day
calling himself her friend.
She was communicative, and he was still too dazzled by her to realize
that she was not above asking questions. In the course of a half hour
she knew all about him, and he, without the courage to be thus
flatteringly curious, knew the main points of her own history. Her
father had been a practicing physician in Rochester for the past
fifteen years. Before that he had lived in New York, where she had
been born twenty years ago. Her mother had been a Canadian, a French
woman from the Province of Quebec, whom her father had met there one
summer when he had gone to fish in Lake St. John. Her mother had been
very beautiful--David nodded at that, he had already decided it--and
had always spoken English with an accent. She, the daughter, when she
was little, spoke French before she did English; in fact, did not Mr.
Crystal notice there was still something a little queer about her _r_'s?
Mr. Crystal had noticed it, noticed it to the extent of thinking it
very pretty. The young lady dismissed the compliment as one who does
not hear, and went on with her narrative:
"After my mother's death my father left New York. He couldn't bear to
live there any more. He'd been so happy. So he moved away, though he
had a fine practice."
The listener gave forth a murmur of sympathetic understanding.
Devotion to a beautiful woman was matter of immediate appeal to him.
His respect for the doctor rose in proportion, especially when the
devotion was weighed in the balance against a fine practice. Looking
at the girl's profile with prim black curls against the cheek, he saw
the French-Canadian mother, and said not gallantly, but rather timidly:
"And you're like your mother, I suppose? You're dark like a French
woman."
She answered this with a brusque denial. Extracting compliments from
the talk of a shy young Westerner was evidently not her strong point.
"Oh, no! not at all. My mother was pale and tall, with very large
black eyes. I am short and dark and my eyes are only just big enough
to see out of. She was delicate and I am very strong. My father says
I've never been sick since I got my first teeth."
She looked at him and laughed, and he realized it was the first time he
had seen her do it. It brightened her face delightfully, making the
eyes she had spoken of so disparagingly narrow into dancing slits.
When she laughed men who had not lost the nicety of their standards by
a sojourn on the frontier would have called her a pretty girl.
"My mother was of the French _noblesse_," she said, a dark eye upon him
to see how he would take this dignified piece of information. "She was
a descendant of the Baron de Poutrincourt, who founded Port Royal."
David was as impressed as anyone could have desired. He did not know
what the French _noblesse_ was, but by its sound he judged it to be
some high and honorable estate. He was equally ignorant of the
identity of the Baron de Poutrincourt, but the name alone was
impressive, especially as Miss Gillespie pronounced it.
"That's fine, isn't it?" he said, as being the only comment he could
think of which at once showed admiration and concealed ignorance.
The young woman seemed to find it adequate and went on with her family
history. Five years ago in Washington her father had seen his old
friend, Marcus Whitman, and since then had been restless with the
longing to move West. His health demanded the change. His labors as a
physician had exhausted him. His daughter spoke feelingly of the
impossibility of restraining his charitable zeal. He attended the poor
for nothing. He rose at any hour and went forth in any weather in
response to the call of suffering.
"That's what he says a doctor's duties are," she said. "It isn't a
profession to make money with, it's a profession for helping people and
curing them. You yourself don't count, it's only what you do that
does. Why, my father had a very large practice, but he made only just
enough to keep us."
Of all she had said this seemed to the listener the best worth hearing.
The doctor now mounted to the top of the highest pedestal David's
admiration could supply. Here was one of the compensations with which
life keeps the balances even. Joe had died and left him friendless,
and while the ache was still sharp, this stranger and his daughter had
come to soothe his pain, perhaps, in the course of time, to conjure it
quite away.
Early in the preceding winter the doctor had been forced to decide on
the step he had been long contemplating. An attack of congestion of
the lungs developed consumption in his weakened constitution. A warm
climate and an open-air life were prescribed. And how better combine
them than by emigrating to California?
"And so," said the doctor's daughter, "father made up his mind to go
and sold out his practice. People thought he was crazy to start on
such a trip when he was sick, but he knows more than they do. Besides,
it's not going to be such hard work for him. Daddy John, the old man
who drives the mules, knows all about this Western country. He was
here a long time ago when Indiana and Illinois were wild and full of
Indians. He got wounded out here fighting and thought he was going to
die, and came back to New York. My father found him there, poor and
lonely and sick, and took care of him and cured him. He's been with us
ever since, more than twenty years, and he manages everything and takes
care of everything. He and father'll tell you I rule them, but that's
just teasing. It's really Daddy John who rules."
The mules were just behind them, and she looked back at the old man and
called in her clear voice:
"I'm talking about you, Daddy John. I'm telling all about your
wickedness."
Daddy John's answer came back, slow and amused:
"Wait till I get the young feller alone and I'll do some talking."
Laughing, she settled herself in her saddle and dropped her voice for
David's ear:
"I think Daddy John was quite pleased we missed the New York train. It
was a big company, and he couldn't have managed everything the way he
can now. But we'll soon catch it up and then"--she lifted her eyebrows
and smiled with charming malice at the thought of Daddy John's coming
subjugation. "We ought to overtake it in three or four weeks they said
in Independence."
Her companion made no answer. The cheerful conversation had suddenly
taken a depressing turn. Under the spell of Miss Gillespie's loquacity
and black eyes he had quite forgotten that he was only a temporary
escort, to be superseded by an entire ox train, of which even now they
were in pursuit. David was a dreamer, and while the young woman
talked, he had seen them both in diminishing perspective, passing
sociably across the plains, over the mountains, into the desert, to
where California edged with a prismatic gleam the verge of the world.
They were to go riding, and talking on, their acquaintance ripening
gradually and delightfully, while the enormous panorama of the
continent unrolled behind them. And it might end in three or four
weeks! The Emigrant Trail looked overwhelmingly long when he could
only see himself and Leff riding over it, and California lost its color
and grew as gray as a line of sea fog.
That evening's camp was pitched in a clearing near the road. The woods
pressed about them, whispering and curious, thrown out and then blotted
as the fires leaped or died. It was the first night's bivouac, and
much noise and bustle went to its accomplishment. The young men
covertly watched the Gillespie Camp. How would this ornamental party
cope with such unfamiliar labors? With its combination of a feminine
element which must be helpless by virtue of a rare and dainty fineness
and a masculine element which could hardly be otherwise because of ill
health, it would seem that all the work must devolve upon the old man.
Nothing, however, was further from the fact. The Gillespies rose to
the occasion with the same dauntless buoyancy that they had shown in
ever attempting the undertaking, and then blithely defying public
opinion with a servant and a cow. The sense of their unfitness which
had made the young men uneasy now gave way to secret wonder as the
doctor pitched the tent like a backwoodsman, and his daughter showed a
skilled acquaintance with campers' biscuit making.
She did it so well, so without hurry and with knowledge, that it was
worth while watching her, if David's own cooking could have spared him.
He did find time once to offer her assistance and that she refused,
politely but curtly. With sleeves rolled to the elbow, her hat off,
showing a roll of hair on the crown of her head separated by a neat
parting from the curls that hung against her cheeks, she was absorbed
in the business in hand. Evidently she was one of those persons to
whom the matter of the moment is the only matter. When her biscuits
were done, puffy and brown, she volunteered a preoccupied explanation:
"I've been learning to do this all winter, and I'm going to do it
right."
And even then it was less an excuse for her abruptness than the
announcement of a compact with herself, steadfast, almost grim.
After supper they sat by the fire, silent with fatigue, the scent of
the men's tobacco on the air, the girl, with her hands clasping her
knees, looking into the flames. In the shadows behind the old servant
moved about. They could hear him crooning to the mules, and then catch
a glimpse of his gnomelike figure bearing blankets from the wagon to
the tent. There came a point where his labors seemed ended, but his
activity had merely changed its direction. He came forward and said to
the girl,
"Missy, your bed's ready. You'd better be going."
She gave a groan and a movement of protest under which was the hopeless
acquiescence of the conquered:
"Not yet, Daddy John. I'm so comfortable sitting here."
"There's two thousand miles before you. Mustn't get tired this early.
Come now, get up."
His manner held less of urgence than of quiet command. He was not
dictatorial, but he was determined. The girl looked at him, sighed,
rose to her knees, and then made a last appeal to her father:
"Father, _do_ take my part. Daddy John's too interfering for words!"
But her father would only laugh at her discomfiture.
"All right," she said as she bent down to kiss him. "It'll be your
turn in just about five minutes."
It was an accurate prophecy. The tent flaps had hardly closed on her
when Daddy John attacked his employer.
"Goin' now?" he said, sternly.
The doctor knew his fate, and like his daughter offered a spiritless
and intimidated resistance.
"Just let me finish this pipe," he pleaded.
Daddy John was inexorable:
"It's no way to get cured settin' round the fire puffin' on a pipe."
"Ten minutes longer?"
"We'll roll out to-morrer at seven."
"Daddy John, go to bed!"
"I got to see you both tucked in for the night before I do. Can't
trust either of you."
The doctor, beaten, knocked the ashes out of his pipe and rose with
resignation.
"This is the family skeleton," he said to the young men who watched the
performance with curiosity. "We're ground under the heel of Daddy
John."
Then he thrust his hand through the old servant's arm and they walked
toward the wagon, their heads together, laughing like a pair of boys.
A few minutes later the camp had sunk to silence. The doctor was
stowed away in the wagon and Miss Gillespie had drawn the tent flaps
round the mystery of her retirement. David and Leff, too tired to
pitch theirs, were dropping to sleep by the fire, when the girl's
voice, low, but penetrating, roused them.
"Daddy John," it hissed in the tone children employ in their games of
hide-and-seek, "Daddy John, are you awake?"
The old man, who had been stretched before the fire, rose to a sitting
posture, wakeful and alert.
"Yes, Missy, what's the matter? Can't you sleep?"
"It's not that, but it's so hard to fix anything. There's no light."
Here it became evident to the watchers that Miss Gillespie's head was
thrust out through the tent opening, the canvas held together below her
chin. Against the pale background, it was like the vision of a
decapitated head hung on a white wall.
"What is it you want to fix?" queried the old man.
"My hair," she hissed back. "I want to put it up in papers, and I
can't see."
Then the secret of Daddy John's power was revealed. He who had so
remorselessly driven her to bed now showed no surprise or
disapprobation at her frivolity. It was as if her wish to beautify
herself received his recognition as an accepted vagary of human nature.
"Just wait a minute," he said, scrambling out of his blanket, "and I'll
get you a light."
The young men could not but look on all agape with curiosity to see
what the resourceful old man intended getting. Could the elaborately
complete Gillespie outfit include candles? Daddy John soon ended their
uncertainty. He drew from the fire a thick brand, brilliantly aflame,
and carried it to the tent. Miss Gillespie's immovable head eyed it
with some uneasiness.
"I've nothing to put it in," she objected, "and I can't hold it while
I'm doing up my hair."
"I will," said the old man. "Get in the tent now and get your papers
ready."
The head withdrew, its retirement to be immediately followed by her
voice slightly muffled by the intervening canvas:
"Now I'm ready."
Daddy John cautiously parted the opening, inserted the torch, and stood
outside, the canvas flaps carefully closed round his hand. With the
intrusion of the flaming brand the tent suddenly became a rosy
transparency. The young' girl's figure moved in the midst of the glow,
a shape of nebulous darkness, its outlines lost in the mist of
enfolding draperies.
Leff, softly lifting himself on his elbows, gazed fascinated upon this
discreet vision. Then looking at David he saw that he had turned over
and was lying with his face on his arms. Leff leaned from the blankets
and kicked him, a gentle but meaning kick on the leg.
To his surprise David lifted a wakeful face, the brow furrowed with an
angry frown.
"Can't you go to sleep," he muttered crossly. "Let that girl curl her
hair, and go to sleep like a man."
He dropped his face once more on his arms. Leff felt unjustly snubbed,
but that did not prevent him from watching the faintly defined aura of
shadow which he knew to be the dark young woman he was too shy to look
at when he met her face to face. He continued watching till the brand
died down to a spark and Daddy John withdrew it and went back to his
fire.
CHAPTER IV
In their division of labor David and Leff had decided that one was to
drive the wagon in the morning, the other in the afternoon. This
morning it was David's turn, and as he "rolled out" at the head of the
column he wondered if Leff would now ride beside Miss Gillespie and
lend attentive ear to her family chronicles. But Leff was evidently
not for dallying by the side of beauty. He galloped off alone,
vanishing through the thin mists that hung like a fairy's draperies
among the trees. The Gillespies rode at the end of the train. Even if
he could not see them David felt their nearness, and it added to the
contentment that always came upon him from a fair prospect lying under
a smiling sky. At harmony with the moment and the larger life outside
it, he leaned back against the canvas hood and let a dreamy gaze roam
over the serene and opulent landscape.
Nature had always soothed and uplifted him, been like an opiate to
anger or pain. As a boy his troubles had lost their sting in the
consoling largeness of the open, under the shade of trees, within sight
of the bowing wheat fields with the wind making patterns on the seeded
grain. Now his thoughts, drifting aimless as thistle fluff, went back
to those childish days of country freedom, when he had spent his
vacations at his uncle's farm. He used to go with his widowed mother,
a forlorn, soured woman who rarely smiled. He remembered his irritated
wonder as she sat complaining in the ox cart, while he sent his eager
glance ahead over the sprouting acres to where the log farmhouse--the
haven of fulfilled dreams--stretched in its squat ugliness. He could
feel again the inward lift, the flying out of his spirit in a rush of
welcoming ecstasy, as he saw the woods hanging misty on the horizon and
the clay bluffs, below which the slow, quiet river uncoiled its yellow
length.
The days at the farm had been the happiest of his life--wonderful days
of fishing and swimming, of sitting in gnarled tree boughs so still the
nesting birds lost their fear and came back to their eggs. For hours
he had lain in patches of shade watching the cloud shadows on the
fields, and the great up-pilings when storms were coming, rising
black-bosomed against the blue. There had been some dark moments to
throw out these brighter ones--when chickens were killed and he had
tried to stand by and look swaggeringly unconcerned as a boy should,
while he sickened internally and shut his lips over pleadings for
mercy. And there was an awful day when pigs were slaughtered, and no
one knew that he stole away to the elder thickets by the river,
burrowed deep into them, and stopped his ears against the shrill,
agonized cries. He knew such weakness was shameful and hid it with a
child's subtlety. At supper he told skillful lies to account for his
pale cheeks and lost appetite.
His uncle, a kindly generous man, without children of his own, had been
fond of him and sympathized with his wish for an education. It was he
who had made it possible for the boy to go to a good school at
Springfield and afterwards to study law. How hard he had worked in
those school years, and what realms of wonder had been opened to him
through books, the first books he had known, reverently handled,
passionately read, that led him into unknown worlds, pointed the way to
ideals that could be realized! With the law books he was not in so
good an accord. But it was his chosen profession, and he approached it
with zeal and high enthusiasm, a young apostle who would sell his
services only for the right.
Now he smiled, looking back at his disillusion. The young apostle was
jostled out of sight in the bustle of the growing town. There was no
room in it for idealists who were diffident and sensitive and stood on
the outside of its self-absorbed activity bewildered by the noises of
life. The stream of events was very different from the pages of books.
David saw men and women struggling toward strange goals, fighting for
soiled and sordid prizes, and felt as he had done on the farm when the
pigs were killed. And as he had fled from that ugly scene to the
solacing quiet of Nature, he turned from the tumult of the little town
to the West, upon whose edge he stood.
It called him like a voice in the night. The spell of its borderless
solitudes, its vast horizons, its benign silences, grew stronger as he
felt himself powerless and baffled among the fighting energies of men.
He dreamed of a life there, moving in unobstructed harmony. A man
could begin in a fresh, clean world, and be what he wanted, be a young
apostle in his own way. His boy friend who had gone to Oregon fired
his imagination with stories of Marcus Whitman and his brother
missionaries. David did not want to be a missionary, but he wanted,
with a young man's solemn seriousness, to make his life of profit to
mankind, to do the great thing without self-interest. So he had
yearned and chafed while he read law and waited for clients and been as
a man should to his mother, until in the summer of 1847 both his mother
and his uncle had died, the latter leaving him a little fortune of four
thousand dollars. Then the Emigrant Trail lay straight before him,
stretching to California.
The reins lay loose on the backs of Bess and Ben and the driver's gaze
was fixed on the line of trees that marked the course of an unseen
river. The dream was realized, he was on the trail. He lifted his
eyes to the sky where massed clouds slowly sailed and birds flew,
shaking notes of song down upon him. Joe was dead, but the world was
still beautiful, with the sun on the leaves and the wind on the grass,
with the kindliness of honest men and the gracious presence of women.
Dr. Gillespie was the first dweller in that unknown world east of the
Alleghenies whom David had met. For this reason alone it would be a
privilege to travel with him. How great the privilege was, the young
man did not know till he rode by the doctor's side that afternoon and
they talked together on the burning questions of the day; or the doctor
talked and David hungrily listened to the voice of education and
experience.
The war with Mexico was one of the first subjects. The doctor regarded
it as a discreditable performance, unworthy a great and generous
nation. The Mormon question followed, and on this he had much curious
information. Living in the interior of New York State, he had heard
Joseph Smith's history from its beginning, when he posed as "a money
digger" and a seer who could read the future through "a peek stone."
The recent polygamous teachings of the prophet were a matter to mention
with lowered voice. Miss Gillespie, riding on the other side, was not
supposed to hear, and certainly appeared to take no interest in Mexico,
or Texas, or Joseph Smith and his unholy doctrines.
She made no attempt to enter into the conversation, and it seemed to
David, who now and then stole a shy look at her to see if she was
impressed by his intelligent comments, that she did not listen. Once
or twice, when the talk was at its acutest point of interest, she
struck her horse and left them, dashing on ahead at a gallop. At
another time she dropped behind, and his ear, trained in her direction,
heard her voice in alternation with Daddy John's. When she joined them
after this withdrawal she was bright eyed and excited.
"Father," she called as she came up at a sharp trot, "Daddy John says
the prairie's not far beyond. He says we'll see it soon--the prairie
that I've been thinking of all winter!"
Her enthusiasm leaped to David and he forgot the Mexican boundaries and
the polygamous Mormons, and felt like a discoverer on the prow of a
ship whose keel cuts unknown seas. For the prairie was still a word of
wonder. It called up visions of huge unpeopled spaces, of the flare of
far flung sunsets, of the plain blackening with the buffalo, of the
smoke wreath rising from the painted tepee, and the Indian, bronzed and
splendid, beneath his feathered crest.
"It's there," she cried, pointing with her whip. "I can't wait. I'm
going on."
David longed to go with her, but the doctor was deep in the extension
of slavery and of all the subjects this burned deepest. The prairie
was interesting but not when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was
on the carpet. Watching the girl's receding shape, David listened
respectfully and heard of the dangers and difficulties that were sure
to follow on the acquisition of the great strip of Mexican territory.
All afternoon they had been passing through woods, the remnant of that
mighty forest which had once stretched from the Missouri to the
Alleghenies. Now its compact growth had become scattered and the sky,
flaming toward sunset, shone between the tree trunks. The road
ascended a slight hill and at the top of this Miss Gillespie appeared
and beckoned to them. As they drew near she turned and made a sweeping
gesture toward the prospect. The open prairie lay before them.
No one spoke. In mute wonderment they gazed at a country that was like
a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where
sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its
dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and
accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines
of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or
gathered in clusters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool
gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other
pools. They shone, a line of glistening disks, imbedded in the green.
Space that seemed to stretch to the edges of the world, the verdure of
Eden, the silence of the unpolluted, unconquered earth were here.
So must it have looked when the beaked Viking ships nosed along the
fretted shores of Rhode Island, when Columbus took the sea in his
high-pooped caravals, when the Pilgrims saw the rocks and naked boughs
of the New England coast. So it had been for centuries, roamed by wild
men who had perished from its face and left no trace, their habitation
as a shadow in the sun, their work as dew upon the grass, their lives
as the lives of the mayfly against its immemorial antiquity.
The young man felt his spirit mount in a rush of exaltation like a
prayer. Some fine and exquisite thing in himself leaped out in wild
response. The vision and the dream were for a moment his. And in that
moment life, all possible, all perfect, stretched before him, to end in
a triumphant glory like the sunset.
The doctor took off his hat.
"The heavens declare the glory of God. All the earth doth magnify his
name," he said in a low voice.
CHAPTER V
A broken line of moving dots, the little company trailed a slow way
across this ocean of green. Nothing on its face was more insignificant
than they. The birds in the trees and the bees in the flowers had a
more important place in its economy. One afternoon David riding in the
rear crested a ridge and saw them a mile in advance, the road
stretching before and behind them in a curving thread. The tops of the
wagons were like the backs of creeping insects, the mounted figures,
specks of life that raised a slight tarnish of dust on the golden
clearness. He wondered at their lack of consequence, unregarded
particles of matter toiling across the face of the world.
This was what they suggested viewed largely from the distance. Close
at hand--one of them--and it was a very different matter. They enjoyed
it. If they were losing their significance as man in the aggregate,
the tamer, and master, they were gaining a new importance as distinct
and separate units. Convention no longer pressed on them. What law
there was they carried with them, bore it before them into the
wilderness like the Ark of the Covenant. But nobody wanted to be
unlawful. There was no temptation to be so. Envy, hatred and malice
and all uncharitableness had been left behind in the cities. They were
a very cheerful company, suffering a little from fatigue, and with now
and then a faint brush of bad temper to put leaven into the dough.
There was a Biblical simplicity in their life. They had gone back to
the era when man was a nomad, at night pitching his tent by the water
hole, and sleeping on skins beside the fire. When the sun rose over
the rim of the prairie the camp was astir. When the stars came out in
the deep blue night they sat by the cone of embers, not saying much,
for in the open, spoken words lose their force and the human creature
becomes a silent animal.
Each day's march was a slow, dogged, progression, broken by fierce work
at the fords. The dawn was the beautiful time when the dew was caught
in frosted webs on the grass. The wings of the morning were theirs as
they rode over the long green swells where the dog roses grew and the
leaves of the sage palpitated to silver like a woman's body quivering
to the brushing of a beloved hand. Sometimes they walked, dipped into
hollows where the wattled huts of the Indians edged a creek, noted the
passage of earlier trains in the cropped grass at the spring mouth and
the circles of dead fires.
In the afternoons it grew hot. The train, deliberate and determined as
a tortoise, moved through a shimmer of light. The drone of insect
voices rose in a sleepy chorus and the men drowsed in the wagons. Even
the buoyant life of the young girl seemed to feel the stupefying weight
of the prairie's deep repose. She rode at a foot pace, her hat hanging
by its strings to the pommel, her hair pushed back from her beaded
forehead, not bothering about her curls now.
Then came the wild blaze of the sunset and the pitching of the camp,
and after supper the rest by the fire with pipe smoke in the air, and
overhead the blossoming of the stars.
They were wonderful stars, troops and troops of them, dust of myriad,
unnumbered worlds, and the white lights of great, bold planets staring
at ours. David wondered what it looked like from up there. Was it as
large, or were we just a tiny, twinkling point too? From city streets
the stars had always chilled him by their awful suggestion of worlds
beyond worlds circling through gulfs of space. But here in the
primordial solitudes, under the solemn cope of the sky, the thought
lost its terror. He seemed in harmony with the universe, part of it as
was each speck of star dust. Without question or understanding he felt
secure, convinced of his oneness with the great design, cradled in its
infinite care.
One evening while thus dreaming he caught Susan's eye full of curious
interest like a watching child's.
"What are you thinking of?" she asked.
"The stars," he answered. "They used to frighten me."
She looked from him to the firmament as if to read a reason for his
fear:
"Frighten you? Why?"
"There were so many of them, thousands and millions, wandering about up
there. It was so awful to think of them, how they'd been swinging
round forever and would keep on forever. And maybe there were people
on some of them, and what it all was for."
She continued to look up and then said indifferently:
"It doesn't seem to me to matter much."
"It used to make me feel that nothing was any use. As if I was just a
grain of dust."
Her eyes came slowly down and rested on him in a musing gaze.
"A grain of dust. I never felt that way. I shouldn't think you'd like
it, but I don't see why you were afraid."
David felt uncomfortable. She was so exceedingly practical and direct
that he had an unpleasant feeling she would set him down as a coward,
who went about under the fear that a meteor might fall on him and
strike him dead. He tried to explain:
"Not afraid actually, just sort of frozen by the idea of it all. It's
so--immense, so--so crushing and terrible."
Her gaze continued, a questioning quality entering it. This gained in
force by a slight tilting of her head to one side. David began to fear
her next question. It might show that she regarded him not only as a
coward but also as a fool.
"Perhaps you don't understand," he hazarded timidly.
"I don't think I do," she answered, then dropped her eyes and added
after a moment of pondering, "I can't remember ever being really afraid
of anything."
Had it been daylight she would have noticed that the young man colored.
He thought guiltily of certain haunting fears of his childhood, ghosts
in the attic, a banshee of which he had once heard a fearsome story, a
cow that had chased him on the farm. She unconsciously assisted him
from this slough of shame by saying suddenly:
"Oh, yes, I can. I remember now. I'm afraid of mad dogs."
It was not very comforting for, after all, everybody was afraid of mad
dogs.
"And there was a reason for that," she went on. "I was frightened by a
mad dog when I was a little girl eight years old. I was going out to
spend some of my allowance. I got twenty cents a month and I had it
all in pennies. And suddenly there was a great commotion in the
street, everybody running and screaming and rushing into doorways. I
didn't know what was the matter but I was startled and dropped my
pennies. And just as I stooped to pick them up I saw the dog coming
toward me, tearing, with its tongue hanging out. And, would you
believe it, I gathered up all those pennies before I ran and just had
time to scramble over a fence."
It was impossible not to laugh, especially with her laughter leading,
her eyes narrowed to cracks through which light and humor sparkled at
him.
He was beginning to know Miss Gillespie--"Miss Susan" he called
her--very well. It was just like his dream, riding beside her every
day, and growing more friendly, the spell of her youth, and her dark
bloom, and her attentive eyes--for she was an admirable listener if her
answers sometimes lacked point--drawing from him secret thoughts and
hopes and aspirations he had never dared to tell before. If she did
not understand him she did not laugh at him, which was enough for David
with the sleepy whisperings of the prairie around him, and new, strange
matter stirring in his heart and making him bold.
There was only one thing about her that was disappointing. He did not
admit it to himself but it kept falling on their interviews with a
depressive effect. To the call of beauty she remained unmoved. If he
drew up his horse to gaze on the wonders of the sunset the waiting made
her impatient. He had noticed that heat and mosquitoes would distract
her attention from the hazy distances drowsing in the clear yellow of
noon. The sky could flush and deepen in majestic splendors, but if she
was busy over the fire and her skillets she never raised her head to
look. And so it was with poetry. She did not know and did not care
anything about the fine frenzies of the masters. Byron?--wrinkling up
her forehead--yes, she thought she'd read something in school.
Shelley?--"The Ode to the West Wind?" No, she'd never read that. What
was an ode anyway? Once he recited the "Lines to an Indian Air," his
voice trembling a little, for the words were almost sacred.
She pondered for a space and then said:
"What are champak odors?"
David didn't know. He had never thought of inquiring.
"Isn't that odd," she murmured. "That would have been the first thing
I would have wanted to know. Champak? I suppose it's some kind of a
flower--something like a magnolia. It has a sound like a magnolia."
A lively imagination was evidently not one of Miss Gillespie's
possessions.
Late one afternoon, riding some distance in front of the train, she and
David had seen an Indian loping by on his pony. It was not an unusual
sight. Many Indians had visited their camp and at the crossing of the
Kaw they had come upon an entire village in transit to the summer
hunting grounds. But there was something in this lone figure, moving
solitary through the evening glow, that put him in accord with the
landscape's solemn beauty, retouched him with his lost magnificence.
In buckskins black with filth, his blanket a tattered rag, an ancient
rifle across his saddle, the undying picturesqueness of the red man was
his.
"Look," said David, his imagination fired. "Look at that Indian."
The savage saw them and turned a face of melancholy dignity upon them,
giving forth a deep "How, How."
"He's a very dirty Indian," said Susan, sweeping him with a glance of
disfavor.
David did not hear her. He looked back to watch the lonely figure as
it rode away over the swells. It seemed to him to be riding into the
past, the lordly past, when the red man owned the land and the fruits
thereof.
"Look at him as he rides away," he said. "Can't you seem to see him
coming home from a battle with his face streaked with vermilion and his
war bonnet on? He'd be solemn and grand with the wet scalps dripping
at his belt. When they saw him coming his squaws would come out in
front of the lodges and begin to sing the war chant."
"Squaws!" in a tone of disgust. "That's as bad as the Mormons."
The muse had possession of David and a regard for monogamy was not
sufficient to stay his noble rage.
"And think how he felt! All this was his, the pale face hadn't come.
He'd fought his enemies for it and driven them back. In the cool of
the evening when he was riding home he could look out for miles and
miles, clear to the horizon, and know he was the King of it all. Just
think what it was to feel like that! And far away he could see the
smoke of his village and know that they were waiting for the return of
the chief."
"Chief!" with even greater emphasis, "that poor dirty creature a
_chief_!"
The muse relinquished her hold. The young man explained, not with
impatience, but as one mortified by a betrayal into foolish enthusiasm:
"I didn't mean that _he_ was a chief. I was just imagining."
"Oh," with the falling inflexion of comprehension. "You often imagine,
don't you? Let's ride on to where the road goes down into that hollow."
They rode on in silence, both slightly chagrined, for if David found it
trying to have his fine flights checked, Susan was annoyed when she
said things that made him wear a look of forbearing patience. She may
not have had much imagination, but she had a very observing eye, and
could have startled not only David, but her father by the shrewdness
with which she read faces.
The road sloped to a hollow where the mottled trunks of cotton woods
stood in a group round the dimpling face of a spring. With
well-moistened roots the grass grew long and rich. Here was the place
for the night's camp. They would wait till the train came up. And
even as they rested on this comfortable thought they saw between the
leaves the canvas top of a wagon.
The meeting of trains was one of the excitements of life on the
Emigrant Trail. Sometimes they were acquaintances made in the wet days
at Independence, sometimes strangers who had come by way of St. Joseph.
Then the encountering parties eyed one another with candid curiosity
and from each came the greeting of the plains, "Be you for Oregon or
California?"
The present party was for Oregon from Missouri, six weeks on the road.
They were a family, traveling alone, having dropped out of the company
with which they had started. The man, a gaunt and grizzled creature,
with long hair and ragged beard, was unyoking his oxen, while the woman
bent over the fire which crackled beneath her hands. She was as lean
as he, shapeless, saffron-skinned and wrinkled, but evidently younger
than she looked. The brood of tow-headed children round her ran from a
girl of fourteen to a baby, just toddling, a fat, solemn-eyed cherub,
almost naked, with a golden fluff of hair.
At sight of him Susan drew up, the unthinking serenity of her face
suddenly concentrated into a hunger of admiration, a look which changed
her, focused her careless happiness into a pointed delight.
"Look at the baby," she said quickly, "a lovely fat baby with curls,"
then slid off her horse and went toward them.
The woman drew back staring. The children ran to her, frightened as
young rabbits, and hid behind her skirts. Only the baby, grave and
unalarmed, stood his ground and Susan snatched him up. Then the mother
smiled, gratified and reassured. She had no upper front teeth, and the
wide toothless grin gave her a look of old age that had in it a curious
suggestion of debasement.
David stood by his horse, making no move to come forward. The party
repelled him. They were not only uncouth and uncomely, but they were
dirty. Dirt on an Indian was, so to speak, dirt in its place--but
unwashed women and children--! His gorge rose at it. And Susan,
always dainty as a pink, seemed entirely indifferent to it. The
children, with unkempt hair and legs caked in mud, crowded about her,
and as she held the baby against her chest, her glance dwelt on the
woman's face, with no more consciousness of its ugliness than when she
looked over the prairie there was consciousness of Nature's supreme
perfection.
On the way back to camp he asked her about it. Why, if she objected to
the Indian's dirt, had she been oblivious to that of the women and the
children? He put it judicially, with impersonal clearness as became a
lawyer. She looked puzzled, then laughed, her fresh, unusual laugh:
"I'm sure I don't know. I don't know why I do everything or why I like
this thing and don't like that. I don't always have a reason, or if I
do I don't stop to think what it is. I just do things because I want
to and feel them because I can't help it. I like children and so I
wanted to talk to them and hear about them from their mother."
"But would your liking for them make you blind to such a thing as dirt?"
"I don't know. Maybe it would. When you're interested in anything or
anybody small things don't matter."
"Small things! Those children were a sight!"
"Yes, poor little brats! No one had washed the baby for weeks. The
woman said she was too tired to bother and it wouldn't bathe in the
creeks with the other children, so they let it go. If we kept near
them I could wash it for her. I could borrow it and wash it every
morning. But there's no use thinking about it as we'll pass them
to-morrow. Wasn't it a darling with little golden rings of hair and
eyes like pieces of blue glass?"
She sighed, relinquishing the thought of the baby's morning bath with
pensive regret. David could not understand it, but decided as Susan
felt that way it must be the right way for a woman to feel. He was
falling in love, but he was certainly not falling in love--as students
of a later date have put it--with "a projection of his own personality."
CHAPTER VI
They had passed the Kaw River and were now bearing on toward the
Vermilion. Beyond that would be the Big and then the Little Blue and
soon after the Platte where "The Great Medicine way of the Pale Face"
bent straight to the westward. The country continued the same and over
its suave undulations the long trail wound, sinking to the hollows,
threading clumps of cotton-wood and alder, lying white along the spine
of bolder ridges.
Each day they grew more accustomed to their gypsy life. The prairie
had begun to absorb them, cut them off from the influences of the old
setting, break them to its will. They were going back over the
footsteps of the race, returning to aboriginal conditions, with their
backs to the social life of communities and their faces to the wild.
Independence seemed a long way behind, California so remote that it was
like thinking of Heaven when one was on earth, well fed and well
faring. Their immediate surroundings began to make their world, they
subsided into the encompassing immensity, unconsciously eliminating
thoughts, words, habits, that did not harmonize with its uncomplicated
design.
On Sundays they halted and "lay off" all day. This was Dr. Gillespie's
wish. He had told the young men at the start and they had agreed. It
would be a good thing to have a day off for washing and general
"redding up." But the doctor had other intentions. In his own words,
he "kept the Sabbath," and each Sunday morning read the service of the
Episcopal Church. Early in their acquaintance David had discovered
that his new friend was religious; "a God-fearing man" was the term the
doctor had used to describe himself. David, who had only seen the
hysterical, fanaticism of frontier revivals now for the first time
encountered the sincere, unquestioning piety of a spiritual nature.
The doctor's God was an all-pervading presence, who went before him as
pillar of fire or cloud. Once speaking to the young man of the
security of his belief in the Divine protection, he had quoted a line
which recurred to David over and over--in the freshness of the morning,
in the hot hush of midday, and in the night when the stars were out:
"Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."
Overcome by shyness the young men had stayed away from the first
Sunday's service. David had gone hunting, feeling that to sit near by
and not attend would offer a slight to the doctor. No such scruples
restrained Leff, who squatted on his heels at the edge of the creek,
washing his linen and listening over his shoulder. By the second
Sunday they had mastered their bashfulness and both came shuffling
their hats in awkward hands and sitting side by side on a log. Leff,
who had never been to church in his life, was inclined to treat the
occasion as one for furtive amusement, at intervals casting a sidelong
look at his companion, which, on encouragement, would have developed
into a wink. David had no desire to exchange glances of derisive
comment. He was profoundly moved. The sonorous words, the solemn
appeal for strength under temptation, the pleading for mercy with that
stern, avenging presence who had said, "I, the Lord thy God am a
jealous God," awed him, touched the same chord that Nature touched and
caused an exaltation less exquisite but more inspiring.
The light fell flickering through the leaves of the cotton-woods on the
doctor's gray head. He looked up from his book, for he knew the words
by heart, and his quiet eyes dwelt on the distance swimming in morning
light. His friend, the old servant, stood behind him, a picturesque
figure in fringed buckskin shirt and moccasined feet. He held his
battered hat in his hand, and his head with its spare locks of grizzled
hair was reverently bowed. He neither spoke nor moved. It was Susan's
voice who repeated the creed and breathed out a low "We beseech thee to
hear us, Good Lord."
The tents and the wagons were behind her and back of them the long
green splendors of the prairie. Flecks of sun danced over her figure,
shot back and forth from her skirt to her hair as whiffs of wind caught
the upper branches of the cotton woods. She had been sitting on the
mess chest, but when the reading of the Litany began she slipped to her
knees, and with head inclined answered the responses, her hands lightly
clasped resting against her breast.
David, who had been looking at her, dropped his eyes as from a sight no
man should see. To admire her at this moment, shut away in the
sanctuary of holy thoughts, was a sacrilege. Men and their passions
should stand outside in that sacred hour when a woman is at prayer.
Leff had no such high fancies. He only knew the sight of Susan made
him dumb and drove away all the wits he had. Now she looked so aloof,
so far removed from all accustomed things, that the sense of her
remoteness added gloom to his embarrassment. He twisted a blade of
grass in his freckled hands and wished that the service would soon end.
The cotton-wood leaves made a light, dry pattering as if rain drops
were falling. From the picketed animals, looping their trail ropes
over the grass, came a sound of low, continuous cropping. The hum of
insects swelled and sank, full of sudden life, then drowsily dying away
as though the spurt of energy had faded in the hour's discouraging
languor. The doctor's voice detached itself from this pastoral chorus
intoning the laws that God gave Moses when he was conducting a
stiff-necked and rebellious people through a wilderness:
"Thou shalt do no murder.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery.
"Thou shalt not steal."
And to each command Susan's was the only voice that answered, falling
sweet and delicately clear on the silence:
"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."
Susan praying for power to resist such scarlet sins! It was fantastic
and David wished he dared join his voice to hers and not let her kneel
there alone as if hers was the only soul that needed strengthening.
Susan, the young, the innocent-eyed, the pure.
He had come again the next Sunday--Leff went hunting that morning--and
felt that some day, not so far distant, he would dare to kneel too and
respond. He thought of it when alone, another port that his dreams
were taking him to--his voice and Susan's, the bass and the treble,
strength and sweetness, symbol of the male and the female, united in
one harmonious strain that would stream upward to the throne of the God
who, watching over them, neither slumbered nor slept.
It was on the afternoon of this Sunday, that David started out to walk
to an Indian village, of which a passing emigrant had told him, lying
in a hollow a mile to the westward. He left the camp sunk in the
somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff
asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the shade of
the cotton-woods, and Daddy John lying on the grass among the whiteness
of the week's wash. The hour was hot and breathless, the middle
distance quivering through a heat haze, and the remoter reaches of the
prairie an opalescent blur.
The Indian village was deserted and he wandered through its scattered
lodges of saplings wattled with the peeled bark of willows. The
Indians had not long departed. The ash of their fires was still warm,
tufts of buffalo hair and bright scraps of calico were caught on the
bushes, yet it already had an air of desolation, the bleakness of the
human habitation when the dweller has crossed the threshold and gone.
Shadows were filling the hollow like a thin cold wine rising on the
edges of a cup, when he left it and gained the upper levels. Doubtful
of his course he stood for a moment looking about, conscious of a
curious change in the prospect, a deepening of its colors, a stillness
no longer dreamy, but heavy with suspense. The sky was sapphire clear,
but on the western horizon a rampart of cloud edged up, gray and
ominous, against the blue. As he looked it mounted, unrolled and
expanded, swelling into forms of monstrous aggression. A faint air,
fresh and damp, passed across the grass, and the clouds swept, like
smoke from a world on fire, over the sun.
With the sudden darkening, dread fell on the face of the land. It came
first in a hush, like a holding of the breath, attentive, listening,
expectant. Then this broke and a quiver, the goose-flesh thrill of
fear, stirred across the long ridges. The small, close growing leafage
cowered, a frightened trembling seized the trees. David saw the sweep
of the landscape growing black under the blackness above. He began to
run, the sky sinking lower like a lid shutting down on the earth. He
thought that it was hard to get it on right, for in front of him a line
of blue still shone over which the lid had not yet been pressed down.
The ground was pale with the whitened terror of upturned leaves, the
high branches of the cotton-woods whipping back and forth in wild
agitation. He felt the first large drops, far apart, falling with a
reluctant splash, and he ran, a tiny figure in the tragic and
tremendous scene.
When he reached the camp the rush of the rain had begun. Through a
network of boughs he caught the red eye of the fire and beyond had a
vision of stampeding mules with the men in pursuit. Then crashing
through the bushes he saw why the fire still burned--Susan was holding
an umbrella over it, the rain spitting in the hot ash, a pan of
biscuits balanced in the middle. Behind her the tent, one side
concave, the other bellying out from restraining pegs, leaped and
jerked at its moorings. A rumble of thunder rolled across the sky and
the rain came at them in a slanting wall.
"We're going to have biscuits for supper if the skies fall," Susan
shouted at him, and he had a glimpse of her face, touched with
firelight, laughing under the roof of the umbrella.
A furious burst of wind cut off his answer, the blue glare of lightning
suddenly drenched them, and the crackling of thunder tore a path across
the sky. The umbrella was wrenched from Susan and her wail as the
biscuits fell pierced the tumult with the thin, futile note of human
dole. He had no time to help her, for the tent with an exultant wrench
tore itself free on one side, a canvas wing boisterously leaping, while
the water dived in at the blankets. As he sped to its rescue he had an
impression of the umbrella, handle up, filling with water like a large
black bowl and Susan groveling in the ashes for her biscuits.
"The tent's going," he cried back; "all your things will be soaked.
Never mind the supper, come and help me." And it seemed in this moment
of tumult, that Susan ceased to be a woman to be cared for and
protected and became his equal, fighting with him against the forces of
the primitive world. The traditions of her helplessness were stripped
from her, and he called her to his aid as the cave man called his woman
when the storm fell on their bivouac.
They seized on the leaping canvas, he feeling in the water for the tent
pegs, she snatching at the ropes. He tried to direct her, shouting
orders, which were beaten down in the stuttering explosion of the
thunder. Once a furious gust sent her against him. The wind wrapped
her damp skirts round him and he felt her body soft and pliable. The
grasp of her hands was tight on his arms and close to his ear he heard
her laughing. For a second the quick pulse of the lightning showed her
to him, her hair glued to her cheeks, her wet bodice like a thin web
molding her shoulders, and as the darkness shut her out he again heard
her laughter broken by panting breaths.
"Isn't it glorious," she cried, struggling away from him. "That nearly
took me off my feet. My skirts are all twined round you."
They got the tent down, writhing and leaping like a live thing frantic
to escape. Conquered, a soaked mass on the ground, he pulled the
bedding from beneath it and she grasped the blankets in her arms and
ran for the wagon. She went against the rain, leaning forward on it,
her skirts torn back and whipped up by the wind into curling eddies.
Her head, the hair pressed flat to it, was sleek and wet as a seal's,
and as she ran she turned and looked at him over her shoulder, a wild,
radiant look that he never forgot.
They sat in the wagon and watched the storm. Soaked and tired they
curled up by the rear opening while the rain threshed against the
canvas and driblets of water came running down the sides. The noise
made talking difficult and they drew close together exclaiming as the
livid lightning saturated the scene, and holding their breaths when the
thunder broke and split its furious way over their heads. They watched
it, conscious each in the other of an increased comforting
friendliness, a gracious reassurance where Nature's transports made man
seem so small.
CHAPTER VII
The Vermilion was swollen. With a bluff on one side and a wide bottom
on the other it ran a prosperous, busy stream, brown and ripple-ridged.
The trail lay like a line of tape along the high land, then down the
slope, and across the bottom to the river. Here it seemed to slip
under the current and come up on the other side where it climbed a
steep bank, and thence went on, thin and pale, rising and dropping to
the ridges till the tape became a thread.
They had been waiting a day for the water to fall. Camped in the
bottom under a scattering of trees with the animals grazing on the
juicy river grass and the song of the stream in their ears, it had been
a welcome break in the monotony of the march. There was always a
choice of occupation in these breathing spells. On the first afternoon
everybody had sat on the grass at the tent doors mending. To-day the
men had revolted and wandered off but Susan continued industriously
intent over patches and darns. She sat on a log, her spools and
scissors beside her, billows of homespun and calico about her feet.
As she sewed she sung in a low undervoice, not looking up. Beyond her
in the shade Daddy John mended a piece of harness. Daddy John was not
a garrulous person and when she paused in her sewing to speak to him,
he answered with a monosyllable. It was one of the old man's
self-appointed duties to watch over her when the others were absent.
If he did not talk much to his "Missy" he kept a vigilant eye upon her,
and to-day he squatted in the shade beside her because the doctor and
David had gone after antelope and Leff was off somewhere on an
excursion of his own.
Susan, sewing, her face grave above her work, was not as pretty as
Susan smiling. She drew her eyebrows, thick and black, low over her
eyes with her habitual concentration in the occupation of the moment,
and her lips, pressed together, pouted, but not the disarming baby pout
which, when she was angry, made one forget the sullenness of her brows.
Her looks however, were of that fortunate kind which lose nothing from
the open air and large backgrounds. Dress added but little to such
attractions as she had. Fineness and elegance were not hers, but her
healthy, ripe brownness fitted into this sylvan setting where the city
beauty would have soon become a pale and draggled thing.
The robust blood of her French Canadian forebears was quickening to the
call of the trail. Was it the spirit of her adventurous ancestors that
made her feel a kinship with the wild, an indifference to its
privations, a joy in its rude liberty? She was thinner, but stronger
and more vigorous than when the train had started. She talked less and
yet her whole being seemed more vibrantly alive, her glance to have
gained the gleaming quietness of those whose eyes scan vague horizons.
She who had been heavy on her feet now stepped with a light
noiselessness, and her body showed its full woman's outlines
straightened and lengthened to the litheness of a boy. Her father
noticed that the Gallic strain in her seemed to be crowding out the
other. In Rochester, under city roofs, she had been at least half his.
On the trail, with the arch of the sky above and the illimitable earth
around her, she was throwing back to her mother's people.
Susan herself had no interest in these atavistic developments. She was
a healthy, uncomplicated, young animal, and she was enjoying herself as
she had never done before. Behind her the life of Rochester stretched
in a tranquil perspective of dull and colorless routine. Nothing had
ever happened. From her seventh year her father and Daddy John had
brought her up, made her the pet and plaything of their lonely lives,
rejoiced in her, wondered at her, delighted in the imperious ways she
had learned from their spoiling. There had been teachers to educate
her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much.
Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach
her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort
abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that
she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she
could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs in
some of the fine restaurants in New York City.
But what were the sober pleasures of housekeeping and cooking beside
the rough, deep-living exhilaration of gypsy life on the plains! She
looked back pityingly at those days of stagnant peace, compared the
entertainment to be extracted from embroidering a petticoat frill to
the exultant joy of a ride in the morning over the green swells. Who
would sip tea in the close curtained primness of the parlor when they
could crouch by the camp fire and eat a corn cake baked on the ashes or
drink brown coffee from a tin cup? And her buffalo robe on the ground,
the blanket tucked round her shoulder, the rustling of furtive animal
life in the grass outside the tent wall--was there any comparison
between its comfort and that of her narrow white bed at home, between
the clean sheets of which she had snuggled so luxuriously?
There were other matters of charm and interest in the wilderness,
matters that Susan did not speak about--hardly admitted to herself, for
she was a modest maid. She had never yet had a lover; no man had ever
kissed her or held her hand longer than a cool, impersonal respect
dictated. In Rochester no one had turned to look at the doctor's
daughter as she walked by, for, in truth, there were many girls much
prettier and more piquant than Susan Gillespie. But, nevertheless, she
had had her dreams about the lover that some day was to come and carry
her off under a wreath of orange blossoms and a white veil. She did
not aspire to a struggling hoard of suitors, but she thought it would
be only fair and entirely within the realm of the possible if she had
two; most girls had two.
Now she felt the secret elation that follows on the dream realized.
She did not tell herself that David and Leff were in love with her.
She would have regarded all speculations on such a sacred subject as
low and unmaidenly. But the consciousness of it permeated her being
with a gratified sense of her worth as a woman. It made her feel her
value. Like all girls of her primitive kind she estimated herself not
by her own measure, but by the measure of a man's love for her. Now
that men admired her she felt that she was taking her place as a unit
of importance. Her sense of achievement in this advent of the desiring
male was not alone pleased vanity, it went back through the ages to the
time when woman won her food and clothing, her right to exist, through
the power of her sex, when she whose attraction was strongest had the
best corner by the fire, the choicest titbit from the hunt, and the
strongest man to fight off rivals and keep her for himself.
Her perceptions, never before exercised on these subjects, were
singularly keen. Neither of the young men had spoken a word of love to
her, yet she intuitively knew that they were both under her spell. The
young girl so stupid at her books, who could never learn arithmetic and
found history a bore, had a deeper intelligence in the reading of the
human heart than anyone of the party. More than the doctor who was a
man of education, more than David who thought so much and loved to
read, more than Leff who, if his brain was not sharp, might be supposed
to have accumulated some slight store of experience, more than Daddy
John who was old and had the hoar of worldly knowledge upon him.
Compared to her they were as novices to a nun who has made an excursion
into the world and taken a bite from the apple Eve threw away.
She had no especial liking for Leff. It amused her to torment him, to
look at him with an artless, inquiring stare when he was overwhelmed by
confusion and did not know what to say. When she felt that he had
endured sufficiently she would become merciful, drop her eyes, and end
what was to her an encounter that added a new zest to her sense of
growing power.
With David it was different. Here, too, she felt her mastery, but the
slave was of another fiber. He acknowledged her rule, but he was
neither clumsy nor dumb before her. She respected his intelligence and
felt a secret jealousy of it, as of a part of him which must always be
beyond her influence. His devotion was a very dear and gracious thing
and she was proud that he should care for her. Love had not awakened
in her, but sometimes when she was with him, her admiration softened to
a warm, invading gentleness, a sense of weakness glad of itself, happy
to acknowledge his greater strength. Had David's intuitions been as
true as hers he would have known when these moments came and spoken the
words. But on such matters he had no intuitions, was a mere,
unenlightened male trying to win a woman by standing at a distance and
kneeling in timid worship.
Now sitting, sewing on the log, Susan heard a step on the gravel, and
without looking up gave it a moment's attention and knew it was Leff's.
She began to sing softly, with an air of abstraction. The steps drew
near her, she noted that they lagged as they approached, finally
stopped. She gave her work a last, lingering glance and raised her
eyes slowly as if politeness warred with disinclination, Leff was
standing before her, scowling at her as at an object of especial
enmity. He carried a small tin pail full of wild strawberries. She
saw it at once, but forebore looking at it, keeping her eyes on his
face, up which the red color ran.
"Oh, Leff," she said with careless amiability, "so you've got back."
Leff grunted an agreeing monosyllable and moved the strawberries to a
position where they intruded into the conversation like a punctuation
mark in the middle of a sentence. Her glance dropped to the pail, and
she looked at it saying nothing, amused to thus tease him and covertly
note his hopeless and impotent writhings.
He thrust the pail almost against her knee and she was forced to say:
"What fine strawberries, a whole pail full. Can I have one?"
He nodded and she made a careful choice, giving the pail a little shake
to stir its contents. Leff glared at the top of her head where her
hair was twisted into a rough knot.
"Thank you," she said. "I've found a beauty. You must have been all
afternoon getting so many," and she put the strawberry in her mouth and
picked up her sewing as though that ended the matter.
Leff stood shifting from foot to foot, hoping that she might extend a
helping hand.
"The river's falling," he said at length. "It's gone down two feet.
We can cross this evening."
"Then I must hurry and finish my mending."
She evidently was not going to extend so much as the tip of a finger.
In his bashful misery his mind worked suddenly and unexpectedly.
"I've got to go and get the horses," he said, and, setting the pail on
the log beside her, turned and ran.
But Susan was prepared for this move. It was what she expected.
"Oh, Leff," she called, lazily. "Come back, you've forgotten your
strawberries."
And he had to come back, furious and helpless, he had to come back. He
had not courage for a word, did not dare even to meet her gaze lifted
mildly to his. He snatched up the pail and lurched off and Susan
returned to her sewing, smiling to herself.
"He wanted you to take the berries," said Daddy John, who had been
watching.
"Did he?" she queried with the raised brows of innocent surprise. "Why
didn't he say so?"
"Too bashful!"
"He couldn't expect me to take them unless he offered them."
"I should think you'd have guessed it."
She laughed at this, dropping her sewing and looking at the old man
with eyes almost shut.
"Oh, Daddy John," she gurgled. "How clever you are!"
An hour later they began the crossing. The ford of the Vermilion was
one of the most difficult between the Kaw and the Platte Valley. After
threading the swift, brown current, the trail zigzagged up a clay bank,
channeled into deep ruts by the spring's fleet of prairie schooners.
It would be a hard pull to get the doctor's wagon up and David rode
over with Bess and Ben to double up with the mules. It was late
afternoon and the bottom lay below the sunshine steeped in a still
transparent light, where every tint had its own pure value. The air
was growing cool after a noon of blistering heat and from an unseen
backwater frogs had already begun a hoarse, tentative chanting.
The big wagon had already crossed when David on Bess, with Ben at the
end of a trail rope, started into the stream. Susan watched him go,
his tall, high-shouldered figure astride the mare's broad back, one arm
flung outward with the rope dipping to the current. As the water rose
round his feet, he gave a wild, jubilant shout and went forward,
plowing deeper with every step, his cries swelling over the river's low
song.
Susan, left on the near bank to wait till the wagons were drawn up,
lifted herself into the crotch of a cottonwood tree. The pastoral
simplicity of the scene, the men and animals moving through the
silver-threaded water with the wagons waiting and after the work the
camp to be pitched, exhilarated her with a conviction of true living,
of existence flowing naturally as the stream. And for the moment David
seemed the great figure in hers. With a thrill at her heart she
watched him receding through the open wash of air and water, shouting
in the jubilance of his manhood. The mischievous pleasure of her
coquetries was forgotten, and in a rush of glad confidence she felt a
woman's pride in him. This was the way she should see the man who was
to win her, not in stuffy rooms, not dressed in stiff, ungainly
clothes, not saying unmeaning things to fill the time. This tale of
laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this
struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this passage across
a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her
love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering
cry that flew across the river to David like the call of an animal to
its mate.
She watched them yoking on Bess and Ben and men and animals bracing
their energies for the start. David drove the horses, walking beside
them, the reins held loose in hands that made upward, urging gestures
as the team breasted the ascent. It was a savage pull. The valiant
little mules bent their necks, the horses straining, iron muscled,
hoofs grinding down to the solid clay. The first charge carried them
half way up, then there was a moment of slackened effort, a relaxing,
recuperative breath, and the wagon came to a standstill. Leff ran for
the back, shouting a warning. The branch he thrust under the wheel was
ground to splinters and the animals grew rigid in their effort to
resist the backward drag.
Leff gripped the wheel, cursing, his hands knotted round the spokes,
his back taut and muscle-ridged under the thin shirt. The cracked
voice of Daddy John came from beyond the canvas hood and David's urgent
cries filled the air. The mules, necks outstretched, almost squatting
in the agony of their endeavor, held their ground, but could do no
more. Bess and Ben began to plunge in a welter of slapping harness as
the wheels ground slowly downward.
Susan watched, her neck craned, her eyes staring. Her sentimental
thoughts had vanished. She was one with the struggling men and beasts,
lending her vigor to theirs. Her eyes were on David, waiting to see
him dominate them like a general carrying his troops to victory. She
could see him, arms outstretched, haranguing his horses as if they were
human beings, but not using the whip. A burst of astonishing profanity
came from Leff and she heard him cry:
"Lay it on to 'em, David. What's the matter with you? Beat 'em like
hell."
The mule drivers used a long-lashed whip which could raise a welt on
the thickest hide. David flung the lash afar and brought it down on
Ben's back. The horse leaped as if he had been burned, jerking ahead
of his mate, and rearing in a madness of unaccustomed pain. With a
passionate gesture David threw the whip down.
Susan saw that it was not accidental. She gave a sound of angry
astonishment and stood up in the crotch of the tree.
"David!" she screamed, but he did not hear, and then louder: "Daddy
John, quick, the whip, he's dropped it."
The old man came running round the back of the wagon, quick and eager
as a gnome. He snatched up the whip and let the lash curl outward with
a hissing rush. It flashed like the flickering dart of a snake's
tongue, struck, and the horses sprang forward. It curled again, hung
suspended for the fraction of a moment, then licked along the sweating
flanks, and horses and mules, bowed in a supreme effort, wrenched the
wagon upward. Susan slid from her perch, feeling a sudden apathy, not
only as from a tension snapped, but as the result of a backwash of
disillusion. David was no longer the proud conqueror, the driver of
man and brute. The tide of pride had ebbed.
Later, when the camp was pitched and she was building the fire, he came
to offer her some wood which was scarce on this side of the river. He
knelt to help her, and, his face close to hers, she said in a low voice:
"Why did you throw the whip down?"
He reddened consciously and looked quickly at her, a look that was
apprehensive as if ready to meet an accusation.
"I saw you do it," she said, expecting a denial.
"Yes, I did it," he answered. "I wasn't going to say I didn't."
"Why did you?" she repeated.
"I can't beat a dumb brute when it's doing its best," he said, looking
away from her, shy and ashamed.
"But the wagon would have gone down to the bottom of the hill. It was
going."
"What would that have mattered? We could have taken some of the things
out and carried them up afterwards. When a horse does his best for
you, what's the sense of beating the life out of him when the load's
too heavy. I can't do that."
"Was that why you threw it down?"
He nodded.
"You'd rather have carried the things up?"
"Yes."
She laid the sticks one on the other without replying and he said with
a touch of pleading in his tone:
"You understand that, don't you?"
She answered quickly:
"Oh, of course, perfectly."
But nevertheless she did not quite. Daddy John's action was the one
she really did understand, and she even understood why Leff swore so
violently.
CHAPTER VIII
It was Sunday again and they lay encamped near the Little Blue. The
country was changing, the trees growing thin and scattered and sandy
areas were cropping up through the trail. At night they unfolded the
maps and holding them to the firelight measured the distance to the
valley of the Platte. Once there the first stage of the journey would
be over. When they started from Independence the Platte had shone to
the eyes of their imaginations as a threadlike streak almost as far
away as California. Now they would soon be there. At sunset they
stood on eminences and pointed in its direction, let their mental
vision conjure up Grand Island and sweep forward to the
buffalo-darkened plains and the river sunk in its league-wide bottom,
even peered still further and saw Fort Laramie, a faint, white dot
against the cloudy peaks of mountains.
The afternoon was hot and the camp drowsed. Susan moving away from it
was the one point of animation in the encircling quietude. She was not
in spirit with its lethargy, stepping rapidly in a stirring of light
skirts, her hat held by one string, fanning back and forth from her
hanging hand. Her goal was a spring hidden in a small arroyo that made
a twisted crease in the land's level face. It was a little dell in
which the beauty they were leaving had taken a last stand, decked the
ground with a pied growth of flowers, spread a checkered roof of boughs
against the sun. From a shelf on one side the spring bubbled, clear as
glass, its waters caught and held quivering in a natural basin of rock.
As she slipped over the margin, the scents imprisoned in the sheltered
depths rose to meet her, a sweet, cool tide of fragrance into which she
sank. After the glaring heat above it was like stepping into a
perfumed bath. She lay by the spring, her hands clasped behind her
head, looking up at the trees. The segments of sky between the boughs
were as blue as a turquoise and in this thick intense color the little
leaves seemed as if inlaid. Then a breeze came and the bits of
inlaying shook loose and trembled into silvery confusion. Small
secretive noises came from them as if minute confidences were passing
from bough to bough, and through their murmurous undertone the drip of
the spring fell with a thin, musical tinkle.
Nature was dreaming and Susan dreamed with it. But her dreaming had a
certain definiteness, a distinct thought sustained its diffused
content. She was not self-consciously thinking of her lovers, not
congratulating herself on their acquirement, but the consciousness that
she had achieved them lay graciously round her heart, gave the soft
satisfaction to her musings that comes to one who has accomplished a
duty. With all modesty she felt the gratification of the being who
approaches his Destiny. She had advanced a step in her journey as a
woman.
A hail from the bank above broke upon her reverie, but when she saw it
was David, she sat up smiling. That he should find out her hiding
place without word or sign from her was an action right and fitting.
It was a move in the prehistoric game of flight and pursuit, in which
they had engaged without comprehension and with the intense earnestness
of children at their play. David dropped down beside her, a spray of
wild roses in his hand, and began at once to chide her for thus
stealing away. Did she not remember they were in the country of the
Pawnees, the greatest thieves on the plains? It was not safe to stray
alone from the camp.
Susan smiled:
"The Pawnees steal horses, but I never heard anyone say they stole
girls."
"They steal anything they can get," said the simple young man.
"Oh, David,"--now she was laughing--"so they might steal me if they
couldn't get a horse, or a blanket, or a side of bacon! Next time I go
wandering I'll take the bacon with me and then I'll be perfectly safe."
"Your father wouldn't like it. I've heard him tell you not to go off
this way alone."
"Well, who could I take? I don't like to ask father to go out into the
sun and Daddy John was asleep, and Leff--I didn't see Leff anywhere."
"I was there," he said, dropping his eyes.
"You were under the wagon reading Byron. I wouldn't for the world take
you away from Byron."
She looked at him with a candid smile, her eyes above it dancing with
delighted relish in her teasing.
"I would have come in a minute," he said low, sweeping the surface of
the spring with the spray of roses. Susan's look dwelt on him, gently
thoughtful in its expression in case he should look up and catch it.
"Leave Byron," she said, "leave the Isles of Greece where that lady,
whose name I've forgotten, 'loved and sung,' and walk in the sun with
me just because I wanted to see this spring! Oh, David, I would never
ask it of you."
"You know I would have loved to do it."
"You would have been polite enough to do it. You're always polite."
"I would have done it because I wanted to," said the victim with the
note of exasperation in his voice.
She stretched her hand forward and very gently took the branch of roses
from him.
"Don't tell stories," she said in the cajoling voice used to children.
"This is Sunday."
"I never tell stories," he answered, goaded to open irritation, "on
Sunday or any other day. You know I would have liked to come with you
and Byron could have--have----"
"What?" the branch upright in her hand.
"Gone to the devil!"
"David!" in horror, "I never thought _you'd_ talk that way."
She gave the branch a shake and a shower of drops fell on him.
"There, that's to cool your anger. For I see you're angry though I
haven't got the least idea what it's about."
He made no answer, wounded by her lack of understanding. She moved the
rose spray against her face, inhaling its fragrance, and watching him
through the leaves. After a moment she said with a questioning
inflection:
"You were angry?"
He gave her a quick glance, met her eyes, shining between the duller
luster of the leaves, and suddenly dumb before their innocent
provocation, turned his head away. The sense of his disturbance
trembled on the air and Susan's smile died. She dropped the branch,
trailing it lightly across the water, and wondering at the confusion
that had so abruptly upset her self-confident gayety. Held in
inexplicable embarrassment she could think of nothing to say. It was
he who broke the silence with a change of subject:
"In a few days more we'll be at the Platte. When we started that
seemed as if it was half the journey, didn't it?"
"We'll get there just about a month from the time we left Independence.
Before we started I thought a month out of doors this way would be like
a year. But it really hasn't seemed long at all. I suppose it's
because I've enjoyed it so."
This again stirred him. Was there any hope that his presence might
have been the cause of some small fraction of that enjoyment? He put
out a timid feeler:
"I wonder why you enjoyed it. Perhaps Leff and I amused you a little."
It was certainly a humble enough remark, but it caused a slight
stiffening and withdrawal in the young girl. She instinctively felt
the pleading for commendation and resented it. It was as if a slave,
upon whose neck her foot rested, were to squirm round and recommend
himself to her tolerance. David, trying to extort from her flattering
admissions, roused a determination to keep the slave with his face in
the dust.
"I just like being out of doors," she said carelessly. "And it's all
the more odd as I was always wanting to hurry on and catch up the large
train."
This was a grinding in of the heel. The large train into which the
Gillespies were to be absorbed and an end brought to their independent
journeying, had at first loomed gloomily before David's vision. But of
late it had faded from the conversation and his mind. The present was
so good it must continue, and he had come to accept that first bright
dream of his in which he and Susan were to go riding side by side
across the continent as a permanent reality. His timidity was swept
away in a rush of stronger feeling and he sat erect, looking sharply at
her:
"I thought you'd given up the idea of joining with that train?"
Susan raised the eyebrows of mild surprise:
"Why did you think that?"
"You've not spoken of it for days."
"That doesn't prove anything. There are lots of important things I
don't speak of."
"You ought to have spoken of that."
The virile note of authority was faint in his words, the first time
Susan had ever heard it. Her foot was in a fair way to be withdrawn
from the slave's neck. The color in her cheeks deepened and it was she
who now dropped her eyes.
"We had arranged to join the train long before we left Rochester," she
answered. "Everybody said it was dangerous to travel in a small party.
Dr. Whitman told my father that."
"There's been nothing dangerous so far."
"No, it's later when we get into the country of the Sioux and the
Black-feet. They often attack small parties. It's a great risk that
people oughtn't to run. They told us that in Independence, too."
He made no answer and she eyed him with stealthy curiosity. He was
looking on the ground, his depression apparent. At this evidence of
her ability to bring joy or sorrow to her slave she relented.
"You'll join it, too, won't you?" she said gently.
"I don't know. The big trains move so slowly."
"Oh, you must. It would be dreadfully dreary to separate our parties
after we'd traveled so long together."
"Maybe I will. I haven't thought about it."
"But you _must_ think about it. There's no knowing now when we may
come upon them--almost any day. You don't want to go on and leave us
behind, do you?"
He again made no answer and she stole another quick look at him. This
mastery of a fellow creature was by far the most engrossing pastime
life had offered her. There was something about him, a suggestion of
depths hidden and shut away from her that filled her with the
venturesome curiosity of Fatima opening the cupboards in Bluebeard's
castle.
"We'd feel so lonely if you went on and left us behind with a lot of
strange people," she said, with increasing softness. "We'd miss you
so."
The young man turned quickly on her, leaned nearer, and said huskily:
"Would you?"
The movement brought his face close to hers, and she shrank back
sharply, her hand ready to hold him at a distance. Her laughing
expression changed into one of offended dignity, almost aversion. At
the same time his agitation, which had paled his cheeks and burst
through his shy reserve, filled her with repulsion. For the moment she
disliked him. If he had tried to put his hand upon her she would have
struck him in quick rage at his presumption. He had not the slightest
intention of doing so, but the sudden rush of feeling that her words
had evoked, made him oblivious to the startled withdrawal of her manner.
"Answer me," he said. "Would you miss me? Am I anything to you?"
She leaped to her feet, laughing not quite naturally, for her heart was
beating hard and she had suddenly shrunk within herself, her spirit
alert and angrily defensive in its maiden stronghold.
"Miss you," she said in a matter-of-fact tone that laid sentiment dead
at a blow, "of course I'd miss you," then backed away from him,
brushing off her skirt.
He rose and stood watching her with a lover's hang-dog look. She
glanced at him, read his face and once more felt secure in her
ascendency. Her debonair self-assurance came back with a lowering of
her pulse and a remounting to her old position of condescending
command. But a parting lesson would not be amiss and she turned from
him, saying with a carefully tempered indifference:
"And Leff, too. I'd miss Leff dreadfully. Come, it's time to go."
Before he could answer she was climbing the bank, not looking back,
moving confidently as one who had no need of his aid. He followed her
slowly, sore and angry, his eyes on her figure which flitted in advance
clean-cut against the pale, enormous sky.
He had just caught up with her when from a hollow near the roadside
Leff came into view. He had been after antelope and carried his rifle
and a hunting knife in his belt. During the chase he had come upon a
deserted Pawnee settlement in a depression of the prairie. Susan was
instantly interested and wanted to see it and David stood by, listening
in sulky silence while Leff pointed out the way. The sun was sinking
and they faced it, the young man's indicating finger moving back and
forth across the vagaries of the route. The prairie was cut by long
undulations, naked of verdure, save a spot in the foreground where,
beside a round greenish pool, a single tree lifted thinly clad boughs.
Something of bleakness had crept into the prospect, its gay greenness
was giving place to an austere pallor of tint, a dry economy of
vegetation. The summits of the swells were bare, the streams shrunk in
sandy channels. It was like a face from which youth is withdrawing.
The Indian encampment lay in a hollow, the small wattled huts gathered
on both sides of a runlet that oozed from the slope and slipped between
a line of stepping stones. The hollow was deep for the level country,
the grassed sides sweeping abruptly to the higher reaches above. They
walked through it, examining the neatly made huts and speculating on
the length of time the Indians had left. David remembered that the day
before, the trail had been crossed by the tracks of a village in
transit, long lines graven in the dust by the dragging poles of the
_travaux_. He felt uneasy. The Indians might not be far and they
themselves were at least a mile from the camp, and but one of them
armed. The others laughed and Susan brought the blood into his face by
asking him if he was afraid.
He turned from her, frankly angry and then stood rigid with fixed
glance. On the summit of the opposite slope, black against the yellow
west, were a group of mounted figures. They were massed together in a
solid darkness, but the outlines of the heads were clear, heads across
which bristled an upright crest of hair like the comb of a rooster.
For a long, silent moment the two parties remained immovable, eying
each other across the hollow. Then David edged closer to the girl. He
felt his heart thumping, but his first throttling grip of fear loosened
as his mind realized their helplessness. Leff was the only one with
arms. They must get in front of Susan and tell her to run and the camp
was a mile off! He felt for her hand and heard her whisper:
"Indians--there are six of them."
As she spoke the opposite group broke and figures detached themselves.
Three, hunched in shapeless sack-forms, were squaws. They made no
movement, resting immobile as statues, the sunset shining between the
legs of their ponies. The men spoke together, their heads turning from
the trio below to one another. David gripped the hand he held and
leaned forward to ask Leff for his knife.
"Don't be frightened," he said to Susan. "It's all right."
"I'm not frightened," she answered quietly.
"Your knife," he said to Leff and then stopped, staring. Leff very
slowly, step pressing stealthily behind step, was creeping backward up
the slope. His face was chalk white, his eyes fixed on the Indians.
In his hand he held his rifle ready, and the long knife gleamed in his
belt. For a moment David had no voice wherewith to arrest him, but
Susan had.
"Where are you going?" she said loudly.
It stopped him like a blow. His terrified eyes shifted to her face.
"I wasn't going," he faltered.
"Come back," she said. "You have the rifle and the knife."
He wavered, his loosened lips shaking.
"Back here to us," she commanded, "and give David the rifle."
He crept downward to them, his glance always on the Indians. They had
begun to move forward, leaving the squaws on the ridge. Their approach
was prowlingly sinister, the ponies stepping gingerly down the slope,
the snapping of twigs beneath their hoofs clear in the waiting silence.
As they dipped below the blazing sunset the rider's figures developed
in detail, their bodies bare and bronzed in the subdued light. Each
face, held high on a craning neck, was daubed with vermilion, the high
crest of hair bristling across the shaven crowns. Grimly impassive
they came nearer, not speaking nor moving their eyes from the three
whites. One of them, a young man, naked save for a breech clout and
moccasins, was in the lead. As he approached David saw that his
eyelids were painted scarlet and that a spot of silver on his breast
was a medal hanging from a leathern thong.
At the bottom of the slope they reined up, standing in a group, with
lifted heads staring. The trio opposite stared as fixedly. Behind
Susan's back Leff had passed David the rifle. He held it in one hand,
Susan by the other. He was conscious of her rigidity and also of her
fearlessness. The hand he held was firm. Once, breathing a phrase of
encouragement, he met her eyes, steady and unafraid. All his own fear
had passed. The sense of danger was thrillingly acute, but he felt it
only in its relation to her. Dropping her hand he stepped a pace
forward and said loudly:
"How!"
The Indian with the medal answered him, a deep, gutteral note.
"Pawnee?" David asked.
The same man replied with a word that none of them understood.
"My camp is just here," said David, with a backward jerk of his head.
"There are many men there."
There was no response to this and he stepped back and said to Susan:
"Go slowly up the hill backward and keep your eyes on them. Don't look
afraid."
She immediately began to retreat with slow, short steps. Leff, gasping
with fear, moved with her, his speed accelerating with each moment.
David a few paces in advance followed them. The Indians watched in a
tranced intentness of observation. At the top of the slope the three
squaws sat as motionless as carven images. The silence was profound.
Into it, dropping through it like a plummet through space, came the
report of a rifle. It was distant but clear, and as if the bullet had
struck a taut string and severed it, it cut the tension sharp and life
flowed back. A movement, like a resumed quiver of vitality, stirred
the bronze stillness of the squaws. The Indians spoke together--a low
murmur. David thought he saw indecision in their colloquy, then
decision.
"They're going," he heard Susan say a little hoarse.
"Oh, God, they're going!" Leff gasped, as one reprieved of the death
sentence.
Suddenly they wheeled, and a rush of wild figures, galloped up the
slope. The group of squaws broke and fled with them. The light struck
the bare backs, and sent splinters from the gun barrels and the noise
of breaking bushes was loud under the ponies' feet.
Once again on the road David and Susan stood looking at one another.
Each was pale and short of breath, and it was difficult for the young
girl to force her stiffened lips into a smile. The sunset struck with
fierce brilliancy across the endless plain, and against it, the Indians
bending low, fled in a streak of broken color. In the other direction
Leff's running figure sped toward the camp. From the distance a rifle
shot again sundered the quiet. After silence had reclosed over the
rift a puff of smoke rose in the air. They knew now it was Daddy John,
fearing they had lost the way, showing them the location of the camp.
Spontaneously, without words, they joined hands and started to where
the trail of smoke still hung, dissolving to a thread. The fleeing
figure of Leff brought no comments to their lips. They did not think
about him, his cowardice was as unimportant to them in their mutual
engrossment as his body was to the indifferent self-sufficiency of the
landscape. They knew he was hastening that he might be first in the
camp to tell his own story and set himself right with the others before
they came. They did not care. They did not even laugh at it. They
would do that later when they had returned to the plane where life had
regained its familiar aspect.
Silently, hand in hand, they walked between the low bushes and across
the whitened patches of sandy soil. When the smoke was gone the pool
with the lone tree guided them, the surface now covered with a glaze of
gold. A deep content lay upon them. The shared peril had torn away a
veil that hung between them and through which they had been dodging to
catch glimpses of one another. Susan's pride in her ascendency was
gone. She walked docilely beside the man who, in the great moment, had
not failed. She was subdued, not by the recent peril, but by the fact
that the slave had shown himself the master. David's chance had come,
but the moment was too completely beautiful, the sudden sense of
understanding too lovely for him to break it with words. He wanted to
savor it, to take joy of its delicate sweetness. It was his
voluptuousness to delight in it, not brush its bloom away with a
lover's avowal. He was the idealist, moving in an unexpectedly
realized dream, too exquisite for words to intrude upon. So they
walked onward, looking across the long land, hand clasped in hand.
END OF PART I
PART II
The River
CHAPTER I
The Emigrant Trail struck the Platte at Grand Island. From the bluffs
that walled in the river valley the pioneers could look down on the
great waterway, a wide, thin current, hardly more than a glistening
veil, stretched over the sandy bottom. Sometimes the veil was split by
islands, its transparent tissue passing between them in sparkling
strands as if it were sewn with silver threads. These separated
streams slipped along so quietly, so without noise or hurry, they
seemed to share in the large unconcern of the landscape. It was a
still, unpeopled, spacious landscape, where there was no work and no
time and the morning and the evening made the day.
Many years ago the Frenchmen had given the river its name, Platte,
because of its lack of depths. There were places where a man could
walk across it and not be wet above the middle; and, to make up for
this, there were quicksands stirring beneath it where the same man
would sink in above his waist, above his shoulders, above his head.
The islands that broke its languid currents were close grown with small
trees, riding low in the water like little ships freighted deep with
greenery. Toward evening, looking to the West, with the dazzle of the
sun on the water, they were a fairy fleet drifting on the silver tide
of dreams.
The wide, slow stream ran in the middle of a wide, flat valley. Then
came a line of broken hills, yellowish and sandy, cleft apart by sharp
indentations, and dry, winding arroyos, down which the buffalo trooped,
thirsty, to the river. When the sun sloped westward, shadows lay clear
in the hollows, violet and amethyst and sapphire blue, transparent
washes of color as pure as the rays of the prism. The hills rolled
back in a turbulence of cone and bluff and then subsided, fell away as
if all disturbance must cease before the infinite, subduing calm of The
Great Plains.
Magic words, invoking the romance of the unconquered West, of the
earth's virgin spaces, of the buffalo and the Indian. In their idle
silence, treeless, waterless, clothed as with a dry pale hair with the
feathered yellow grasses, they looked as if the monstrous creatures of
dead epochs might still haunt them, might still sun their horny sides
among the sand hills, and wallow in the shallows of the river. It was
a bit of the early world, as yet beyond the limit of the young nation's
energies, the earth as man knew it when his eye was focused for far
horizons, when his soul did not shrink before vast solitudes.
Against this sweeping background the Indian loomed, ruler of a kingdom
whose borders faded into the sky. He stood, a blanketed figure,
watching the flight of birds across the blue; he rode, a painted
savage, where the cloud shadows blotted the plain, and the smoke of his
lodge rose over the curve of the earth. Here tribe had fought with
tribe, old scores had been wiped out till the grass was damp with
blood, wars of extermination had raged. Here the migrating villages
made a moving streak of color like a bright patch on a map where there
were no boundaries, no mountains, and but one gleaming thread of water.
In the quietness of evening the pointed tops of the tepees showed dark
against the sky, the blur of smoke tarnishing the glow in the West.
When the darkness came the stars shone on this spot of life in the
wilderness, circled with the howling of wolves.
The buffalo, driven from the East by the white man's advance and from
the West by the red man's pursuit, had congregated in these pasture
lands. The herds numbered thousands upon thousands, diminishing in the
distance to black dots on the fawn-colored face of the prairie. Twice
a day they went to the river to drink. Solemnly, in Indian file, they
passed down the trails among the sand hills, worn into gutters by their
continuous hoofs. From the wall of the bluffs they emerged into the
bottom, line after line, moving slowly to the water. Then to the river
edge the valley was black with them, a mass of huge, primordial forms,
from which came bellowings and a faint, sharp smell of musk.
The valley was the highway to the West--the far West, the West of the
great fur companies. It led from the Missouri, whose turbid current
was the boundary between the frontier and the wild, to the second great
barrier, the mountains which blocked the entrance to the unknown
distance, where the lakes were salt and there were deserts rimed with
alkali. It stretched a straight, plain path, from the river behind it
to the peaked white summits in front.
Along it had come a march of men, first a scattered few, then a broken
line, then a phalanx--the winners of the West.
They were bold men, hard men, men who held life lightly and knew no
fear. In the van were the trappers and fur traders with their beaver
traps and their long-barreled rifles. They went far up into the
mountains where the rivers rose snow-chilled and the beavers built
their dams. There were mountain men in fringed and beaded buckskins,
long haired, gaunt and weather scarred; men whose pasts were unknown
and unasked, who trapped and hunted and lived in the lodges with their
squaws. There were black-eyed Canadian voyageurs in otter-skin caps
and coats made of blankets, hardy as Indian ponies, gay and light of
heart, who poled the keel boats up the rivers to the chanting of old
French songs. There were swarthy half-breeds, still of tongue, stolid
and eagle-featured, wearing their blankets as the Indians did,
noiseless in their moccasins as the lynx creeping on its prey.
And then came the emigrants, the first white-covered wagons, the first
white women, looking out from the shade of their sunbonnets. The squaw
wives wondered at their pale faces and bright hair. They came at
intervals, a few wagons crawling down the valley and then the long,
bare road with the buffaloes crossing it to the river and the
occasional red spark of a trapper's camp fire. In '43 came the first
great emigration, when 1,000 people went to Oregon. The Indians, awed
and uneasy, watched the white line of wagon tops. "Were there so many
pale faces as this in the Great Father's country?" one of the chiefs
asked.
Four years later the Mormons emigrated. It was like the moving of a
nation, an exodus of angry fanatics, sullen, determined men burning
with rage at the murder of their prophet, cursing his enemies and
quoting his texts. The faces of women and children peered from the
wagons, the dust of moving flocks and herds rose like a column at the
end of the caravan. Their camps at night were like the camps of the
patriarchs, many women to work for each man, thousands of cattle
grazing in the grass. From the hills above the Indians watched the red
circle of their fires and in the gray dawn saw the tents struck and the
trains "roll out." There were more people from the Great Father's
country, more people each year, till the great year, '49, when the cry
of gold went forth across the land like a trumpet call.
Then the faces on the Emigrant Trail were as the faces on the populous
streets of cities. The trains of wagons were unbroken, one behind the
other, straight to the sunset. A cloud of dust moved with them, showed
their coming far away as they wheeled downward at Grand Island, hid
their departure as they doubled up for the fording of the Platte. All
the faces were set westward, all the eyes were strained to that distant
goal where the rivers flowed over golden beds and the flakes lay yellow
in the prospector's pan.
The Indians watched them, cold at the heart, for the people in the
Great Father's Country were numerous as the sands of the sea, terrible
as an army with banners.
CHAPTER II
The days were very hot. Brilliant, dewless mornings, blinding middays,
afternoons held breathless in the remorseless torrent of light. The
caravan crawled along the river's edge at a footspace, the early
shadows shooting far ahead of it, then dwindling to a blot beneath each
moving body, then slanting out behind. There was speech in the morning
which died as the day advanced, all thought sinking into torpor in the
monotonous glare. In the late afternoon the sun, slipping down the
sky, peered through each wagon's puckered canvas opening smiting the
drivers into lethargy. Propped against the roof supports, hats drawn
low over their brows they slept, the riders pacing on ahead stooped and
silent on their sweating horses. There was no sound but the creaking
of the wheels, and the low whisperings of the river into which, now and
then, an undermined length of sand dropped with a splash.
But in the evening life returned. When the dusk stole out of the hill
rifts and the river flowed thick gold from bank to bank, when the
bluffs grew black against the sunset fires, the little party shook off
its apathy and animation revived. Coolness came with the twilight,
sharpening into coldness as the West burned from scarlet and gold to a
clear rose. The fire, a mound of buffalo chips into which glowing
tunnels wormed, was good. Overcoats and blankets were shaken out and
the fragrance of tobacco was on the air. The recrudescence of ideas
and the need to interchange them came on the wanderers. Hemmed in by
Nature's immensity, unconsciously oppressed by it, they felt the want
of each other, of speech, of sympathy, and crouched about the fire
telling anecdotes of their life "back home," that sounded trivial but
drew them closer in the bond of a nostalgic wistfulness.
One night they heard a drum beat. It came out of the distance faint
but distinct, throbbing across the darkness like a frightened heart
terrified by its own loneliness. The hand of man was impelling it, an
unseen hand, only telling of its presence by the thin tattoo it sent
through the silence. Words died and they sat rigid in the sudden alarm
that comes upon men in the wilderness. The doctor clutched his
daughter's arm, Daddy John reached for his rifle. Then, abruptly as it
had come, it stopped and they broke into suggestions--emigrants on the
road beyond them, an Indian war drum on the opposite bank.
But they were startled, their apprehensions roused. They sat uneasy,
and half an hour later the pad of horses' hoofs and approaching voices
made each man grip his gun and leap to his feet. They sent a hail
through the darkness and an answering voice came back:
"It's all right. Friends."
The figures that advanced into the firelight were those of four men
with a shadowy train of pack mules extending behind them. In fringed
and greasy buckskins, with long hair and swarthy faces, their feet
noiseless in moccasins, they were so much of the wild, that it needed
the words, "Trappers from Laramie," to reassure the doctor and make
Leff put down his rifle.
The leader, a lean giant, bearded to the cheek bones and with lank
locks of hair falling from a coon-skin cap, gave his introduction
briefly. They were a party of trappers en route from Fort Laramie to
St. Louis with the winter's catch of skins. In skirted, leather
hunting shirt and leggings, knife and pistols in the belt and powder
horn, bullet mold, screw and awl hanging from a strap across his chest,
he was the typical "mountain man." While he made his greetings, with
as easy an assurance as though he had dropped in upon a party of
friends, his companions picketed the animals which moved on the
outskirts of the light in a spectral band of drooping forms.
The three other men, were an ancient trapper with a white froth of hair
framing a face, brown and wrinkled as a nut, a Mexican, Indian-dark,
who crouched in his serape, rolled a cigarette and then fell asleep,
and a French Canadian voyageur in a coat made of blanketing and with a
scarlet handkerchief tied smooth over his head. He had a round ruddy
face, and when he smiled, which he did all the time, his teeth gleamed
square and white from the curly blackness of his beard. He got out his
pans and buffalo meat, and was dropping pieces of hardtack into the
spitting tallow when Susan addressed him in his own tongue, the patois
of the province of Quebec. He gave a joyous child's laugh and a
rattling fire of French followed, and then he must pick out for her the
daintiest morsel and gallantly present it on a tin plate, wiped clean
on the grass.
They ate first and then smoked and over the pipes engaged in the
bartering which was part of the plainsman's business. The strangers
were short of tobacco and the doctor's party wanted buffalo skins.
Fresh meat and bacon changed hands. David threw in a measure of corn
meal and the old man--they called him Joe--bid for it with a hind
quarter of antelope. Then, business over, they talked of themselves,
their work, the season's catch, and the life far away across the
mountains where the beaver streams are.
They had come from the distant Northwest, threaded with ice-cold rivers
and where lakes, sunk between rocky bulwarks, mirrored the whitened
peaks. There the three Tetons raised their giant heads and the hollows
were spread with a grassy carpet that ran up the slopes like a
stretched green cloth. There had once been the trapper's paradise
where the annual "rendezvous" was held and the men of the mountains
gathered from creek and river and spent a year's earnings in a wild
week. But the streams were almost empty now and the great days over.
There was a market but no furs. Old Joe could tell what it had once
been like, old Joe who years ago had been one of General Ashley's men.
The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and shook his head.
"The times is dead," he said, with the regret of great days gone,
softened by age which softens all things. "There ain't anything in it
now. When Ashley and the Sublettes and Campbell ran the big companies
it was a fine trade. The rivers was swarmin' with beaver and if the
Indians 'ud let us alone every man of us 'ud come down to rendezvous
with each mule carrying two hundred pound of skins. Them was the
times."
The quick, laughing patter of the voyageur's French broke in on his
voice, but old Joe, casting a dim eye back over the splendid past, was
too preoccupied to mind.
"I've knowed the time when the Powder River country and the rivers that
ran into Jackson's Hole was as thick with beaver as the buffalo range
is now with buffalo. We'd follow up a new stream and where the ground
was marshy we'd know the beaver was there, for they'd throw dams across
till the water'd soak each side, squeezin' through the willow roots.
Then we'd cut a tree and scoop out a canoe, and when the shadders began
to stretch go nosin' along the bank, keen and cold and the sun settin'
red and not a sound but the dip of the paddle. We'd set the
traps--seven to a man--and at sun-up out again in the canoe, clear and
still in the gray of the morning, and find a beaver in every trap."
"Nothin' but buffalo now to count on," said the other man. "And what's
in that?"
David said timidly, as became so extravagant a suggestion, that a
mountain man he had met in Independence told him he thought the buffalo
would be eventually exterminated. The trappers looked at one another,
and exchanged satiric smiles. Even the Canadian stopped in his chatter
with Susan to exclaim in amaze: "Sacré Tonnerre!"
Old Joe gave a lazy cast of his eye at David.
"Why, boy," he said, "if they'd been killin' them varmints since Bunker
Hill they couldn't do no more with 'em than you could with your little
popgun out here on the plains. The Indians has druv 'em from the West
and the white man's druv 'em from the East and it don't make no
difference. I knowed Captain Bonneville and he's told me how he stood
on the top of Scotts Bluffs and seen the country black with
'em--millions of 'em. That's twenty-five years ago and he ain't seen
no more than I have on these plains not two seasons back. Out as far
as your eye could reach, crawlin' with buffalo, till you couldn't see
cow nor bull, but just a black mass of 'em, solid to the horizon."
David felt abashed and the doctor came to his rescue with a question
about Captain Bonneville and Joe forgot his scorn of foolish young men
in reminiscences of that hardy pathfinder.
The old trapper seemed to have known everyone of note in the history of
the plains and the fur trade, or if he didn't know them he said he did
which was just as good. Lying on a buffalo skin, the firelight gilding
the bony ridges of his face, a stub of black pipe gripped between his
broken teeth, he told stories of the men who had found civilization too
cramped and taken to the wilderness. Some had lived and died there,
others come back, old and broken, to rest in a corner of the towns they
had known as frontier settlements. Here they could look out to the
West they loved, strain their dim eyes over the prairie, where the
farmer's plow was tracing its furrow, to the Medicine Way of The Pale
Face that led across the plains and up the long bright river and over
the mountains to the place of the trapper's rendezvous.
He had known Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto who was chief of the Crows,
fought their battles and lived in their villages with a Crow wife. Joe
described him as "a powerful liar," but a man without fear. Under his
leadership the Crows had become a great nation and the frontiersmen
laid it to his door that no Crow had ever attacked a white man except
in self-defense. Some said he was still living in California. Joe
remembered him well--a tall man, strong and fleet-footed as an Indian,
with mighty muscles and a skin like bronze. He always wore round his
neck a charm of a perforated bullet set between two glass beads hanging
from a thread of sinew.
He had known Rose, another white chief of the Crows, an educated man
who kept his past secret and of whom it was said that the lonely places
and the Indian trails were safer for him than the populous ways of
towns. The old man had been one of the garrison in Fort Union when the
terrible Alexander Harvey had killed Isidore, the Mexican, and standing
in the courtyard cried to the assembled men: "I, Alexander Harvey, have
killed the Spaniard. If there are any of his friends who want to take
it up let them come on"; and not a man in the fort dared to go. He had
been with Jim Bridger, when, on a wager, he went down Bear River in a
skin boat and came out on the waters of the Great Salt Lake.
Susan, who had stopped her talk with the voyageur to listen to this
minstrel of the plains, now said:
"Aren't you lonely in those quiet places where there's no one else?"
The old man nodded, a gravely assenting eye on hers:
"Powerful lonely, sometimes. There ain't a mountain man that ain't
felt it, some of 'em often, others of 'em once and so scairt that time
they won't take the risk again. It comes down suddint, like a
darkness--then everything round that was so good and fine, the sound of
the pines and the bubble of the spring and the wind blowing over the
grass, seems like they'd set you crazy. You'd give a year's peltries
for the sound of a man's voice. Just like when some one's dead that
you set a heap on and you feel you'd give most everything you got to
see 'em again for a minute. There ain't nothin' you wouldn't promise
if by doin' it you could hear a feller hail you--just one shout--as he
comes ridin' up the trail."
"That was how Jim Cockrell felt when he prayed for the dog," said the
tall man.
"Did he get the dog?"
He nodded.
"That's what he said anyway. He was took with just such a lonesome
spell once when he was trapping in the Mandans country. He was a pious
critter, great on prayer and communing with the Lord. And he
felt--I've heard him tell about it--just as if he'd go wild if he
didn't get something for company. What he wanted was a dog and you
might just as well want an angel out there with nothin' but the Indian
villages breakin' the dazzle of the snow and you as far away from them
as you could get. But that didn't stop Jim. He just got down and
prayed, and then he waited and prayed some more and 'ud look around for
the dog, as certain he'd come as that the sun 'ud set. Bimeby he fell
asleep and when he woke there was the dog, a little brown varmint,
curled up beside him on the blanket. Jim used to say an angel brought
it. I'm not contradictin', but----"
"Wal," said old Joe, "he most certainly come back into the fort with a
dog. I was there and seen him."
Leff snickered, even the doctor's voice showed the incredulous note
when he asked:
"Where could it have come from?"
The tall man shrugged.
"Don't ask me. All I know is that Jim Cockrell swore to it and I've
heard him tell it drunk and sober and always the same way. He held out
for the angel. I'm not saying anything against that, but whatever it
was it must have had a pretty powerful pull to get a dog out to a
trapper in the dead o' winter."
They wondered over the story, offering explanations, and as they talked
the fire died low and the moon, a hemisphere clean-halved as though
sliced by a sword, rose serene from a cloud bank. Its coming silenced
them and for a space they watched the headlands of the solemn landscape
blackening against the sky, and the river breaking into silvery
disquiet. Separating the current, which girdled it with a sparkling
belt, was the dark blue of an island, thick plumed with trees, a black
and mysterious oblong. Old Joe pointed to it with his pipe.
"Brady's Island," he said. "Ask Hy to tell you about that. He knew
Brady."
The tall man looked thoughtfully at the crested shape.
"That's it," he said. "That's where Brady was murdered."
And then he told the story:
"It was quite a while back in the 30's, and the free trappers and
mountain men brought their pelts down in bull boats and mackinaws to
St. Louis. There were a bunch of men workin' down the river and when
they got to Brady's Island, that's out there in the stream, the water
was so shallow the boats wouldn't float, so they camped on the island.
Brady was one of 'em, a cross-tempered man, and he and another feller'd
been pick-in' at each other day by day since leavin' the mountains.
They'd got so they couldn't get on at all. Men do that sometimes on
the trail, get to hate the sight and sound of each other. You can't
tell why.
"One day the others went after buffalo and left Brady and the man that
hated him alone on the island. When the hunters come home at night
Brady was dead by the camp fire, shot through the head and lyin' stiff
in his blood. The other one had a slick story to tell how Brady
cleanin' his gun, discharged it by accident and the bullet struck up
and killed him. They didn't believe it, but it weren't their business.
So they buried Brady there on the island and the next day each man
shouldered his pack and struck out to foot it to the Missouri.
"It was somethin' of a walk and the ones that couldn't keep up the
stride fell behind. They was all strung out along the river bank and
some of 'em turned off for ways they thought was shorter, and first
thing you know the party was scattered, and the man that hated Brady
was left alone, lopin' along on a side trail that slanted across the
prairie to the country of the Loup Fork Pawnees.
"That was the last they saw of him and it was a long time--news
traveled slow on the plains in them days--before anybody heard of him
for he never come to St. Louis to tell. Some weeks later a party of
trappers passin' near the Pawnee villages on the Loup Fork was hailed
by some Indians and told they had a paleface sick in the chief's tent.
The trappers went there and in the tent found a white man, clear
headed, but dyin' fast.
"It was the man that killed Brady. Lyin' there on the buffalo skin, he
told them all about it--how he done it and the lie he fixed up. Death
was comin', and the way he'd hated so he couldn't keep his hand from
murder was all one now. He wanted to get it off his mind and sorter
square himself. When he'd struck out alone he went on for a spell,
killin' enough game and always hopin' for the sight of the river. Then
one day he caught his gun in a willow tree and it went off, sending the
charge into his thigh and breaking the bone. He was stunned for a
while and then tried to move on, tried to crawl. He crawled for six
days and at the end of the sixth found a place with water and knowed
he'd come to the end of his rope. He tore a strip off his blanket and
tied it to the barrel of his rifle and stuck it end up. The Pawnees
found him there and treated him kind, as them Indians will do
sometimes. They took him to their village and cared for him, but it
was too late. He wanted to see a white man and tell and then die
peaceful, and that's what he done. While the trappers was with him he
died and they buried him there decent outside the village."
The speaker's voice ceased and in the silence the others turned to look
at the black shape of the island riding the gleaming waters like a
funeral barge. In its dark isolation, cut off from the land by the
quiet current, it seemed a fitting theater for the grim tragedy. They
gazed at it, chilled into dumbness, thinking of the murderer moving to
freedom under the protection of his lie, then overtaken, and in his
anguish, alone in the silence, meeting the question of his conscience.
Once more the words came back to David: "Behold, He that keepeth Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep."
Susan pressed against her father, awed and cold, and from old Joe,
stretched in his blanket, came a deep and peaceful snore.
CHAPTER III
Susan was riding alone on the top of the bluffs. The evening before,
three men returning from the Oregon country to the States, had
bivouacked with them and told them that the New York Company was a
day's march ahead, so she had gone to the highlands to reconnoiter.
Just here the bluffs swept inward toward the river, contracting the
bottom to a valley only a few miles in width. Through it the road lay,
a well-worn path crossed as with black stripes by the buffalo runs.
Susan's glance, questing ahead for the New York train, ran to the
distance where the crystal glaze of the stream shrunk to a silver
thread imbedded in green velvet. There was a final point where green
and silver converged in a blinding dazzle, and over this the sun hung,
emerging from a nebulous glare to a slowly defining sphere.
Turning to the left her gaze lost itself in the endlessness of the
plains. It was like looking over the sea, especially at the horizon
where the land was drawn in a straight, purplish line. She could
almost see sails there, small sails dark against a sky that was so
remote its color had faded to an aerial pallor. As the journey had
advanced the influence of these spacious areas had crept upon her. In
the beginning there had been times when they woke in her an unexplained
sadness. Now that was gone and she loved to ride onward, the one item
of life in the silence, held in a new correspondence with the solemn
immensity. It affected her as prayer does the devotee. Under its
inspiration she wondered at old worries and felt herself impervious to
new ones.
With eyes on the purple horizon her thoughts went back to her home in
Rochester with the green shutters and the brasses on the door. How far
away it seemed! Incidents in its peaceful routine were like the
resurgences of memory from a previous incarnation. There was no
tenderness in her thoughts of the past, no sentiment clung to her
recollections of what was now a dead phase of her life. She was
slightly impatient of its contented smallness, of her satisfaction with
such things as her sewing, her cake making, her childish conferences
with girl friends on the vine-grown porch. They seemed strangely
trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present. She was
living now, feeling the force of a rising growth, her horizon widening
to suit that which her eyes sought, the dependence of her sheltered
girlhood gone from her as the great adventure called upon untouched
energies and untried forces. It was like looking back on another girl,
or like a woman looking back on a child.
She had often spoken to David of these past days, and saw that her
descriptions charmed him. He had asked her questions about it and been
surprised that she did not miss the old existence more. To him it had
seemed ideal, and he told her that that was the way he should like to
live and some day would, with just such a servant as Daddy John, and a
few real friends, and a library of good books. His enthusiasm made her
dimly realize the gulf between them--the gulf between the idealist and
the materialist--that neither had yet recognized and that only she, of
the two, instinctively felt. The roughness of the journey irked David.
The toil of the days wore on his nerves. She could see that it pained
him to urge the tired animals forward, to lash them up the stream banks
and drive them past the springs. And only half understanding his
character--fine where she was obtuse, sensitive where she was
invulnerable, she felt the continued withdrawal from him, the
instinctive shrinking from the man who was not her mate.
She had silently acquiesced in the idea, entertained by all the train,
that she would marry him. The doctor had intimated to her that he
wished it and from her childhood her only real religion had been to
please her father. Yet half a dozen times she had stopped the proposal
on the lover's lips. And not from coquetry either. Loth and reluctant
she clung to her independence. A rival might have warmed her to a more
coming-on mood, but there was no rival. When by silence or raillery
she had shut off the avowal she was relieved and yet half despised him
for permitting her to take the lead. Why had he not forced her to
listen? Why had he not seized her and even if she struggled, held her
and made her hear him? She knew little of men, nothing of love, but
she felt, without putting her thoughts even to herself, that to a man
who showed her he was master she would have listened and surrendered.
Riding back to the camp she felt a trifle remorseful about her
behavior. Some day she would marry him--she had got far enough to
admit that--and perhaps it was unkind of her not to let the matter be
settled. And at that she gave a petulant wriggle of her shoulders
under her cotton blouse. Wasn't that his business? Wasn't he the one
to end it, not wait on her pleasure? Were all men so easily governed,
she wondered.
Looking ahead across the grassed bottom land, she saw that the train
had halted and the camp was pitched. She could see David's tall
stooping figure, moving with long strides between the tents and the
wagons. She laid a wager with herself that he would do certain things
and brought her horse to a walk that she might come upon him
noiselessly and watch. Of course he did them, built up her fire and
kindled it, arranged her skillets beside it and had a fresh pail of
water standing close by. It only remained for him to turn as he heard
the sound of her horse's hoofs and run to help her dismount. This, for
some reason, he did not do and she was forced to attract his attention
by saying in a loud voice:
"There was nothing to be seen. Not a sign of a wagon from here to the
horizon."
He looked up from his cooking and said: "Oh, you're back, Susan," and
returned to the pan of buffalo tallow.
This was a strange remissness in the slave and she was piqued.
Contrary to precedent it was her father who helped her off. She slid
into his arms laughing, trying to kiss him as she slipped down, then
standing with her hands on his shoulders told him of her ride. She was
very pretty just then, her hair loose on her sunburned brow, her face
all love and smiles. But David bent over his fire, did not raise his
eyes to the charming tableau, that had its own delightfulness to the
two participants, and that one of the participants intended should show
him how sweet Susan Gillespie could be when she wanted.
All of which trivial matter combined to the making of momentous matter,
momentous in the future for Susan and David. Shaken in her confidence
in the subjugation of her slave, Susan agreed to his suggestion to ride
to the bluffs after supper and see the plains under the full moon. So
salutary had been his momentary neglect of her that she went in a
chastened spirit, a tamed and gentle maiden. They had orders not to
pass out of sight of the twin fires whose light followed them like the
beams of two, watchful, unwinking eyes.
They rode across the bottom to where the bluffs rose, a broken bulwark.
That afternoon Susan had found a ravine up which they could pass. She
knew it by a dwarfed tree, a landmark in the naked country. The
moonlight lay white on the barrier indented with gulfs of darkness,
from each of which ran the narrow path of the buffalo. The line of
hills, silver-washed and black-caverned, was like a rampart thrown
across the entrance to the land of mystery, and they like the pygmy men
of fairyland come to gain an entry. It was David who thought of this.
It reminded him of Jack and the Beanstalk, where Jack, reaching the top
of the vine, found himself in a strange country. Susan did not
remember much about Jack. She was engrossed in recognizing the ravine,
scanning the darkling hollows for the dwarf tree.
It was a steep, winding cut, the tree, halfway up its length, spreading
skeleton arms against a sky clear as a blue diamond. They turned into
it and began a scrambling ascent, the horses' hoofs slipping into the
gutter that the buffaloes had trodden out. It was black dark in the
depths with the moonlight slanting white on the walls.
"We're going now to find the giants," David called over his shoulder.
"Doesn't this seem as if it ought to lead us up right in front of
Blunderbore's Castle?"
"The buffalo runs are like trenches," she answered. "If you don't look
out your horse may fall."
They tied their horses to the tree and climbed on foot to the levels
above. On the earth's floor, unbroken by tree or elevation, there was
not a shadow. It lay silver frosted in the foreground, darkening as it
receded. In the arch above no cloud filmed the clearness, the moon,
huge and mottled, dominating the sky. The silence was penetrating; not
a breath or sound disturbed it. It was the night of the primitive
world, which stirred the savage to a sense of the infinite and made
him, from shell or clay or stone, carve out a God.
Without speaking they walked forward to a jutting point and looked down
on the river. The current sparkled like a dancer's veil spread on the
grass. They could not hear its murmur or see the shifting disturbance
of its shallows, only received the larger impression of the flat,
gleaming tide split by the black shapes of islands. David pointed to
the two sparks of the camp fires.
"See, they're looking after us as if they were alive and knew they
mustn't lose sight of us."
"They look quite red in the moonlight," she answered, interested.
"As if they belonged to man and a drop of human blood had colored them."
"What a queer idea. Let's walk on along the bluffs."
They turned and moved away from the lights, slipping down into the
darkness of the channeled ravines and emerging onto the luminous
highlands. The solemnity of the night, its brooding aloofness in which
they held so small a part, chilled the girl's high self-reliance.
Among her fellows, in a setting of light and action, she was all proud
independence. Deprived of them she suffered a diminution of confidence
and became if not clinging, at least a feminine creature who might some
day be won. Feeling small and lonely she insensibly drew closer to the
man beside her, at that moment the only connecting link between her and
the living world with which her liens were so close.
The lover felt the change in her, knew that the barrier she had so
persistently raised was down. They were no longer mistress and slave,
but man and maid. The consciousness of it gave him a new boldness.
The desperate daring of the suitor carried him beyond his familiar
tremors, his dread of defeat. He thrust his hand inside her arm,
timidly, it is true, ready to snatch it back at the first rebuff. But
there was none, so he kept it there and they walked on. Their talk was
fragmentary, murmured sentences that they forgot to finish, phrases
trailing off into silence as if they had not clear enough wits to fit
words together, or as if words were not necessary when at last their
spirits communed. Responding to the instigation of the romantic hour
the young girl felt an almost sleepy content. The arm on which she
leaned spoke of strength, it symbolized a protection she would have
repudiated in the practical, sustaining sunshine, but that now was very
sweet.
David walked in a vision. Was it Susan, this soft and docile being,
close against his side, her head moving slowly as her eyes ranged over
the magical prospect? He was afraid to speak for fear the spell would
break. He did not know which way his feet bore him, but blindly went
on, looking down at the profile almost against his shoulder, at the
hand under which his had slid, small and white in the transforming
light. His silence was not like hers, the expression of a temporary,
lulled tranquility. He had passed the stage when he could delay to
rejoice in lovely moments. He was no longer the man fearful of the
hazards of his fate, but a vessel of sense ready to overflow at the
slightest touch.
It came when a ravine opened at their feet and she drew herself from
him to gather up her skirts for the descent. Then the tension broke
with a tremulous "Susan, wait!" She knew what was coming and braced
herself to meet it. The mystical hour, the silver-bathed wonder of the
night, a girl's frightened curiosity, combined to win her to a
listening mood. She felt on the eve of a painful but necessary ordeal,
and clasped her hands together to bear it creditably. Through the
perturbation of her mind the question flashed--Did all women feel this
way? and then the comment, How much they had to endure that they never
told!
It was the first time any man had made the great demand of her. She
had read of it in novels and other girls had told her. From this data
she had gathered that it was a happy if disturbing experience. She
felt only the disturbance. Seldom in her life had she experienced so
distracting a sense of discomfort. When David was half way through she
would have given anything to have stopped him, or to have run away.
But she was determined now to stand it, to go through with it and be
engaged as other girls were and as her father wished her to be.
Besides there was nowhere to run to and she could not have stopped him
if she had tried. He was launched, the hour had come, the, to him,
supreme and awful hour, and all the smothered passion and hope and
yearning of the past month burst out.
Once she looked at him and immediately looked away, alarmed and abashed
by his appearance. Even in the faint light she could see his pallor,
the drops on his brow, the drawn desperation of his face. She had
never in her life seen anyone so moved and she began to share his
agitation and wish that anything might happen to bring the interview to
an end.
"Do you care? Do you care?" he urged, trying to look into her face.
She held it down, not so much from modesty as from an aversion to
seeing him so beyond himself, and stammered:
"Of course I care. I always have. Quite a great deal. You know it."
"I never knew," he cried. "I never was sure. Sometimes I thought so
and the next day you were all different. Say you do. Oh, Susan, say
you do."
He was as close to her as he could get without touching her, which, the
question now fairly put, he carefully avoided doing. Taller than she
he loomed over her, bending for her answer, quivering and sweating in
his anxiety.
The young girl was completely subdued by him. She was frightened, not
of the man, but of the sudden revelation of forces which she did not in
the least comprehend and which made him another person. Though she
vaguely understood that she still dominated him, she saw that her
dominion came from something much more subtle than verbal command and
imperious bearing. All confusion and bewildered meekness, she melted,
partly because she had meant to, partly because his vehemence
overpowered her, and partly because she wanted to end the most trying
scene she had ever been through.
"Will you say yes? Oh, you must say yes," she heard him imploring, and
she emitted the monosyllable on a caught breath and then held her head
even lower and felt an aggrieved amazement that it was all so different
from what she had thought it would be.
He gave an exclamation, a sound almost of pain, and drew away from her.
She glanced up at him, her eyes full of scared curiosity, not knowing
what extraordinary thing was going to happen next. He had dropped his
face into his hands, and stood thus for a moment without moving. She
peered at him uneasily, like a child at some one suffering from an
unknown complaint and giving evidence of the suffering in strange ways.
He let his hands fall, closed his eyes for a second, then opened them
and came toward her with his face beatified. Delicately, almost
reverently, he bent down and touched her cheek with his lips.
The lover's first kiss! This, too, Susan had heard about, and from
what she had heard she had imagined that it was a wonderful experience
causing unprecedented joy. She was nearly as agitated as he, but
through her agitation, she realized with keen disappointment that she
had felt nothing in the least resembling joy. An inward shrinking as
the bearded lips came in contact with her skin was all she was
conscious of. There was no rapture, no up-gush of anything lovely or
unusual. In fact, it left her with the feeling that it was a duty duly
discharged and accepted--this that she had heard was one of life's
crises, that you looked back on from the heights of old age and told
your grandchildren about.
They were silent for a moment, the man so filled and charged with
feeling that he had no breath to speak, no words, if he had had breath,
to express the passion that was in him. Inexperienced as she, he
thought it sweet and beautiful that she should stand away from him with
averted face. He gazed at her tenderly, wonderingly, won, but still a
thing too sacred for his touch.
Susan, not knowing what to do and feeling blankly that something
momentous had happened and that she had not risen to it, continued to
look on the ground. She wished he would say something simple and
natural and break the intolerable silence. Finally, she felt that she
could endure it no longer, and putting her hand to her forehead, pushed
back her hair and heaved a deep sigh. He instantly moved to her all
brooding, possessive inquiry. She became alarmed lest he meant to kiss
her again and edged away from him, exclaiming hastily:
"Shall we go back? We've been a long time away."
Without speech he slid his hand into the crook of her arm and they
began to retrace their steps. She could feel his heart beating and the
warm, sinewy grasp of his fingers clasped about hers. The plain was a
silver floor for their feet, in the starless sky the great orb soared.
The girl's embarrassment left her and she felt herself peacefully
settling into a contented acquiescence. She looked up at him, a tall
shape, black between her and the moon. Her glance called his and he
gazed down into her eyes, a faint smile on his lips. His arm was
strong, the way was strangely beautiful, and in the white light and the
stillness, romance walked with them.
There was no talk between them till they reached the horses. In the
darkness of the cleft, hidden from the searching radiance, he drew her
to him, pressing her head with a trembling hand against his heart. She
endured it patiently but was glad when he let her go and she was in the
saddle, a place where she felt more at home than in a man's arms with
her face crushed against his shirt, turning to avoid its rough texture
and uncomfortably conscious of the hardness of his lean breast. She
decided not to speak to him again, for she was afraid he might break
forth into those protestations of love that so embarrassed her.
At the camp Daddy John was up, sitting by the fire, waiting for them.
Of this, too, she was glad. Good-bys between lovers, even if only to
be separated by a night, were apt to contain more of that distressful
talk. She called a quick "Good night" to him, and then dove into her
tent and sat down on the blankets. The firelight shone a nebulous
blotch through the canvas and she stared at it, trying to concentrate
her thoughts and realize that the great event had happened.
"I'm engaged," she kept saying to herself, and waited for the rapture,
which, even if belated, ought surely to come. But it did not. The
words obstinately refused to convey any meaning, brought nothing to her
but a mortifying sensation of being inadequate to a crisis. She heard
David's voice exchanging a low good night with the old man, and she
hearkened anxiously, still hopeful of the thrill. But again there was
none, and she could only gaze at the blurred blot of light and whisper
"I'm engaged to be married," and wonder what was the matter with her
that she should feel just the same as she did before.
CHAPTER IV
The dawn was gray when Susan woke the next morning. It was cold and
she cowered under her blankets, watching the walls of the tent grow
light, and the splinter between the flaps turn from white to yellow.
She came to consciousness quickly, waking to an unaccustomed depression.
At first it had no central point of cause, but was reasonless and
all-permeating like the depression that comes from an unlocated
physical ill. Her body lay limp under the blankets as her mind lay
limp under the unfamiliar cloud. Then the memory of last night took
form, her gloom suddenly concentrated on a reason, and she sunk beneath
it, staring fixedly at the crack of growing light. When she heard the
camp stirring and sat up, her heart felt so heavy that she pressed on
it with her finger tips as if half expecting they might encounter a
strange, new hardness through the soft envelope of her body.
She did not know that this lowering of her crest, hitherto held so high
and carried so proudly, was the first move of her surrender. Her
liberty was over, she was almost in the snare. The strong feminine
principle in her impelled her like an inexorable fate toward marriage
and the man. The children that were to be, urged her toward their
creator. And the unconquered maidenhood that was still hers, recoiled
with trembling reluctance from its demanded death. Love had not yet
come to lead her into a new and wonderful world. She only felt the
sense of strangeness and fear, of leaving the familiar ways to enter
new ones that led through shadows to the unknown.
When she rode out beside her father in the red splendors of the
morning, a new gravity marked her. Already the first suggestion of the
woman--like the first breath of the season's change--was on her face.
The humility of the great abdication was in her eyes.
David left them together and rode away to the bluffs. She followed his
figure with a clouded glance as she told her father her news. Her
depression lessened when he turned upon her with a radiant face.
"If you had searched the world over you couldn't have found a man to
please me better. Seeing David this way, day by day, I've come to know
him through and through and he's true, straight down to the core."
"Of course he is," she answered, tilting her chin with the old
sauciness that this morning looked a little forlorn. "I wouldn't have
liked him if he hadn't been."
"Oh, Missy, you're such a wise little woman."
She glanced at him quickly, recognizing the tone, and to-day, with her
new heavy heart, dreading it.
"Now, father, don't laugh at me. This is all very serious."
"Serious! It's the most serious thing that ever happened in the world,
in our world. And if I was smiling--I'll lay a wager I wasn't
laughing--it was because I'm so happy. You don't know what this means
to me. I've wanted it so much that I've been afraid it wasn't coming
off. And then I thought it must, for it's my girl's happiness and
David's and back of theirs mine."
"Well, then, if you're happy, I'm happy."
This time his smile was not bantering, only loving and tender. He did
not dream that her spirit might not be as glad as his looking from the
height of middle-age to a secured future. He had been a man of a
single love, ignorant save of that one woman, and she so worshiped and
wondered at that there had been no time to understand her. Insulated
in the circle of his own experience he did not guess that to an
unawakened girl the engagement morn might be dark with clouds.
"Love and youth," he said dreamily, "oh, Susan, it's so beautiful!
It's Eden come again when God walked in the garden. And it's so short.
_Eheu Fugaces_! You've just begun to realize how wonderful it is, just
said to yourself 'This is life--this is what I was born for,' when it's
over. And then you begin to understand, to look back, and see that it
was not what you were born for. It was only the beginning that was to
give you strength for the rest--the prairie all trees and flowers, with
the sunlight and the breeze on the grass."
"It sounds like this journey, like the Emigrant Trail."
"That's what I was thinking. The beautiful start gives you courage for
the mountains. The memory of it carries you over the rough places,
gives you life in your heart when you come to the desert where it's all
parched and bare. And you and your companion go on, fighting against
the hardships, bound closer and closer by the struggle. You learn to
give up, to think of the other one, and then you say, '_This_ is what I
was born for,' and you know you're getting near the truth. To have
some one to go through the fight for, to do the hard work for--that's
the reality after the vision and the dream."
The doctor, thinking of the vanished years of his married life, and his
daughter, of the unknown ones coming, were not looking at the subject
from the same points of view.
"I don't think you make it sound very pleasant," she said, from
returning waves of melancholy. "It's nothing but hardships and danger."
"California's at the end of it, dearie, and they say that's the most
beautiful country in the world."
"It will be a strange country," she said wistfully, not thinking alone
of California.
"Not for long."
"Do you think we'll ever feel at home in it?"
The question came in a faint voice. Why did California, once the goal
of her dreams, now seem an alien land in which she always would be a
stranger?
"We're bringing our home with us--carrying some of it on our backs like
snails and the rest in our hearts like all pioneers. Soon it will
cease being strange, when there are children in it. Where there's a
camp fire and a blanket and a child, that's home, Missy."
He leaned toward her and laid his hand on hers as it rested on the
pommel.
"You'll be so happy in it," he said softly.
A sudden surge of feeling, more poignant than anything she had yet
felt, sent a pricking of tears to her eyes. She turned her face away,
longing in sudden misery for some one to whom she could speak plainly,
some one who once had felt as she did now. For the first time she
wished that there was another woman in the train. Her instinct told
her that men could not understand. Unable to bear her father's glad
assurance she said a hasty word about going back and telling Daddy John
and wheeled her horse toward the prairie schooner behind them.
Daddy John welcomed her by pushing up against the roof prop and giving
her two thirds of the driver's seat. With her hands clipped between
her knees she eyed him sideways.
"What do you think's going to happen?" she said, trying to compose her
spirits by teasing him.
"It's going to rain," he answered.
This was not helpful or suggestive of future sympathy, but at any rate,
it was not emotional.
"Now, Daddy John, don't be silly. Would I get off my horse and climb
up beside you to ask you about the weather?"
"I don't know what you'd do, Missy, you've got that wild out here on
the plains--just like a little buffalo calf."
He glimpsed obliquely at her, his old face full of whimsical
tenderness. She smiled bravely and he saw above the smile, her eyes,
untouched by it. He instantly became grave.
"Well, what's goin' to happen?" he asked soberly.
"I'm going to be married."
He raised his eyebrows and gave a whistle.
"That is somethin'! And which is it?"
"What a question! David, of course. Who else could it be?"
"Well, he's the best," he spoke slowly, with considering phlegm. "He's
a first-rate boy as far as he goes."
"I don't think that's a very nice way to speak of him. Can't you say
something better?"
The old man looked over the mules' backs for a moment of inward
cogitation. He was not surprised at the news but he was surprised at
something in his Missy's manner, a lack of the joyfulness, that he,
too, had thought an attribute of all intending brides.
"He's a good boy," he said thoughtfully. "No one can say he ain't.
But some way or other, I'd rather have had a bigger man for you, Missy."
"Bigger!" she exclaimed indignantly. "He's nearly six feet. And girls
don't pick out their husbands because of their height."
"I ain't meant it that way. Bigger in what's in him--can get hold o'
more, got a bigger reach."
"I don't know what you mean. If you're trying to say he's not got a
big mind you're all wrong. He knows more than anybody I ever met
except father. He's read hundreds and hundreds of books."
"That's it--too many books. Books is good enough but they ain't the
right sort 'er meat for a feller that's got to hit out for himself in a
new country. They're all right in the city where you got the butcher
and the police and a kerosene lamp to read 'em by. David 'ud be a fine
boy in the town just as his books is suitable in the town. But this
ain't the town. And the men that are the right kind out here ain't
particularly set on books. I'd 'a' chose a harder feller for you,
Missy, that could have stood up to anything and didn't have no soft
feelings to hamper him."
"Rubbish," she snapped. "Why don't you encourage me?"
Her tone drew his eyes, sharp as a squirrel's and charged with quick
concern. Her face was partly turned away. The curve of her cheek was
devoid of its usual dusky color, her fingers played on her under lip as
if it were a little flute.
"What do you want to be encouraged for?" he said low, as if afraid of
being overheard.
She did not move her head, but looked at the bluffs.
"I don't know," she answered, then hearing her--voice hoarse cleared
her throat. "It's all--so--so--sort of new. I--I--feel--I don't know
just how--I think it's homesick."
Her voice broke in a bursting sob. Her control gone, her pride fell
with it. Wheeling on the seat she cast upon him a look of despairing
appeal.
"Oh, Daddy John," was all she could gasp, and then bent her head so
that her hat might hide the shame of her tears.
He looked at her for a nonplused moment, at her brown arms bent over
her shaken bosom, at the shield of her broken hat. He was thoroughly
discomfited for he had not the least idea what was the matter. Then he
shifted the reins to his left hand and edging near her laid his right
on her knee.
"Don't you want to marry him?" he said gently.
"It isn't that, it's something else."
"What else? You can say anything you like to me. Ain't I carried you
when you were a baby?"
"I don't know what it is." Her voice came cut by sobbing breaths. "I
don't understand. It's like being terribly lonesome."
The old frontiersman had no remedy ready for this complaint. He, too,
did not understand.
"Don't you marry him if you don't like him," he said. "If you want to
tell him so and you're afraid, I'll do it for you."
"I do like him. It's not that."
"Well, then, what's making you cry?"
"Something else, something way down deep that makes everything seem so
far away and strange."
He leaned forward and spat over the wheel, then subsided against the
roof prop.
"Are you well?" he said, his imagination exhausted.
"Yes, very."
Daddy John looked at the backs of the mules. The off leader was a
capricious female by name Julia who required more management and
coaxing than the other five put together, and whom he loved beyond them
all. In his bewildered anxiety the thought passed through his mind
that all creatures of the feminine gender, animal or human, were
governed by laws inscrutable to the male, who might never aspire to
comprehension and could only strive to please and placate.
A footfall struck on his ear and, thrusting his head beyond the canvas
hood, he saw Leff loafing up from the rear.
"Saw her come in here," thought the old man, drawing his head in, "and
wants to hang round and snoop."
Since the Indian episode he despised Leff. His contempt was unveiled,
for the country lout who had shown himself a coward had dared to raise
his eyes to the one star in Daddy John's firmament. He would not have
hidden his dislike if he could. Leff was of the outer world to which
he relegated all men who showed fear or lied.
He turned to Susan:
"Go back in the wagon and lie down. Here comes Leff and I don't want
him to see you."
The young girl thought no better of Leff than he did. The thought of
being viewed in her abandonment by the despised youth made her scramble
into the back of the wagon where she lay concealed on a pile of sacks.
In the forward opening where the canvas was drawn in a circle round a
segment of sky, Daddy John's figure fitted like a picture in a circular
frame. As a step paused at the wheel she saw him lean forward and
heard his rough tones.
"Yes, she's here, asleep in the back of the wagon."
Then Leff's voice, surprised:
"Asleep? Why, it ain't an hour since we started."
"Well, can't she go to sleep in the morning if she wants? Don't you go
to sleep every Sunday under the wagon?"
"Yes, but that's afternoon."
"Mebbe, but everybody's not as slow as you at getting at what they
want."
This appeared to put Susan's retirement in a light that gave rise to
pondering. There was a pause, then came the young man's heavy
footsteps slouching back to his wagon. Daddy John settled down on the
seat.
"I'm almighty glad it weren't him, Missy," he said, over his shoulder.
"I'd 'a' known then why you cried."
CHAPTER V
Late the same day Leff, who had been riding on the bluffs, came down to
report a large train a few miles ahead of them. It was undoubtedly the
long-looked-for New York Company.
The news was as a tonic to their slackened energies. A cheering
excitement ran through the train. There was stir and loud talking.
Its contagion lifted Susan's spirits and with her father she rode on in
advance, straining her eyes against the glare of the glittering river.
Men and women, who daily crowded by them unnoted on city streets, now
loomed in the perspective as objective points of avid interest. No
party Susan had ever been to called forth such hopeful anticipation.
To see her fellows, to talk with women over trivial things, to demand
and give out the human sympathies she wanted and that had lain
withering within herself, drew her from the gloom under which she had
lain weeping in the back of Daddy John's wagon.
They were nearing the Forks of the Platte where the air was dryly
transparent and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a
congeries of broken white dots on the river's edge, they could hear the
bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a
woman's voice.
It was like a handclasp across space. Drawing nearer the sounds of men
and life reached forward to meet them--laughter, the neighing of
horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were
returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness
of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they
still longed for.
The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in
which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day's
labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring,
the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by
the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this
interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the
twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night's bivouac. It
shone bright on the darkness of the grass, a cordon of flame that some
kindly magician had drawn about the resting place of the tired camp.
With the night pressing on its edges it was a tiny nucleus of life
dropped down between the immemorial plains and the ancient river. Home
was here in the pitched tents, a hearthstone in the flame lapping on
the singed grass, humanity in the loud welcome that rose to meet the
newcomers. The doctor had known but one member of the Company, its
organizer, a farmer from the Mohawk Valley. But the men, dropping
their ox yokes and water pails, crowded forward, laughing deep-mouthed
greetings from the bush of their beards, and extending hands as hard as
the road they had traveled.
The women were cooking. Like goddesses of the waste places they stood
around the fires, a line of half-defined shapes. Films of smoke blew
across them, obscured and revealed them, and round about them savory
odors rose. Fat spit in the pans, coffee bubbled in blackened pots,
and strips of buffalo meat impaled on sticks sent a dribble of flame to
the heat. The light was strong on their faces, lifted in greeting,
lips smiling, eyes full of friendly curiosity. But they did not move
from their posts for they were women and the men and the children were
waiting to be fed.
Most of them were middle-aged, or the trail had made them look
middle-aged. A few were very old. Susan saw a face carved with
seventy years of wrinkles mumbling in the framing folds of a shawl.
Nearby, sitting on the dropped tongue of a wagon, a girl of perhaps
sixteen, sat ruminant, nursing a baby. Children were everywhere,
helping, fighting, rolling on the grass. Babies lay on spread blankets
with older babies sitting by to watch. It was the woman's hour. The
day's march was over, but the intimate domestic toil was at its height.
The home makers were concentrated upon their share of the
activities--cooking food, making the shelter habitable, putting their
young to bed.
Separated from Susan by a pile of scarlet embers stood a young girl, a
large spoon in her hand. The light shot upward along the front of her
body, painting with an even red glow her breast, her chin, the under
side of her nose and finally transforming into a coppery cloud the
bright confusion of her hair. She smiled across the fire and said:
"I'm glad you've come. We've been watching for you ever since we
struck the Platte. There aren't any girls in the train. I and my
sister are the youngest except Mrs. Peebles over there," with a nod in
the direction of the girl on the wagon tongue, "and she's married."
The woman beside her, who had been too busy over the bacon pan to raise
her head, now straightened herself, presenting to Susan's eye a face
more buxom and mature but so like that of the speaker that it was
evident they were sisters. A band of gold gleamed on her wedding
finger and her short skirt and loose calico jacket made no attempt to
hide the fact that another baby was soon to be added to the already
well-supplied train. She smiled a placid greeting and her eye, lazily
sweeping Susan, showed a healthy curiosity tempered by the
self-engrossed indifference of the married woman to whom the outsider,
even in the heart of the wilderness, is forever the outsider.
"Lucy'll be real glad to have a friend," she said. "She's lonesome.
Turn the bacon, Lucy, it makes my back ache to bend"; and as the sister
bowed over the frying pan, "move, children, you're in the way."
This was directed to two children who lay on the grass by the fire,
with blinking eyes, already half asleep. As they did not immediately
obey she assisted them with a large foot, clad in a man's shoe. The
movement though peremptory was not rough. It had something of the
quality of the mother tiger's admonishing pats to her cubs, a certain
gentleness showing through force. The foot propelled the children into
a murmurous drowsy heap. One of them, a little girl with a shock of
white hair and a bunch of faded flowers wilting in her tight baby
grasp, looked at her mother with eyes glazed with sleep, a deep look as
though her soul was gazing back from the mysteries of unconsciousness.
"Now lie there till you get your supper," said the mother, having by
gradual pressure pried them out of the way. "And you," to Susan,
"better bring your things over and camp here and use our fire. We've
nearly finished with it."
In the desolation of the morning Susan had wished for a member of her
own sex, not to confide in but to feel that there was some one near,
who, if she did know, could understand. Now here were two. Their
fresh, simple faces on which an artless interest was so naïvely
displayed, their pleasant voices, not cultured as hers was but women's
voices for all that, gave her spirits a lift. Her depression quite
dropped away, the awful lonely feeling, all the more whelming because
nobody could understand it, departed from her. She ran back to the
camp singing and for the first time that day looked at David, whose
presence she had shunned, with her old, brilliant smile.
An hour later and the big camp rested, relaxed in the fading twilight
that lay a yellow thread of separation between the day's high colors
and the dewless darkness of the night. It was like a scene from the
migrations of the ancient peoples when man wandered with a woman, a
tent, and a herd. The barrier of the wagons, with its girdle of fire
sparks, incased a grassy oval green as a lawn. Here they sat in little
groups, collecting in tent openings as they were wont to collect on
summer nights at front gates and piazza steps. The crooning of women
putting babies to sleep fell in with the babblings of the river. The
men smoked in silence. Nature had taught them something of her large
reticence in their day-long companionship. Some few lounged across the
grass to have speech of the pilot, a grizzled mountain man, who had
been one of the Sublette's trappers, and had wise words to say of the
day's travel and the promise of the weather. But most of them lay on
the grass by the tents where they could see the stars through their
pipe smoke and hear the talk of their wives and the breathing of the
children curled in the blankets.
A youth brought an accordion from his stores and, sitting cross-legged
on the ground, began to play. He played "Annie Laurie," and a woman's
voice, her head a black outline against the west, sang the words. Then
there was a clamor of applause, sounding thin and futile in the
evening's suave quietness, and the player began a Scotch reel in the
production of which the accordion uttered asthmatic gasps as though
unable to keep up with its own proud pace. The tune was sufficiently
good to inspire a couple of dancers. The young girl called Lucy rose
with a partner--her brother-in-law some one told Susan--and facing one
another, hand on hip, heads high, they began to foot it lightly over
the blackening grass.
Seen thus Lucy was handsome, a tall, long-limbed sapling of a girl,
with a flaming crest of copper-colored hair and movements as lithe and
supple as a cat's. She danced buoyantly, without losing breath,
advancing and retreating with mincing steps, her face grave as though
the performance had its own dignity and was not to be taken lightly.
Her partner, a tanned and long-haired man, took his part in a livelier
spirit, laughing at her, bending his body grotesquely and growing red
with his caperings. Meanwhile from the tent door the wife looked on
and Susan heard her say to the doctor with whom she had been conferring:
"And when will it be my turn to dance the reel again? There wasn't a
girl in the town could dance it with me."
Her voice was weighted with the wistfulness of the woman whose endless
patience battles with her unwillingness to be laid by.
Susan saw David's fingers feeling in the grass for her hand. She gave
it, felt the hard stress of his grip, and conquered her desire to draw
the hand away. All her coquetry was gone. She was cold and subdued.
The passionate hunger of his gaze made her feel uncomfortable. She
endured it for a space and then said with an edge of irritation on her
voice:
"What are you staring at me for? Is there something on my face?"
He breathed in a roughened voice:
"No, I love you."
Her discomfort increased. Tumult and coldness make uncongenial
neighbors. The man, all passion, and the woman, who has no answering
spark, grope toward each other through devious and unillumined ways.
He whispered again:
"I love you so. You don't understand."
She did not and looked at him inquiringly, hoping to learn something
from his face. His eyes, meeting hers, were full of tears. It
surprised her so that she stared speechlessly at him, her head thrown
back, her lips parted.
He looked down, ashamed of his emotion, murmuring:
"You don't understand. It's so sacred. Some day you will."
She did not speak to him again, but she let him hold her hand because
she thought she ought to and because she was sorry.
CHAPTER VI
The next morning the rain was pouring. The train rolled out without
picturesque circumstance, the men cursing, the oxen, with great heads
swinging under the yokes, plodding doggedly through lakes fretted with
the downpour. Breakfast was a farce; nobody's fire would burn and the
women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two
provident parties had stoves fitted up in their wagons with a joint of
pipe coming out through holes in the canvas. From these, wafts of
smoke issued with jaunty assurance, to be beaten down by the rain,
which swept them fiercely out of the landscape.
There was no perspective, the distance invisible, nearer outlines
blurred. The world was a uniform tint, walls of gray marching in a
slant across a foreground embroidered with pools. Water ran, or
dripped, or stood everywhere. The river, its surface roughened by the
spit of angry drops, ran swollen among its islands, plumed shapes seen
mistily through the veil. The road emerged in oases of mud from long,
inundated spaces. Down the gullies in the hills, following the beaten
buffalo tracks, streams percolated through the grass of the bottom,
feeling their way to the river.
Notwithstanding the weather a goodly company of mounted men rode at the
head of the train. They were wet to the skin and quite indifferent to
it. They had already come to regard the vagaries of the weather as
matters of no import. Mosquitoes and Indians were all they feared. On
such nights many of them slept in the open under a tarpaulin, and when
the water grew deep about them scooped out a drainage canal with a hand
that sleep made heavy.
When the disorder of the camping ground was still in sight, Susan, with
the desire of social intercourse strong upon her, climbed into the
wagon of her new friends. They were practical, thrifty people, and
were as comfortable as they could be under a roof of soaked canvas in a
heavily weighted prairie schooner that every now and then bumped to the
bottom of a chuck hole. The married sister sat on a pile of sacks
disposed in a form that made a comfortable seat. A blanket was spread
behind her, and thus enthroned she knitted at a stocking of gray yarn.
Seen in the daylight she was young, fresh-skinned, and not uncomely.
Placidity seemed to be the dominating note of her personality. It
found physical expression in the bland parting of her hair, drawn back
from her smooth brow, her large plump hands with their deliberate
movements and dimples where more turbulent souls had knuckles, and her
quiet eyes, which turned upon anyone who addressed her a long
ruminating look before she answered. She had an air of almost oracular
profundity but she was merely in the quiescent state of the woman whose
faculties and strength are concentrated upon the coming child. Her
sister called her Bella and the people in the train addressed her as
Mrs. McMurdo.
Lucy was beside her also knitting a stocking, and the husband, Glen
McMurdo, sat in the front driving, his legs in the rain, his upper half
leaning back under the shelter of the roof. He looked sleepy, gave a
grunt of greeting to Susan, and then lapsed against the saddle propped
behind him, his hat pulled low on his forehead hiding his eyes. In
this position, without moving or evincing any sign of life, he now and
then appeared to be roused to the obligations of his position and
shouted a drowsy "Gee Haw," at the oxen.
He did not interfere with the women and they broke into the talk of
their sex, how they cooked, which of their clothes had worn best, what
was the right way of jerking buffalo meat. And then on to personal
matters: where they came from, what they were at home, whither they
were bound. The two sisters were Scotch girls, had come from Scotland
twenty years ago when Lucy was a baby. Their home was Cooperstown
where Glen was a carpenter. He had heard wonderful stories of
California, how there were no carpenters there and people were flocking
in, so he'd decided to emigrate.
"And once he'd got his mind set on it, he had to start," said his wife.
"Couldn't wait for anything but must be off then and there. That's the
way men are."
"It's a hard trip for you," said Susan, wondering at Mrs. McMurdo's
serenity.
"Well, I suppose it is," said Bella, as if she did not really think it
was, but was too lazy to disagree. "I hope I'll last till we get to
Fort Bridger."
"What's at Fort Bridger?"
"It's a big place with lots of trains coming and going and there'll
probably be a doctor among them. And they say it's a good place for
the animals--plenty of grass--so it'll be all right if I'm laid up for
long. But I have my children very easily."
It seemed to the doctor's daughter a desperate outlook and she eyed,
with a combination of pity and awe, the untroubled Bella reclining on
the throne of sacks. The wagon gave a creaking lurch and Bella nearly
lost count of her stitches which made her frown as she was turning the
heel. The lurch woke her husband who pushed back his hat, shouted "Gee
Haw" at the oxen, and then said to his wife:
"You got to cut my hair, Bella. These long tags hanging down round my
ears worry me."
"Yes, dear, as soon as the weather's fine. I'll borrow a bowl from
Mrs. Peeble's mother so that it'll be cut evenly all the way round."
Here there was an interruption, a breathless, baby voice at the wheel,
and Glen leaned down and dragged up his son Bob, wet, wriggling, and
muddy. The little fellow, four years old, had on a homespun shirt and
drawers, both dripping. His hair was a wet mop, hanging in rat tails
to his eyes. Under its thatch his face, pink and smiling, was as fresh
as a dew-washed rose. Tightly gripped in a dirty paw were two wild
flowers, and it was to give these to his mother that he had come.
He staggered toward her, the wagon gave a jolt, and he fell, clasping
her knees and filling the air with the sweetness of his laughter. Then
holding to her arm and shoulder, he drew himself higher and pressed the
flowers close against her nose.
"Is it a bu'full smell?" he inquired, watching her face with eyes of
bright inquiry.
"Beautiful," she said, trying to see the knitting.
"Aren't you glad I brought them?" still anxiously inquiring.
"Very"--she pushed them away. "You're soaked. Take off your things."
And little Bob, still holding his flowers, was stripped to his skin.
"Now lie down," said his mother. "I'm turning the heel."
He obeyed, but turbulently, and with much pretense, making believe to
fall and rolling on the sacks, a naked cherub writhing with laughter.
Finally, his mother had to stop her heel-turning to seize him by one
leg, drag him toward her, roll him up in the end of the blanket and
with a silencing slap say, "There, lie still." This quieted him. He
lay subdued save for a waving hand in which the flowers were still
imbedded and with which he made passes at the two girls, murmuring with
the thick utterance of rising sleep "Bu'full flowers." And in a moment
he slept, curled against his mother, his face angelic beneath the wet
hair.
When Susan came to the giving of her personal data--the few facts
necessary to locate and introduce her--her engagement was the item of
most interest. A love story even on the plains, with the rain
dribbling in through the cracks of the canvas, possessed the old,
deathless charm. The doctor and his philanthropies, on which she would
have liked to dilate, were given the perfunctory attention that
politeness demanded. By himself the good man is dull, he has to have a
woman on his arm to carry weight. David, the lover, and Susan, the
object of his love, were the hero and heroine of the story. Even the
married woman forgot the turning of the heel and fastened her mild gaze
on the young girl.
"And such a handsome fellow," she said. "I said to Lucy--she'll tell
you if I didn't--that there wasn't a man to compare with him in our
train. And so gallant and polite. Last night, when I was heating the
water to wash the children, he carried the pails for me. None of the
men with us do that. They'd never think of offering to carry our
buckets."
Her husband who had appeared to be asleep said:
"Why should they?" and then shouted "Gee Haw" and made a futile kick
toward the nearest ox.
Nobody paid any attention to him and Lucy said:
"Yes, he's very fine looking. And you'd never met till you started on
the trail? Isn't that romantic?"
Susan was gratified. To hear David thus commended by other women
increased his value. If it did not make her love him more, it made her
feel the pride of ownership in a desirable possession. There was
complacence in her voice as she cited his other gifts.
"He's very learned. He's read all kinds of books. My father says it's
wonderful how much he's read. And he can recite poetry, verses and
verses, Byron and Milton and Shakespeare. He often recites to me when
we're riding together."
This acquirement of the lover's did not elicit any enthusiasm from
Bella.
"Well, did you ever!" she murmured absently, counting stitches under
her breath and then pulling a needle out of the heel, "Reciting poetry
on horseback!"
But it impressed Lucy, who, still in the virgin state with fancy free
to range, was evidently inclined to romance:
"When you have a little log house in California and live in it with him
he'll recite poetry to you in the evening after the work's done. Won't
that be lovely?"
Susan made no response. Instead she swallowed silently, looking out on
the rain. The picture of herself and David, alone in a log cabin
somewhere on the other side of the world, caused a sudden return of
yesterday's dejection. It rushed back upon her in a flood under which
her heart declined into bottomless depths. She felt as if actually
sinking into some dark abyss of loneliness and that she must clutch at
her father and Daddy John to stay her fall.
"We won't be alone," with a note of protest making her voice plaintive.
"My father and Daddy John will be there. I couldn't be separated from
them. I'd never get over missing them. They've been with me always."
Bella did not notice the tone, or maybe saw beyond it.
"You won't miss them when you're married," she said with her benign
content. "Your husband will be enough."
Lucy, with romance instead of a husband, agreed to this, and arranged
the programme for the future as she would have had it:
"They'll probably live near you in tents. And you'll see them often;
ride over every few days. But you'll want your own log house just for
yourselves."
This time Susan did not answer, for she was afraid to trust her voice.
She pretended a sudden interest in the prospect while the unbearable
picture rose before her mind--she and David alone, while her father and
Daddy John were somewhere else in tents, somewhere away from her, out
of reach of her hands and her kisses, not there to laugh with her and
tease her and tell her she was a tyrant, only David loving her in an
unintelligible, discomforting way and wanting to read poetry and admire
sunsets. The misery of it gripped down into her soul. It was as the
thought of being marooned on a lone sand bar to a free buccaneer. They
never could leave her so; they never could have the heart to do it.
And anger against David, the cause of it, swelled in her. It was he
who had done it all, trying to steal her away from the dear, familiar
ways and the people with whom she had been so happy.
Lucy looked at her with curious eyes, in which there was admiration and
a touch of envy.
"You must be awfully happy?" she said.
"Awfully," answered Susan, swallowing and looking at the rain.
When she went back to her own wagon she found a consultation in
progress. Daddy John, streaming from every fold, had just returned
from the head of the caravan, where he had been riding with the pilot.
From him he had heard that the New York Company on good roads, in fair
weather, made twenty miles a day, and that in the mountains, where the
fodder was scarce and the trail hard, would fall to a slower pace. The
doctor's party, the cow long since sacrificed to the exigencies of
speed, had been making from twenty-five to thirty. Even with a drop
from this in the barer regions ahead of them they could look forward to
reaching California a month or six weeks before the New York Company.
There was nothing to be gained by staying with them, and, so far, the
small two-wagon caravan had moved with a speed and absence of accident,
which gave its members confidence in their luck and generalship. It
was agreed that they should leave the big train the next morning and
move on as rapidly as they could, stopping at Fort Laramie to repair
the wagons which the heat had warped, shoe the horses, and lay in the
supplies they needed.
Susan heard it with regret. The comfort of dropping back into the
feminine atmosphere, where obvious things did not need explanation, and
all sorts of important communications were made by mental telepathy,
was hard to relinquish. She would once again have to adjust herself to
the dull male perceptions which saw and heard nothing that was not
visible and audible. She would have to shut herself in with her own
problems, getting no support or sympathy unless she asked for it, and
then, before its sources could be tapped, she would have to explain why
she wanted it and demonstrate that she was a deserving object.
And it was hard to break the budding friendship with Lucy and Bella,
for friendships were not long making on the Emigrant Trail. One day's
companionship in the creaking prairie schooner had made the three women
more intimate than a year of city visiting would have done. They made
promises of meeting again in California. Neither party knew its exact
point of destination--somewhere on that strip of prismatic color, not
too crowded and not too wild but that wanderers of the same blood and
birth might always find each other.
In the evening the two girls sat in Susan's tent enjoying a last
exchange of low-toned talk. The rain had stopped. The thick, bluish
wool of clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon was here and
there rent apart, showing strips of lemon-colored sky. The ground was
soaked, the footprints round the wagons filled with water, the ruts
brimming with it. There was a glow of low fires round the camp, for
the mosquitoes were bad and the brown smudge of smoldering buffalo
chips kept them away.
Susan gave the guest the seat of honor--her saddle spread with a
blanket--and herself sat on a pile of skins. The tent had been pitched
on a rise of ground and already the water was draining off. Through
the looped entrance they could see the regular lights of the fires,
spotted on the twilight like the lamps of huge, sedentary glow worms,
and the figures of men recumbent near where the slow smoke spirals
wound languidly up. Above the sweet, moist odor of the rain, the tang
of the burning dung rose, pungent and biting.
Here as the evening deepened they comfortably gossiped, their voices
dropping lower as the camp sunk to rest. They exchanged vows of the
friendship that was to be renewed in California, and then, drawing
closer together, watching the fires die down to sulky red sparks and
the sentinel's figure coming and going on its lonely beat, came to an
exchange of opinions on love and marriage.
Susan was supposed to know most, her proprietorship of David giving her
words the value of experience, but Lucy had most to say. Her tongue
loosened by the hour and a pair of listening ears, she revealed herself
as much preoccupied with all matters of sentiment, and it was only
natural that a love story of her own should be confessed. It was back
in Cooperstown, and he had been an apprentice of Glen's. She hadn't
cared for him at all, judging by excerpts from the scenes of his
courtship he had been treated with unmitigated harshness. But her
words and tones--still entirely scornful with half a continent between
her and the adorer--gave evidence of a regret, of self-accusing, uneasy
doubt, as of one who looks back on lost opportunities. The listener's
ear was caught by it, indicating a state of mind so different from her
own.
"Then you did like him?"
"I didn't like him at all. I couldn't bear him."
"But you seem sorry you didn't marry him."
"Well-- No, I'm not sorry. But"--it was the hour for truth, the still
indifference of the night made a lie seem too trivial for the effort of
telling--"I don't know out here in the wilds whether I'll ever get
anyone else."
CHAPTER VII
By noon the next day the doctor's train had left the New York Company
far behind. Looking back they could see it in gradual stages of
diminishment--a white serpent with a bristling head of scattered
horsemen, then a white worm, its head a collection of dark particles,
then a white thread with a head too insignificant to be deciphered.
Finally it was gone, absorbed into the detailless distance where the
river coiled through the green.
Twenty-four hours later they reached the Forks of the Platte. Here the
trail crossed the South Fork, slanted over the plateau that lay between
the two branches, and gained the North Fork. Up this it passed,
looping round the creviced backs of mighty bluffs, and bearing
northwestward to Fort Laramie. The easy faring of the grassed bottom
was over. The turn to the North Fork was the turn to the mountains.
The slow stream with its fleet of islands would lose its dreamy
deliberateness and become a narrowed rushing current, sweeping round
the bases of sandstone walls as the pioneers followed it up and on
toward the whitened crests of the Wind River Mountains, where the snows
never melted and the lakes lay in the hollows green as jade.
It was afternoon when they reached the ford. The hills had sunk away
to low up-sweepings of gray soil, no longer hiding the plain which lay
yellow against a cobalt sky. As the wagons rolled up on creaking
wheels the distance began to darken with the buffalo. The prospect was
like a bright-colored map over which a black liquid has been spilled,
here in drops, there in creeping streams. Long files flowed from the
rifts between the dwarfed bluffs, unbroken herds swept in a wave over
the low barrier, advanced to the river, crusted its surface, passed
across, and surged up the opposite bank. Finally all sides showed the
moving mass, blackening the plateau, lining the water's edge in an
endless undulation of backs and heads, foaming down the faces of the
sand slopes. Where the train moved they divided giving it right of
way, streaming by, bulls, cows, and calves intent on their own
business, the earth tremulous under their tread. Through breaks in
their ranks the blue and purple of the hills shone startlingly vivid
and beyond the prairie lay like a fawn-colored sea across which dark
shadows trailed.
The ford was nearly a mile wide, a shallow current, in some places only
a glaze, but with shifting sands stirring beneath it. Through the
thin, glass-like spread of water the backs of sand bars emerged, smooth
as the bodies of recumbent monsters. On the far side the plateau
stretched, lilac with the lupine flowers, the broken rear line of the
herd receding across it.
The doctor, feeling the way, was to ride in the lead, his wagon
following with Susan and Daddy John on the driver's seat. It seemed an
easy matter, the water chuckling round the wheels, the mules not wet
above the knees. Half way across, grown unduly confident, the doctor
turned in his saddle to address his daughter when his horse walked into
a quicksand and unseated him. It took them half an hour to drag it
out, Susan imploring that her father come back to the wagon and change
his clothes. He only laughed at her which made her angry. With
frowning brows she saw him mount again, and a dripping, white-haired
figure, set out debonairly for the opposite bank.
The sun was low, the night chill coming on when they reached it. Their
wet clothes were cold upon them and the camp pitching was hurried.
Susan bending over her fire, blowing at it with expanded cheeks and,
between her puffs, scolding at her father, first, for having got wet,
then for having stayed wet, and now for being still wet, was to David
just as charming as any of the other and milder apotheoses of the Susan
he had come to know so well. It merely added a new tang, a fresh spice
of variety, to a personality a less ravished observer might have
thought unattractively masterful for a woman.
Her fire kindled, the camp in shape, she lay down by the little blaze
with her head under a lupine plant. Her wrath had simmered to
appeasement by the retirement of the doctor into his wagon, and David,
glimpsing at her, saw that her eyes, a thread of observation between
black-fringed lids, dwelt musingly on the sky. She looked as if she
might be dreaming a maiden's dream of love. He hazarded a tentative
remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to
the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual
response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her lips. He
watched her as he could when she was not looking at him. A loosened
strand of her hair lay among the lupine roots, one of her hands rested,
brown and upcurled, on a tiny weed its weight had broken. She turned
her head with a nestling movement, drew a deep, soft breath and her
eyelids drooped.
"David," she said in a drowsy voice, "I'm going to sleep. Wake me at
supper time."
He became rigidly quiet. When she had sunk deep into sleep, only her
breast moving with the ebb and flow of her quiet breath, he crept
nearer and drew a blanket over her, careful not to touch her. He
looked at the unconscious face for a moment, then softly dropped the
blanket and stole back to his place ready to turn at the first foot
fall and lift a silencing hand.
It was one of the beautiful moments that had come to him in his wooing.
He sat in still reverie, feeling the dear responsibilities of his
ownership. That she might sleep, sweet and soft, he would work as no
man ever worked before. To guard, to comfort, to protect her--that
would be his life. He turned and looked at her, his sensitive face
softening like a woman's watching the sleep of her child. Susan, all
unconscious, with her rich young body showing in faint curves under the
defining blanket, and her hair lying loose among the roots of the
lupine bush, was so devoid of that imperious quality that marked her
when awake, was so completely a tender feminine thing, with peaceful
eyelids and innocent lips, that it seemed a desecration to look upon
her in such a moment of abandonment. Love might transform her into
this--in her waking hours when her body and heart had yielded
themselves to their master.
David turned away. The sacred thought that some day he would be the
owner of this complex creation of flesh and spirit, so rich, so fine,
with depths unknown to his groping intelligence, made a rush of
supplication, a prayer to be worthy, rise in his heart. He looked at
the sunset through half-shut eyes, sending his desire up to that
unknown God, who, in these wild solitudes, seemed leaning down to
listen:
"Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."
The sun, falling to the horizon like a spinning copper disk, was as a
sign of promise and help. The beauty of the hour stretched into the
future. His glance, shifting to the distance, saw the scattered dots
of the disappearing buffalo, the shadows sloping across the sand hills,
and the long expanse of lupines blotting into a thick foam of lilac
blue.
Susan stirred, and he woke from his musings with a start. She sat up,
the blanket falling from her shoulders, and looking at him with
sleep-filled eyes, smiled the sweet, meaningless smile of a
half-awakened child. Her consciousness had not yet fully returned, and
her glance, curiously clear and liquid, rested on his without
intelligence. The woman in her was never more apparent, her seduction
never more potent. Her will dormant, her bounding energies at low ebb,
she looked a thing to nestle, soft and yielding, against a man's heart.
"Have I slept long?" she said stretching, and then, "Isn't it cold."
"Come near the fire," he answered. "I've built it up while you were
asleep."
She came, trailing the blanket in a languid hand, and sat beside him.
He drew it up about her shoulders and looked into her face. Meeting
his eyes she broke into low laughter, and leaning nearer to him
murmured in words only half articulated:
"Oh, David, I'm so sleepy."
He took her hand, and it stayed unresisting against his palm. She
laughed again, and then yawned, lifting her shoulders with a supple
movement that shook off the blanket.
"It takes such a long time to wake up," she murmured apologetically.
David made no answer, and for a space they sat silent looking at the
sunset. As the mists of sleep dispersed she became aware of his hand
pressure, and the contentment that marked her awakening was marred.
But she felt in a kindly mood and did not withdraw her hand. Instead,
she wanted to please him, to be as she thought he would like her to be,
so she made a gallant effort and said:
"What a wonderful sunset--all yellow to the middle of the sky."
He nodded, looking at the flaming west. She went on:
"And there are little bits of gold cloud floating over it, like the
melted lead that you pour through a key on all Hallowe'en."
He again made no answer, and leaning nearer to spy into his face, she
asked naïvely:
"Don't you think it beautiful?"
He turned upon her sharply, and she drew back discomposed by his look.
"Let me kiss you," he said, his voice a little husky.
He was her betrothed and had never kissed her but once in the
moonlight. It was his right, and after all, conquering the inevitable
repugnance, it did not take long. Caught thus in a yielding mood she
resolved to submit. She had a comforting sense that it was a rite to
which in time one became accustomed. With a determination to perform
her part graciously she lowered her eyelids and presented a dusky
cheek. As his shoulder touched hers she felt that he trembled and was
instantly seized with the antipathy that his emotion woke in her. But
it was too late to withdraw. His arms closed round her and he crushed
her against his chest. When she felt their strength and the beating of
his heart against the unstirred calm of her own, her good resolutions
were swept away in a surge of abhorrence. She struggled for freedom,
repelling him with violent, pushing hands, and exclaiming breathlessly:
"Don't, David! Stop! I won't have it! Don't!"
He instantly released her, and she shrunk away, brushing off the bosom
of her blouse as if he had left dust there. Her face was flushed and
frowning.
"Don't. You mustn't," she repeated, with heated reproof. "I don't
want you to."
David smiled a sheepish smile, looking foolish, and not knowing what to
say. At the sight of his crestfallen expression she averted her eyes,
sorry that she had hurt him but not sufficiently sorry to risk a
repetition of the unpleasant experience. He, too, turned his glance
from her, biting his lip to hide the insincerity of his smile,
irritated at her unmanageableness, and in his heart valuing her more
highly that she was so hard to win. Both were exceedingly conscious,
and with deepened color sat gazing in opposite directions like children
who have had a quarrel.
A step behind them broke upon their embarrassment, saving them from the
necessity of speech. Daddy John's voice came with it:
"Missy, do you know if the keg of whisky was moved? It ain't where I
put it."
She turned with a lightning quickness.
"Whisky! Who wants whisky?"
Daddy John looked uncomfortable.
"Well, the doctor's took sort of cold, got a shiver on him like the
ague, and he thought a nip o' whisky'd warm him up."
She jumped to her feet.
"There!" flinging out the word with the rage of a disregarded prophet,
"a chill! I knew it!"
In a moment all the self-engrossment of her bashfulness was gone. Her
mind had turned on another subject with such speed and completeness
that David's kiss and her anger might have taken place in another world
in a previous age. Her faculties leaped to the sudden call like a
liberated spring, and her orders burst on Daddy John:
"In the back of the wagon, under the corn meal. It was moved when we
crossed the Big Blue. Take out the extra blankets and the medicine
chest. That's in the front corner, near my clothes, under the seat. A
chill--out here in the wilderness!"
David turned to soothe her:
"Don't be worried. A chill's natural enough after such a wetting."
She shot a quick, hard glance at him, and he felt ignominiously
repulsed. In its preoccupation her face had no recognition of him, not
only as a lover but as a human being. Her eyes, under low-drawn brows,
stared for a second into his with the unseeing intentness of inward
thought. Her struggles to avoid his kiss were not half so chilling.
Further solacing words died on his lips.
"It's the worst possible thing that could happen to him. Everybody
knows that"--then she looked after Daddy John. "Get the whisky at
once," she called. "I'll find the medicines."
"Can't I help?" the young man implored.
Without answering she started for the wagon, and midway between it and
the fire paused to cry back over her shoulder:
"Heat water, or if you can find stones heat them. We must get him
warm."
And she ran on.
David looked about for the stones. The "we" consoled him a little, but
he felt as if he were excluded into outer darkness, and at a moment
when she should have turned to him for the aid he yearned to give. He
could not get over the suddenness of it, and watched them forlornly,
gazing enviously at their conferences over the medicine chest, once
straightening himself from his search for stones to call longingly:
"Can't I do something for you over there?"
"Have you the stones?" she answered without raising her head, and he
went back to his task.
In distress she had turned from the outside world, broken every lien of
interest with it, and gone back to her own. The little circle in which
her life had always moved snapped tight upon her, leaving the lover
outside, as completely shut out from her and her concerns as if he had
been a stranger camped by her fire.
CHAPTER VIII
The doctor was ill. The next day he lay in the wagon, his chest
oppressed, fever burning him to the dryness of an autumn leaf. To the
heads that looked upon him through the circular opening with a
succession of queries as to his ailment, he invariably answered that it
was nothing, a bronchial cold, sent to him as a punishment for
disobeying his daughter. But the young men remembered that the journey
had been undertaken for his health, and Daddy John, in the confidential
hour of the evening smoke, told them that the year before an attack of
congestion of the lungs had been almost fatal.
Even if they had not known this, Susan's demeanor would have told them
it was a serious matter. She was evidently wracked by anxiety which
transformed her into a being so distant, and at times so cross, that
only Daddy John had the temerity to maintain his usual attitude toward
her. She would hardly speak to Leff, and to David, the slighting
coldness that she had shown in the beginning continued, holding him at
arm's length, freezing him into stammering confusion. When he tried to
offer her help or cheer her she made him feel like a foolish and
tactless intruder, forcing his way into the place that was hers alone.
He did not know whether she was prompted by a cruel perversity, or held
in an absorption so intense she had no warmth of interest left for
anybody. He tried to explain her conduct, but he could only feel its
effect, wonder if she had grown to dislike him, review the last week in
a search for a cause. In the daytime he hung about the doctor's wagon,
miserably anxious for a word from her. He was grateful if she asked
him to hunt for medicine in the small, wooden chest, or to spread the
blankets to air on the tops of the lupine bushes.
And while she thus relegated him to the outer places where strangers
hovered, a sweetness, so gentle, so caressing, so all pervading that it
made of her a new and lovely creature, marked her manner to the sick
man. There had always been love in her bearing to her father, but this
new tenderness was as though some hidden well of it, sunk deep in the
recesses of her being, had suddenly overflowed. David saw the hardness
of the face she turned toward him transmute into a brooding passion of
affection as she bent over the doctor's bed. The fingers he did not
dare to touch lifted the sick man's hand to her cheek and held it there
while she smiled down at him, her eyes softening with a light that
stirred the lover's soul. The mystery of this feminine complexity awed
him. Would she ever look at him like that? What could he do to make
her? He knew of no other way than by serving her, trying unobtrusively
to lighten her burden, effacing himself, as that seemed to be what she
wanted. And in the night as he lay near the wagon, ready to start at
her call, he thought with exalted hope that some day he might win such
a look for himself.
The doctor was for going on. There was no necessity to stay in camp
because one man happened to wheeze and cough, he said, and anyway, he
could do that just as well when they were moving. So they started out
and crossed the plateau to where the road dropped into the cleft of Ash
Hollow. Here they stopped and held a conference. The doctor was
worse. The interior of the wagon, the sun beating on the canvas roof,
was like a furnace, where he lay sweltering, tossed this way and that
by the jolting wheels. Their dust moved with them, breezes lifting it
and carrying it careening back to them where it mingled with new dust,
hanging dense like a segment of fog in the scene's raw brilliancy.
Ash Hollow looked a darkling descent, the thin pulsations of the little
leaves of ash trees flickering along its sides. The road bent downward
in sharp zigzags, and somewhere below the North Fork ran. The plain
was free, blue clothed and blue vaulted, with "the wonderful winds of
God" flowing between. The conference resulted in a unanimous decision
to halt where they were, and stay in camp till the doctor improved,
moving him from the wagon to a tent.
For four days he lay parched with fever, each breath drawn with a
stifled inner rustling, numerous fine wrinkles traced in a network on
his dried cheeks. Then good care, the open air, and the medicine chest
prevailed. He improved, and Susan turned her face again to the world
and smiled. Such was the changefulness of her mood that her smiles
were as radiant and generously bestowed as her previous demeanor had
been repelling. Even Leff got some of them, and they fell on David
prodigal and warming as the sunshine. Words to match went with them.
On the morning of the day when the doctor's temperature fell and he
could breathe with ease, she said to her betrothed:
"Oh, David, you've been so good, you've made me so fond of you."
It was the nearest she had yet come to the language of lovers. It made
him dizzy; the wonderful look was in his mind.
"You wouldn't let me be good," was all he could stammer. "You didn't
seem as if you wanted me at all."
"Stupid!" she retorted with a glance of beaming reproach, "I'm always
like that when my father's sick."
It was noon of the fifth day that a white spot on the plain told them
the New York Company was in sight. The afternoon was yet young when
the dust of the moving column tarnished the blue-streaked distance.
Then the first wagons came into view, creeping along the winding ribbon
of road. As soon as the advance guard of horsemen saw the camp, pieces
of it broke away and were deflected toward the little group of tents
from which a tiny spiral of smoke went up in an uncoiling, milky skein.
Susan had many questions to answer, and had some ado to keep the
inquirers away from the doctor, who was still too weak to be disturbed.
She was sharp and not very friendly in her efforts to preserve him from
their sympathizing curiosity.
Part of the train had gone by when she heard from a woman who rode up
on a foot-sore nag that the McMurdo's were some distance behind. A
bull boat in which the children were crossing the river had upset, and
Mrs. McMurdo had been frightened and "took faint." The children were
all right--only a wetting--but it was a bad time for their mother to
get such a scare.
"I'm not with the women who think it's all right to take such risks.
Stay at home _then_," she said, giving Susan a sage nod out of the
depths of her sunbonnet.
The news made the young girl uneasy. A new reticence, the "grown-up"
sense of the wisdom of silence that she had learned on the trail, made
her keep her own council. Also, there was no one to tell but her
father, and he was the last person who ought to know. The call of
unaided suffering would have brought him as quickly from his buffalo
skins in the tent as from his bed in the old home in Rochester. Susan
resolved to keep it from him, if she had to stand guard over him and
fight them off. Her philosophy was primitive--her own first, and if,
to save her own, others must be sacrificed, then she would aid in the
sacrifice and weep over its victims, weep, but not yield.
When the train had disappeared into the shadows of Ash Hollow, curses,
shouts, and the cracking of whips rising stormily over its descent, the
white dot of the McMurdo's wagon was moving over the blue and green
distance. As it drew near they could see that Glen walked beside the
oxen, and the small figure of Bob ran by the wheel. Neither of the
women were to be seen. "Lazy and riding," Daddy John commented, spying
at them with his far-sighted old eyes. "Tired out and gone to sleep,"
David suggested. Susan's heart sank and she said nothing. It looked
as if something was the matter, and she nerved herself for a struggle.
When Glen saw them, his shout came through the clear air, keen-edged as
a bird's cry. They answered, and he raised a hand in a gesture that
might have been a beckoning or merely a hail. David leaped on a horse
and went galloping through the bending heads of the lupines to meet
them. Susan watched him draw up at Glen's side, lean from his saddle
for a moment's parley, then turn back. The gravity of his face
increased her dread. He dismounted, looking with scared eyes from one
to the other. Mrs. McMurdo was sick. Glen was glad--he couldn't say
how glad--that it was their camp. He'd camp there with them. His wife
wasn't able to go on.
Susan edged up to him, caught his eye and said stealthily:
"Don't tell my father."
He hesitated.
"They--they--seemed to want him."
"I'll see to that," she answered. "Don't you let him know that
anything's the matter, or I'll never forgive you."
It was a command, and the glance that went with it accented its
authority.
The prairie schooner was now close at hand, and they straggled forward
to meet it, one behind the other, through the brushing of the knee-high
bushes. The child recognizing them ran screaming toward them, his
hands out-stretched, crying out their names. Lucy appeared at the
front of the wagon, climbed on the tongue and jumped down. She was
pale, the freckles on her fair skin showing like a spattering of brown
paint, her flaming hair slipped in a tousled coil to one side of her
head.
"It's you!" she cried. "Glen didn't know whose camp it was till he saw
David. Oh, I'm so glad!" and she ran to Susan, clutched her arm and
said in a hurried lower key, "Bella's sick. She feels terribly bad,
out here in this place with nothing. Isn't it dreadful?"
"I'll speak to her," said Susan. "You stay here."
The oxen, now at the outskirts of the camp, had come to a standstill.
Susan stepping on the wheel drew herself up to the driver's seat.
Bella sat within on a pile of sacks, her elbows on her knees, her
forehead in her hands. By her side, leaning against her, stood the
little girl, blooming and thoughtful, her thumb in her mouth. She
withdrew it and stared fixedly at Susan, then smiled a slow, shy smile,
full of meaning, as if her mind held a mischievous secret. At Susan's
greeting the mother lifted her head.
"Oh, Susan, isn't it a mercy we've found you?" she exclaimed. "We saw
the camp hours ago, but we didn't know it was yours. It's as if God
had delayed you. Yes, my dear, it's come. But I'm not going to be
afraid. With your father it'll be all right."
The young girl said a few consolatory words and jumped down from the
wheel. She was torn both ways. Bella's plight was piteous, but to
make her father rise in his present state of health and attend such a
case, hours long, in the chill, night breath of the open--it might kill
him! She turned toward the camp, vaguely conscious of the men standing
in awkward attitudes and looking thoroughly uncomfortable as though
they felt a vicarious sense of guilt--that the entire male sex had
something to answer for in Bella's tragic predicament. Behind them
stood the doctor's tent, and as her eyes fell on it she saw Lucy's body
standing in the opening, the head and shoulders hidden within the
inclosure. Lucy was speaking with the doctor.
Susan gave a sharp exclamation and stopped. It was too late to
interfere. Lucy withdrew her head and came running back, crying
triumphantly:
"Your father's coming. He says he's not sick at all. He's putting on
his coat."
Following close on her words came the doctor, emerging slowly, for he
was weak and unsteady. In the garish light of the afternoon he looked
singularly white and bleached, like a man whose warm, red-veined life
is dried into a sere grayness of blood and tissue. He was out of
harmony with the glad living colors around him, ghostlike amid the
brightness of the flowering earth and the deep-dyed heaven. He met his
daughter's eyes and smiled.
"Your prisoner has escaped you, Missy."
She tried to control herself, to beat down the surge of anger that
shook her. Meeting him she implored with low-toned urgence:
"Father, you can't do it. Go back. You're too sick."
He pushed her gently away, his smile gone.
"Go back, Missy? The woman is suffering, dear."
"I know it, and I don't care. You're suffering, you're sick. She
should have known better than to come. It's her fault, not ours.
Because she was so foolhardy is no reason why you should be victimized."
His gravity was crossed by a look of cold, displeased surprise, a look
she had not seen directed upon her since once in her childhood when she
had told him a lie.
"I don't want to feel ashamed of you, Missy," he said quietly, and
putting her aside went on to the wagon.
She turned away blinded with rage and tears. She had a dim vision of
David and fled from it, then felt relief at the sight of Daddy John.
He saw her plight, and hooking his hand in her arm took her behind the
tent, where she burst into furious words and a gush of stifled weeping.
"No good," was the old man's consolation. "Do you expect the doctor to
lie comfortable in his blanket when there's some one around with a
pain?"
"Why did she come? Why didn't she stay at home?"
"That ain't in the question," he said, patting her arm; "she's here,
and she's got the pain, and you and I know the doctor."
The McMurdo's prairie schooner rolled off to a place where the lupines
were high, and Glen pitched the tent. The men, not knowing what else
to do to show their sympathy, laid the fires and cleaned the camp.
Then the two younger ones shouldered their rifles and wandered away to
try and get some fresh buffalo meat, they said; but it was obvious that
they felt out of place and alarmed in a situation where those of their
sex could only assume an apologetic attitude and admit the blame.
The children were left to Susan's care. She drew them to the cleared
space about the fires, and as she began the preparations for supper
asked them to help. They took the request very seriously, and she
found a solace in watching them as they trotted up with useless pans,
bending down to see the smile of thanks to which they were accustomed,
and which made them feel proud and important. Once she heard Bob, in
the masterful voice of the male, tell his sister the spoon she was so
triumphantly bringing was not wanted. The baby's joy was stricken from
her, she bowed to the higher intelligence, and the spoon slid from her
limp hand to the ground, while she stood a figure of blank
disappointment. Susan had to set down her pan and call her over, and
kneeling with the soft body clasped close, and the little knees
pressing against her breast, felt some of the anger there melting away.
After that they gathered broken twigs of lupine, and standing afar
threw them at the flames. There was a moment of suspense when they
watched hopefully, and then a sad awakening when the twigs fell about
their feet. They shuffled back, staring down at the scattered leaves
in a stupor of surprise.
Sunset came and supper was ready. Daddy John loomed up above the lip
of Ash Hollow with a load of roots and branches for the night. Lucy
emerged from the tent and sat down by her cup and plate, harrassed and
silent. Glen said he wanted no supper. He had been sitting for an
hour on the pole of David's wagon, mute and round-shouldered in his
dusty homespuns. No one had offered to speak to him. It was he who
had induced the patient woman to follow him on the long journey. They
all knew this was now the matter of his thoughts. His ragged figure
and down-drooped, miserable face were dignified with the tragedy of a
useless remorse. As Lucy passed him he raised his eyes, but said
nothing. Then, as the others drew together round the circle of tin
cups and plates, a groan came suddenly from the tent. He leaped up,
made a gesture of repelling something unendurable, and ran away,
scudding across the plain not looking back. The group round the fire
were silent. But the two children did not heed. With their blond
heads touching, they held their cups close together and argued as to
which one had the most coffee in it.
When the twilight came there was no one left by the fire but Susan and
the children. She gathered them on a buffalo robe and tucked a blanket
round them watching as sleep flowed over them, invaded and subdued them
even while their lips moved with belated, broken murmurings. The
little girl's hand, waving dreamily in the air, brushed her cheek with
a velvet touch, and sank languidly, up-curled like a rose petal. With
heads together and bodies nestled close they slept, exhaling the
fragrance of healthy childhood, two sparks of matter incased in an
envelope of exquisite flesh, pearly tissue upon which life would trace
a pattern not yet selected.
Darkness closed down on the camp, pressing on the edges of the
firelight like a curious intruder. There was no wind, and the mound of
charring wood sent up a line of smoke straight as a thread, which
somewhere aloft widened and dissolved. The stillness of the wilderness
brooded close and deep, stifling the noises of the day. When the
sounds of suffering from the tent tore the airy veil apart, it
shuddered full of the pain, then the torn edges delicately adhered, and
it was whole again. Once Lucy came, haggard and tight-lipped, and
asked Susan to put on water to heat. Bella was terribly sick, the
doctor wouldn't leave her. The other children were nothing to this.
But the Emigrant Trail was molding Lucy. She made no complaints, and
her nerves were steady as a taut string. It was one of the hazards of
the great adventure to be taken as it came.
After she had gone, and the iron kettle was balanced on a bed of heat,
Susan lay down on her blanket. Fear and loathing were on her. For the
first time a shrinking from life and its requirements came coldly over
her, for the first time her glad expectancy knew a check, fell back
before tremendous things blocking the path. Her dread for her father
was submerged in a larger dread--of the future and what it might bring,
of what might be expected of her, of pains and perils once so far away
they seemed as if she would never reach them, now suddenly close to
her, laying a gripping hand on her heart.
Her face was toward the camp, and she could not see on the plain behind
her a moving shadow bearing down on the fire's glow, visible for miles
in that level country. It advanced noiselessly through the swaying
bushes, till, entering the limits of the light, it detached itself from
the darkness, taking the form of a mounted man followed by a pack
animal. The projected rays of red played along the barrel of a rifle
held across the saddle, and struck answering gleams from touches of
metal on the bridle. So soundless was the approach that Susan heard
nothing till a lupine stalk snapped under the horse's hoof. She sat up
and turned. Over the horse's ears she saw a long swarthy face framed
in hanging hair, and the glint of narrowed eyes looking curiously at
her. She leaped to her feet with a smothered cry, Indians in her mind.
The man raised a quick hand, and said:
"It's all right. It's a white man."
He slid off his horse and came toward her. He was so like an Indian,
clad in a fringed hunting shirt and leggings, his movements lithe and
light, his step noiseless, his skin copper dark, that she stood alert,
ready to raise a warning cry. Then coming into the brighter light she
saw he was white, with long red hair hanging from the edge of his cap,
and light-colored eyes that searched her face with a hard look. He was
as wild a figure as any the plains had yet given up, and she drew away
looking fearfully at him.
"Don't be afraid," he said in a deep voice. "I'm the same kind as you."
"Who are you?" she faltered.
"A mountain man. I'll camp with you." Then glancing about, "Where are
the rest of them?"
"They're round somewhere," she answered. "We have sickness here."
"Cholera?" quickly.
She shook her head.
Without more words he went back and picketed his horses, and took the
pack and saddle off. She could see his long, pale-colored figure
moving from darkness into light, and the animals drooping with
stretched necks as their bonds were loosened. When he came back to the
fire he dropped a blanket and laid his gun close to it, then threw
himself down. The rattle of the powder horn and bullet mold he wore
hanging from his shoulder came with the movement. He slipped the strap
off and threw it beside the gun. Then drew one foot up and unfastened
a large spur attached to his moccasined heel. He wore a ragged
otter-skin cap, the animal's tail hanging down on one side. This he
took off too, showing his thick red hair, damp and matted from the heat
of the fur. With a knotted hand he pushed back the locks pressed down
on his forehead. The skin there was untanned and lay like a white band
above the darkness of his face, thin, edged with a fringe of red beard
and with blue eyes set high above prominent cheek bones. He threw his
spur on the other things, and looking up met Susan's eyes staring at
him across the fire.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To California."
"So am I."
She made no answer.
"Were you asleep when I came?"
"No, I was thinking."
A sound of anguish came from the tent, and Susan set her teeth on her
underlip stiffening. He looked in its direction, then back at her.
"What's the matter there?" he asked.
"A child is being born."
He made no comment, swept the background of tents and wagon roofs with
an investigating eye that finally came to a stop on the sleeping
children.
"Are these yours?"
"No, they belong to the woman who is sick."
His glance left them as if uninterested, and he leaned backward to pull
his blanket out more fully. His body, in the sleekly pliant buckskins,
was lean and supple. As he twisted, stretching an arm to draw out the
crumpled folds, the lines of his long back and powerful shoulders
showed the sinuous grace of a cat. He relaxed into easeful full
length, propped on an elbow, his red hair coiling against his neck.
Susan stole a stealthy glance at him. As if she had spoken, he
instantly raised his head and looked into her eyes.
His were clear and light with a singularly penetrating gaze, not bold
but intent, eyes not used to the detailed observation of the peopled
ways, but trained to unimpeded distances and to search the faces of
primitive men. They held hers, seeming to pierce the acquired veneer
of reserve to the guarded places beneath. She felt a slow stir of
antagonism, a defensive gathering of her spirit as against an intruder.
Her pride and self-sufficiency responded, answering to a hurried
summons. She was conscious of a withdrawal, a closing of doors, a
shutting down of her defenses in face of aggression and menace. And
while she rallied to this sudden call-to-arms the strange man held her
glance across the fire. It was she who spoke slowly in a low voice:
"Where do you come from?"
"From Taos, and after that Bent's Fort."
"What is your name?"
"Low Courant."
Then with an effort she turned away and bent over the children. When
she looked back at him he was rolled in his blanket, and with his face
to the fire was asleep.
Lucy came presently for the hot water with a bulletin of progress
growing each moment more direful. Her eyes fell on the sleeping man,
and she said, peering through the steam of the bubbling water:
"Who's that?"
"A strange man."
"From where?"
"Taos, and after that Bent's Fort," Susan repeated, and Lucy forgot him
and ran back to the tent.
There was a gray line in the east when she returned to say the child
was born dying as it entered the world, and Bella was in desperate
case. She fell beside her friend, quivering and sobbing, burying her
face in Susan's bosom. Shaken and sickened by the dreadful night they
clung together holding to each other, as if in a world where love
claimed such a heavy due, where joy realized itself at such exceeding
cost, nothing was left but the bond of a common martyrdom. Yet each of
them, knowing the measure of her pain, would move to the head of her
destiny and take up her heavy engagement without fear, obeying the
universal law.
But now, caught in the terror of the moment, they bowed their heads and
wept together while the strange man slept by the fire.
END OF PART II
PART III
The Mountains
CHAPTER I
Fort Laramie stood where the eastern roots of the mountains start in
toothed reef and low, premonitory sweep from the level of the plains.
Broken chains and spurs edged up toward it. Far beyond, in a faint
aerial distance, the soaring solidity of vast ranges hung on the
horizon, cloudy crests painted on the sky. Laramie Peak loomed closer,
a bold, bare point, gold in the morning, purple at twilight. And the
Black Hills, rock-ribbed and somber, dwarf pines clutching their
lodges, rose in frowning ramparts to the North and West.
It was a naked country, bleak and bitter. In winter it slept under a
snow blanket, the lights of the fort encircled by the binding,
breathless cold. Then the wandering men that trapped and traded with
the Indians came seeking shelter behind the white walls, where the furs
were stacked in storerooms, and the bourgeois' table was hospitable
with jerked meat and meal cakes. When the streams began to stir under
the ice, and a thin green showed along the bottoms, it opened its gates
and the men of the mountains went forth with their traps rattling at
the saddle horn. Later, when the spring was in waking bloom, and each
evening the light stayed longer on Laramie Peak, the Indians came in
migrating villages moving to the summer hunting grounds, and in painted
war parties, for there was a season when the red man, like the Hebrew
kings, went forth to battle.
It was midsummer now, the chalk-white walls of the fort were bathed in
a scorching sunshine, and the nomads of the wilderness met and picked
up dropped threads in its courtyard. It stood up warlike on a rise of
ground with the brown swiftness of a stream hurrying below it. Once
the factors had tried to cultivate the land, but had given it up, as
the Indians carried off the maize and corn as it ripened. So the
short-haired grass grew to the stockade. At this season the
surrounding plain was thick with grazing animals, the fort's own
supply, the ponies of the Indians, and the cattle of the emigrants.
Encampments were on every side, clustering close under the walls,
whence a cannon poked its nose protectingly from the bastion above the
gate. There was no need to make the ring of wagons here. White man
and red camped together, the canvas peaks of the tents showing beside
the frames of lodge poles, covered with dried skins. The pale face
treated his red brother to coffee and rice cakes, and the red brother
offered in return a feast of boiled dog.
Just now the fort was a scene of ceaseless animation. Its courtyard
was a kaleidoscopic whirl of color, shifting as the sun shifted and the
shadow of the walls offered shade. Indians with bodies bare above the
dropped blankets, moved stately or squatted on their heels watching the
emigrants as they bartered for supplies. Trappers in fringed and
beaded leather played cards with the plainsmen in shady corners or
lounged in the cool arch of the gateway looking aslant at the emigrant
girls. Their squaws, patches of color against the walls, sat docile,
with the swarthy, half-breed children playing about their feet. There
were French Canadians, bearded like pirates, full of good humor,
filling the air with their patois, and a few Mexicans, who passed the
days sprawled on serapes and smoking sleepily. Over all the bourgeois
ruled, kindly or crabbedly, according to his make, but always
absolutely the monarch of a little principality.
The doctor's train had reached the fort by slow stages, and now lay
camped outside the walls. Bella's condition had been serious, and they
had crawled up the valley of the North Platte at a snail's pace. The
gradual change in the country told them of their advance--the intrusion
of giant bluffs along the river's edge, the disappearance of the many
lovely flower forms, the first glimpses of parched areas dotted with
sage. From the top of Scotts Bluffs they saw the mountains, and stood,
a way-worn company, looking at those faint and formidable shapes that
blocked their path to the Promised Land. It was a sight to daunt the
most high-hearted, and they stared, dropping ejaculations that told of
the first decline of spirit. Only the sick woman said nothing. Her
languid eye swept the prospect indifferently, her spark of life burning
too feebly to permit of any useless expenditure. It was the strange
man who encouraged them. They would pass the mountains without effort,
the ascent was gradual, South Pass a plain.
The strange man had stayed with them, and all being well, would go on
to Fort Bridger, probably to California, in their company. It was good
news. He was what they needed, versed in the lore of the wilderness,
conversant with an environment of which they were ignorant. The train
had not passed Ash Hollow when he fell into command, chose the camping
grounds, went ahead in search of springs, and hunted with Daddy John,
bringing back enough game to keep them supplied with fresh meat. They
began to rely upon him, to defer to him, to feel a new security when
they saw his light, lean-flanked figure at the head of the caravan.
One morning, as the doctor rode silently beside him, he broke into a
low-toned singing. His voice was a mellow baritone, and the words he
sung, each verse ending with a plaintive burden, were French:
"Il y a longtemps que je t'ai aimé jamais je ne t'oublierai."
Long ago the doctor had heard his wife sing the same words, and he
turned with a start:
"Where did you learn that song?"
"From some voyageur over yonder," nodding toward the mountains. "It's
one of their songs."
"You have an excellent accent, better than the Canadians."
The stranger laughed and addressed his companion in pure and fluent
French.
"Then you're a Frenchman?" said the elder man, surprised.
"Not I, but my people were. They came from New Orleans and went up the
river and settled in St. Louis. My grandfather couldn't speak a
sentence in English when he first went there."
When the doctor told his daughter this he was a little triumphant.
They had talked over Courant and his antecedents, and had some argument
about them, the doctor maintaining that the strange man was a
gentleman, Susan quite sure that he was not. Dr. Gillespie used the
word in its old-fashioned sense, as a term having reference as much to
birth and breeding as to manners and certain, ineradicable instincts.
The gentleman adventurer was not unknown on the plains. Sometimes he
had fled from a dark past, sometimes taken to the wild because the
restraints of civilization pressed too hard upon the elbows of his
liberty.
"He's evidently of French Creole blood," said the doctor. "Many of
those people who came up from New Orleans and settled in St. Louis were
of high family and station."
"Then why should he be out here, dressed like an Indian and wandering
round with all sorts of waifs and strays? I believe he's just the same
kind of person as old Joe, only younger. Or, if he does come from
educated people, there's something wrong about him, and he's had to
come out here and hide."
"Oh, what a suspicious little Missy! Nothing would make me believe
that. He may be rough, but he's not crooked. Those steady,
straight-looking eyes never belonged to any but an honest man. No, my
dear, there's no discreditable past behind him, and he's a gentleman."
"Rubbish!" she said pettishly. "You'll be saying Leff's a gentleman
next."
From which it will be seen that Low Courant had not been communicative
about himself. Such broken scraps of information as he had dropped,
when pieced together made a scanty narrative. His grandfather had been
one of the early French settlers of St. Louis, and his father a
prosperous fur trader there. But why he had cut loose from them he did
not vouchsafe to explain. Though he was still young--thirty
perhaps--it was evident that he had wandered far and for many years.
He knew the Indian trails of the distant Northwest, and spoke the
language of the Black Feet and Crows. He had passed a winter in the
old Spanish town of Santa Fé, and from there joined a regiment of
United States troops and done his share of fighting in the Mexican War.
Now the wanderlust was on him, he was going to California.
"Maybe to settle," he told the doctor. "If I don't wake up some
morning and feel the need to move once more."
When they reached the fort he was hailed joyously by the bourgeois
himself. The men clustered about him, and there were loud-voiced
greetings and much questioning, a rumor having filtered to his old
stamping ground that he had been killed in the siege of the Alamo. The
doctor told the bourgeois that Courant was to go with his train to
California, and the apple-cheeked factor grinned and raised his
eyebrows:
"Vous avez de la chance! He's a good guide. Even Kit Carson, who
conducted the General Fremont, is no better."
The general satisfaction did not extend to Susan. The faint thrill of
antagonism that the man had roused in her persisted. She knew he was a
gain to the party, and said nothing. She was growing rapidly in this
new, toughening life, and could set her own small prejudices aside in
the wider view that each day's experience was teaching her. The
presence of such a man would lighten the burden of work and
responsibility that lay on her father, and whatever was beneficial to
the doctor was accepted by his daughter. But she did not like Low
Courant. Had anyone asked her why she could have given no reason. He
took little notice of any of the women, treating them alike with a
brusque indifference that was not discourteous, but seemed to lump them
as necessary but useless units in an important whole.
The train was the focus of his interest. The acceleration of its
speed, the condition of the cattle, the combination of lightness and
completeness in its make-up were the matters that occupied him. In the
evening hour of rest these were the subjects he talked of, and she
noticed that Daddy John was the person to whom he talked most. With
averted eyes, her head bent to David's murmurings, she was really
listening to the older men. Her admiration was reluctantly evoked by
the stranger's dominance and vigor of will, his devotion to the work he
had undertaken. She felt her own insignificance and David's also, and
chafed under the unfamiliar sensation.
The night after leaving Ash Hollow, as they sat by the fire, David at
her side, the doctor had told Courant of the betrothal. His glance
passed quickly over the two conscious faces, he gave a short nod of
comprehension, and turning to Daddy John, inquired about the condition
of the mules' shoes. Susan reddened. She saw something of
disparagement, of the slightest gleam of mockery, in that short look,
which touched both faces and then turned from them as from the faces of
children playing at a game. Yes, she disliked him, disliked his manner
to Lucy and herself, which set them aside as beings of a lower order,
that had to go with them and be taken care of like the stock, only much
less important and necessary. Even to Bella he was off-hand and
unsympathetic, unmoved by her weakness, as he had been by her
sufferings the night he came. Susan had an idea that he thought
Bella's illness a misfortune, not so much for Bella as for the welfare
of the train.
They had been at the fort now for four days and were ready to move on.
The wagons were repaired, the mules and horses shod, and Bella was
mending, though still unable to walk. The doctor had promised to keep
beside the McMurdos till she was well, then his company would forge
ahead.
In the heat of the afternoon, comfortable in a rim of shade in the
courtyard, the men were arranging for the start the next morning. The
sun beat fiercely on the square opening roofed by the blue of the sky
and cut by the black shadow of walls. In the cooling shade the motley
company lay sprawling on the ground or propped against the doors of the
store rooms. The open space was brilliant with the blankets of
Indians, the bare limbs of brown children, and the bright serapes of
the Mexicans, who were too lazy to move out of the sun. In a corner
the squaws played a game with polished cherry stones which they tossed
in a shallow, saucerlike basket and let drop on the ground.
Susan, half asleep on a buffalo skin, watched them idly. The game
reminded her of the jack-stones of her childhood. Then her eye slanted
to where Lucy stood by the gate talking with a trapper called Zavier
Leroux. The sun made Lucy's splendid hair shine like a flaming nimbus,
and the dark men of the mountains and the plain watched her with
immovable looks. She was laughing, her head drooped sideways. Above
the collar of her blouse a strip of neck, untouched by tan, showed in a
milk-white band. Conscious of the admiring observation, she
instinctively relaxed her muscles into lines of flowing grace, and
lowered her eyes till her lashes shone in golden points against her
freckled cheeks. With entire innocence she spread her little lure,
following an elemental instinct, that, in the normal surroundings of
her present life, released from artificial restraints, was growing
stronger.
Her companion was a voyageur, a half-breed, with coarse black hair
hanging from a scarlet handkerchief bound smooth over his head. He was
of a sinewy, muscular build, his coppery skin, hard black eyes, and
high cheek bones showing the blood of his mother, a Crow squaw. His
father, long forgotten in the obscurity of mountain history, had
evidently bequeathed him the French Canadian's good-humored gayety.
Zavier was a light-hearted and merry fellow, and where he came laughter
sprang up. He spoke English well, and could sing French songs that
were brought to his father's country by the adventurers who crossed the
seas with Jacques Cartier.
The bourgeois, who was aloft on the bastion sweeping the distance with
a field glass, suddenly threw an announcement down on the courtyard:
"Red Feather's village is coming and an emigrant train."
The space between the four walls immediately seethed into a whirlpool
of excitement. It eddied there for a moment, then poured through the
gateway into the long drainlike entrance passage and spread over the
grass outside.
Down the face of the opposite hill, separated from the fort by a narrow
river, came the Indian village, streaming forward in a broken torrent.
Over its barbaric brightness, beads and glass caught the sun, and the
nervous fluttering of eagle feathers that fringed the upheld lances
played above its shifting pattern of brown and scarlet. It descended
the slope in a broken rush, spreading out fanwise, scattered,
disorderly, horse and foot together. On the river bank it paused, the
web of color thickening, then rolled over the edge and plunged in. The
current, beaten into sudden whiteness, eddied round the legs of horses,
the throats of swimming dogs, and pressed up to the edges of the
travaux where frightened children sat among litters of puppies. Ponies
bestrode by naked boys struck up showers of spray, squaws with lifted
blankets waded stolidly in, mounted warriors, feathers quivering in
their inky hair, indifferently splashing them. Here a dog, caught by
the current, was seized by a sinewy hand; there a horse, struggling
under the weight of a travaux packed with puppies and old women, was
grasped by a lusty brave and dragged to shore. The water round them
frothing into silvery turmoil, the air above rent with their cries,
they climbed the bank and made for the camping ground near the fort.
Among the first came a young squaw. Her white doeskin dress was as
clean as snow, barbarically splendid with cut fringes and work of bead
and porcupine quills. Her mien was sedate, and she swayed to her horse
lightly and flexibly as a boy, holding aloft a lance edged with a
flutter of feathers, and bearing a round shield of painted skins.
Beside her rode the old chief, his blanket falling away from his
withered body, his face expressionless and graven deep with wrinkles.
"That's Red Feather and his favorite squaw," said the voice of Courant
at Susan's elbow.
She made no answer, staring at the Indian girl, who was handsome and
young, younger than she.
"And look," came the voice again, "there are the emigrants."
A long column of wagons had crested the summit and was rolling down the
slope. They were in single file, hood behind hood, the drivers,
bearded as cave men, walking by the oxen. The line moved steadily,
without sound or hurry, as if directed by a single intelligence
possessed of a single idea. It was not a congeries of separated
particles, but a connected whole. As it wound down the face of the
hill, it suggested a vast Silurian monster, each wagon top a vertebra,
crawling forward with definite purpose.
"That's the way they're coming," said the voice of the strange man.
"Slow but steady, an endless line of them."
"Who?" said Susan, answering him for the first time.
"The white men. They're creeping along out of their country into this,
pushing the frontier forward every year, and going on ahead of it with
their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train
comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scattered and broken,
going every way like a lot of glass beads rolling down the hill. This
comes slow, but it's steady and sure as fate."
She thought for a moment, watching the emigrants, and then said:
"It moves like soldiers."
"Conquerors. That's what they are. They're going to roll over
everything--crush them out."
"Over the Indians?"
"That's it. Drive 'em away into the cracks of the mountains, wipe them
out the way the trappers are wiping out the beaver."
"Cruel!" she said hotly. "I don't believe it."
"Cruel?" he gave her a look of half-contemptuous amusement. "Maybe so,
but why should you blame them for that? Aren't you cruel when you kill
an antelope or a deer for supper? They're not doing you any harm, but
you just happen to be hungry. Well, those fellers are hungry--land
hungry--and they've come for the Indian's land. The whole world's
cruel. You know it, but you don't like to think so, so you say it
isn't. You're just lying because you're afraid of the truth."
She looked angrily at him and met the gray eyes. In the center of each
iris was a dot of pupil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to
Susan like the heads of black pins. "That's exactly what he'd say,"
she thought; "he's no better than a savage." What she said was:
"I don't agree with you at all."
"I don't expect you to," he answered, and making an ironical bow turned
on his heel and swung off.
The next morning, in the pallor of the dawn, they started, rolling out
into a gray country with the keen-edged cold of early day in the air,
and Laramie Peak, gold tipped, before them. As the sky brightened and
the prospect began to take on warmer hues, they looked ahead toward the
profiles of the mountains and thought of the journey to come. At this
hour of low vitality it seemed enormous, and they paced forward a
silent, lifeless caravan, the hoof beats sounding hollow on the beaten
track.
Then from behind them came a sound of singing, a man's voice caroling
in the dawn. Both girls wheeled and saw Zavier Leroux ambling after
them on his rough-haired pony, the pack horse behind. He waved his
hand and shouted across the silence:
"I come to go with you as far as South Pass," and then he broke out
again into his singing. It was the song Courant had sung, and as he
heard it he lifted up his voice at the head of the train, and the two
strains blending, the old French chanson swept out over the barren land:
"A la claire fontaine!
M'en allant promener
J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle
Que je me suis baigné!"
Susan waved a beckoning hand to the voyageur, then turned to Lucy and
said joyously:
"What fun to have Zavier! He'll keep us laughing all the time. Aren't
you glad he's coming?"
Lucy gave an unenthusiastic "Yes." After the first glance backward she
had bent over her horse smoothing its mane her face suddenly dyed with
a flood of red.