CHAPTER VIII

Fort Bridger was like a giant magnet perpetually revolving and sweeping

the western half of the country with its rays. They wheeled from the

west across the north over the east and down to the south. Ox teams,

prairie schooners, pack trains, horsemen came to it from the barren

lands that guarded the gates of California, from the tumultuous rivers

and fragrant forests of the Oregon country, from the trapper's paths

and the thin, icy streams of the Rockies, from the plains where the

Platte sung round its sand bars, from the sun-drenched Spanish deserts.

All roads led to it, and down each one came the slow coil of the long

trains and the pacing files of mounted men. Under its walls they

rested and repaired their waste, ere they took the trail again intent

on the nation's work of conquest.

The fort's centripetal attraction had caught the doctor's party, and

was drawing it to the focus. They reckoned the days on their fingers

and pressed forward with a feverish hurry. They were like wayworn

mariners who sight the lights of a port. Dead desires, revived, blew

into a glow extinguished vanities. They looked at each other, and for

the first time realized how ragged and unkempt they were, then dragged

out best clothes from the bottom of their chests and hung their

looking-glasses to the limbs of trees. They were coming to the surface

after a period of submersion.

Susan fastened her mirror to the twig on an alder trunk and ransacked

her store of finery. It yielded up a new red merino bodice, and the

occasion was great enough to warrant breaking into her reserve of

hairpins. Then she experimented with her hair, parted and rolled it in

the form that had been the fashion in that long dead past--was it

twenty years ago?--when she had been a girl in Rochester. She

inspected her reflected image with a fearful curiosity, as if expecting

to find gray hairs and wrinkles. It was pleasant to see that she

looked the same--a trifle thinner may be. And as she noted that her

cheeks were not as roundly curved, the fullness of her throat had

melted to a more muscular, less creased and creamy firmness, she felt a

glow of satisfaction. For in those distant days--twenty-five years ago

it must be--she had worried because she was a little _too_ fat. No one

could say that now. She stole a look over her shoulder to make sure

she was not watched--it seemed an absurdly vain thing to do--and turned

back the neck of her blouse. The faintest rise of collar bone showed

under the satiny skin, fine as a magnolia petal, the color of faintly

tinted meerschaum. She ran her hand across it and it was smooth as

curds yielding with an elastic resistance over its bedding of firm

flesh. The young girl's pride in her beauty rose, bringing with it a

sense of surprise. She had thought it gone forever, and now it still

held, the one surviving sensation that connected her with that other

Susan Gillespie who had lived a half century ago in Rochester.

It was the day after this recrudescence of old coquetry that the first

tragedy of the trail, the tragedy that was hers alone, smote her.

The march that morning had been over a high level across which they

headed for a small river they would follow to the Fort. Early in the

afternoon they saw its course traced in intricate embroidery across the

earth's leathern carpet. The road dropped into it, the trail grooved

deep between ramparts of clay. On the lip of the descent the wayward

Julia, maddened with thirst, plunged forward, her obedient mates

followed, and the wagon went hurling down the slant, dust rising like

the smoke of an explosion. The men struggled for control and, seized

by the contagion of their excitement, the doctor laid hold of a wheel.

It jerked him from his feet and flung him sprawling, stunned by the

impact, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his lips. The others saw

nothing, in the tumult did not hear Susan's cry. When they came back

the doctor was lying where he had fallen, and she was sitting beside

him wiping his lips with the kerchief she had torn from her neck. She

looked up at them and said:

"It's a hemorrhage."

Her face shocked them into an understanding of the gravity of the

accident. It was swept clean of its dauntless, rosy youth, had

stiffened into an unelastic skin surface, taut over rigid muscles. But

her eyes were loopholes through which anguish escaped. Bending them on

her father a hungry solicitude suffused them, too all-pervading to be

denied exit. Turned to the men an agonized questioning took its place.

It spoke to them like a cry, a cry of weakness, a cry for succor. It

was the first admission of their strength she had ever made, the first

look upon them which had said, "You are men, I am a woman. Help me."

They carried the doctor to the banks of the stream and laid him on a

spread robe. He protested that it was nothing, it had happened before,

several times. Missy would remember it, last winter in Rochester? Her

answering smile was pitiable, a grimace of the lips that went no

farther. She felt its failure and turned away plucking at a weed near

her. Courant saw the trembling of her hand and the swallowing movement

of her throat, bared of its sheltering kerchief. She glanced up with a

stealthy side look, fearful that her moment of weakness was spied upon,

and saw him, the pity surging from his heart shining on his face like a

softening light. She shrank from it, and, as he made an involuntary

step toward her, warned him off with a quick gesture. He turned to the

camp and set furiously to work, his hands shaking as he drove in the

picket pins, his throat dry. He did not dare to look at her again.

The desire to snatch her in his arms, to hold her close till he crushed

her in a passion of protecting tenderness, made him fear to look at

her, to hear her voice, to let the air of her moving body touch him.

The next morning, while lifting the doctor into the wagon, there was a

second hemorrhage. Even the sick man found it difficult to maintain

his cheery insouciance. Susan looked pinched, her tongue seemed

hardened to the consistency of leather that could not flex for the

ready utterance of words. The entire sum of her consciousness was

focused on her father. "Breakfast?"--with a blank glance at the

speaker--"is it breakfast time?" The men cooked for her and brought

her a cup of coffee and her plate of food. She set them on the

driver's seat, and when the doctor, keeping his head immovable, and

turning smiling eyes upon her, told her to eat she felt for them like a

blind woman. It was hard to swallow the coffee, took effort to force

it down a channel that was suddenly narrowed to a parched, resistent

tube. She would answer no one, seemed to have undergone an ossifying

of all faculties turned to the sounds and sights of life. David

remembered her state when the doctor had been ill on the Platte. But

the exclusion of the outer world was then an obsession of worry, a

jealous distraction, as if she resented the well-being of others when

hers were forced to suffer. This was different. She did not draw away

from him now. She did not seem to see or hear him. Her glance lit

unknowing on his face, her hand lay in his, passive as a thing of

stone. Sometimes he thought she did not know who he was.

"Can't we do anything to cheer her or take her mind off it?" he said to

Daddy John behind the wagon.

The old man gave him a glance of tolerant scorn.

"You can't take a person's mind off the only thing that's in it. She's

got nothing inside her but worry. She's filled up with it, level to

the top. You might as well try and stop a pail from overflowing that's

too full of water."

They fared on for two interminable, broiling days. The pace was of the

slowest, for a jolt or wrench of the wagon might cause another

hemorrhage. With a cautious observance of stones and chuck holes they

crawled down the road that edged the river. The sun was blinding,

beating on the canvas hood till the girl's face was beaded with sweat,

and the sick man's blankets were hot against the intenser heat of his

body. Outside the world held its breath spellbound in a white dazzle.

The river sparkled like a coat of mail, the only unquiet thing on the

earth's incandescent surface. When the afternoon declined, shadows

crept from the opposite bluffs, slanted across the water, slipped

toward the little caravan and engulfed it. Through the front opening

Susan watched the road. There was a time when each dust ridge showed a

side of bright blue. To half-shut eyes they were like painted stripes

weaving toward the distance. Following them to where the trail bent

round a buttress, her glance brought up on Courant's mounted figure.

He seemed the vanishing point of these converging stripes, the object

they were striving toward, the end they aimed for. Reaching him they

ceased as though they had accomplished their purpose, led the woman's

eyes to him as to a symbolical figure that piloted the train to succor.

With every hour weakness grew on the doctor, his words were fewer. By

the ending of the first day, he lay silent looking out at the vista of

bluffs and river, his eyes shining in sunken orbits. As dusk fell

Courant dropped back to the wagon and asked Daddy John if the mules

could hold the pace all night. Susan heard the whispered conference,

and in a moment was kneeling on the seat, her hand clutched like a

spread starfish on the old man's shoulder.

Courant leaned from his saddle to catch the driver's ear with his

lowered tones. "With a forced march we can get there to-morrow

afternoon. The animals can rest up and we can make him comfortable and

maybe find a doctor."

Her face, lifted to him, was like a transparent medium through which

anxiety and hope that was almost pain, shone. She hung on his words

and breathed back quick agreement. It would have been the same if he

had suggested the impossible, if the angel of the Lord had appeared and

barred the way with a flaming sword.

"Of course they can go all night. They must. We'll walk and ride by

turns. That'll lighten the wagon. I'll go and get my horse," and she

was out and gone to the back of the train where David rode at the head

of the pack animals.

The night was of a clear blue darkness, suffused with the misty light

of stars. Looking back, Courant could see her upright slenderness

topping the horse's black shape. When the road lay pale and unshaded

behind her he could decipher the curves of her head and shoulders.

Then he turned to the trail in front, and her face, as it had been when

he first saw her and as it was now, came back to his memory. Once,

toward midnight, he drew up till they reached him, her horse's muzzle

nosing soft against his pony's flank. He could see the gleam of her

eyes, fastened on him, wide and anxious.

"Get into the wagon and ride," he commanded.

"Why? He's no worse! He's sleeping."

"I was thinking of you. This is too hard for you. It'll wear you out."

"Oh, I'm all right," she said with a slight movement of impatience.

"Don't worry about me. Go on."

He returned to his post and she paced slowly on, keeping level with the

wheels. It was very still, only the creaking of the wagon and the hoof

beats on the dust. She kept her eyes on his receding shape, watched it

disappear in dark turns, then emerge into faintly illumined stretches.

It moved steadily, without quickening of gait, a lonely shadow that

they followed through the unknown to hope. Her glance hung to it, her

ear strained for the thud of his pony's feet, sight and sound of him

came to her like a promise of help. He was the one strong human thing

in this place of remote skies and dumb unfeeling earth.

It was late afternoon when the Fort came in sight. A flicker of

animation burst up in them as they saw the square of its long, low

walls, crowning an eminence above the stream. The bottom lay wide at

its feet, the river slipping bright through green meadows sprinkled

with an army of cattle. In a vast, irregular circle, a wheel of life

with the fort as its hub, spread an engirdling encampment. It was

scattered over plain and bottom in dottings of white, here drawn close

in clustering agglomerations, there detached in separate spatterings.

Coming nearer the white spots grew to wagon hoods and tent roofs, and

among them, less easy to discern, were the pointed summits of the

lodges with the bunched poles bristling through the top. The air was

very still, and into it rose the straight threads of smoke from

countless fires, aspiring upwards in slender blue lines to the bluer

sky. They lifted and dispersed the smell of burning wood that comes to

the wanderer with a message of home, a message that has lain in his

blood since the first man struck fire and turned the dry heap of sticks

to an altar to be forever fixed as the soul of his habitation.

They camped in the bottom withdrawn from the closer herding of tents.

It was a slow settling, as noiseless as might be, for two at least of

their number knew that the doctor was dying. That afternoon Daddy John

and Courant had seen the shadow of the great change. Whether Susan saw

it they neither knew. She was full of a determined, cold energy,

urging them at once to go among the camps and search for a doctor.

They went in different directions, leaving her sitting by her father's

feet at the raised flap of the tent. Looking back through the

gathering dusk Courant could see her, a dark shape, her body drooping

in relaxed lines. He thought that she knew.

When they came back with the word that there was no doctor to be found,

darkness was closing in. Night came with noises of men and the

twinkling of innumerable lights. The sky, pricked with stars, looked

down on an earth alive with answering gleams, as though a segment of

its spark-set shield had fallen and lay beneath it, winking back

messages in an aerial telegraphy. The fires leaped high or glowed in

smoldering mounds, painting the sides of tents, the flanks of

ruminating animals, the wheels of wagons, the faces of men and women.

Coolness, rest, peace brooded over the great bivouac, with the guardian

shape of the Fort above it and the murmur of the river at its feet.

A lantern, standing on a box by the doctor's side, lit the tent.

Through the opening the light from the fire outside poured in, sending

shadows scurrying up the canvas walls. Close within call David sat by

it, his chin on his knees, his eyes staring at the tongues of flames as

they licked the fresh wood. There was nothing now for him to do. He

had cooked the supper, and then to ease the pain of his unclaimed

sympathies, cleaned the pans, and from a neighboring camp brought a

piece of deer meat for Susan. It was the only way he could serve her,

and he sat disconsolately looking now at the meat on a tin plate, then

toward the tent where she and Daddy John were talking. He could hear

the murmur of their voices, see their silhouettes moving on the canvas,

gigantic and grotesque. Presently she appeared in the opening, paused

there for a last word, and then came toward him.

"He wants to speak to Daddy John for a moment," she said and dropping

on the ground beside him, stared at the fire.

David looked at her longingly, but he dared not intrude upon her somber

abstraction. The voices in the tent rose and fell. Once at a louder

phrase from Daddy John she turned her head quickly and listened, a

sheaf of strained nerves. The voices dropped again, her eye came back

to the light and touched the young man's face. It contained no

recognition of him, but he leaped at the chance, making stammering

proffer of such aid as he could give.

"I've got you some supper."

He lifted the plate, but she shook her head.

"Let me cook it for you," he pleaded. "You haven't eaten anything

since morning."

"I can't eat," she said, and fell back to her fire-gazing, slipping

away from him into the forbidding dumbness of her thoughts. He could

only watch her, hoping for a word, an expressed wish. When it came it

was, alas! outside his power to gratify:

"If there had only been a doctor here! That was what I was hoping for."

And so when she asked for the help he yearned to give, it was his fate

that he should meet her longing with a hopeless silence.

When Daddy John emerged from the tent she leaped to her feet.

"Well?" she said with low eagerness.

"Go back to him. He wants you," answered the old man. "I've got

something to do for him."

He made no attempt to touch her, his words and voice were brusque, yet

David saw that she responded, softened, showed the ragged wound of her

pain to him as she did to no one else. It was an understanding that

went beneath all externals. Words were unnecessary between them, heart

spoke to heart.

She returned to the tent and sunk on the skin beside her father. He

smiled faintly and stretched a hand for hers, and her fingers slipped

between his, cool and strong against the lifeless dryness of his palm.

She gave back his smile bravely, her eyes steadfast. She had no desire

for tears, no acuteness of sensation. A weight as heavy as the world

lay on her, crushing out struggle and resistance. She knew that he was

dying. When they told her there was no doctor in the camp her

flickering hope had gone out. Now she was prepared to sit by him and

wait with a lethargic patience beyond which was nothing.

He pressed her hand and said: "I've sent Daddy John on a hunt. Do you

guess what for?"

She shook her head feeling no curiosity.

"The time is short, Missy."

The living's instinct to fight against the acquiescence of the dying

prompted her to the utterance of a sharp "No."

"I want it all arranged and settled before it's too late. I sent him

to see if there was a missionary here."

She was leaning against the couch of robes, resting on the piled

support of the skins. In the pause after his words she slowly drew

herself upright, and with her mouth slightly open inhaled a deep

breath. Her eyes remained fixed on him, gleaming from the shadow of

her brows, and their expression, combined with the amaze of the dropped

underlip, gave her a look of wild attention.

"Why?" she said. The word came obstructed and she repeated it.

"I want you to marry David here to-night."

The doctor's watch on a box at the bed head ticked loudly in the

silence. They looked at each other unconscious of the length of the

pause. Death on the one hand, life pressing for its due on the other,

were the only facts they recognized. Hostility, not to the man but to

the idea, drove the amazement from her face and hardened its softness

to stone.

"Here, to-night?" she said, her comprehension stimulated by an

automatic repetition of his words.

"Yes. I may not be able to understand tomorrow."

She moved her head, her glance touching the watch, the lantern, then

dropping to the hand curled round her own. It seemed symbolic of the

will against which hers was rising in combat. She made an involuntary

effort to withdraw her fingers but his closed tighter on them.

"Why?" she whispered again.

"Some one must take care of you. I can't leave you alone."

She answered with stiffened lips: "There's Daddy John."

"Some one closer than Daddy John. I want to leave you with David."

Her antagonism rose higher, sweeping over her wretchedness. Worn and

strained she had difficulty to keep her lips shut on it, to prevent

herself from crying out her outraged protests. All her dormant

womanhood, stirring to wakefulness in the last few weeks, broke into

life, gathering itself in a passion of revolt, abhorrent of the

indignity, ready to flare into vehement refusal. To the dim eyes

fastened on her she was merely the girl, reluctant still. He watched

her down-drooped face and said:

"Then I could go in peace. Am I asking too much?"

She made a negative movement with her head and turned her face away

from him.

"You'll do this for my happiness now?"

"Anything," she murmured.

"It will be also for your own."

He moved his free hand and clasped it on the mound made by their locked

fingers. Through the stillness a man's voice singing Zavier's Canadian

song came to them. It stopped at the girl's outer ear, but, like a

hail from a fading land, penetrated to the man's brain and he stirred.

"Hist!" he said raising his brows, "there's that French song your

mother used to sing."

The distant voice rose to the plaintive burden and he lay motionless,

his eyes filmed with memories. As the present dimmed the past grew

clearer. His hold on the moment relaxed and he slipped away from it on

a tide of recollection, muttering the words.

The girl sat mute, her hand cold under his, her being passing in an

agonized birth throe from unconsciousness to self-recognition. Her

will--its strength till now unguessed--rose resistant, a thing of iron.

Love was too strong in her for open opposition, but the instinct to

fight, blindly but with caution, for the right to herself was stronger.

His murmuring died into silence and she looked at him. His eyes were

closed, the pressure of his fingers loosened. A light sleep held him,

and under its truce she softly withdrew her hand, then stole to the

tent door and stood there a waiting moment, stifling her hurried

breathing. She saw David lying by the fire, gazing into its smoldering

heart. With noiseless feet she skirted the encircling ropes and pegs,

and stood, out of range of his eye, on the farther side. Here she

stopped, withdrawn from the light that came amber soft through the

canvas walls, slipping into shadow when a figure passed, searching the

darkness with peering eyes.

Around her the noises of the camp rose, less sharp than an hour

earlier, the night silence gradually hushing them. The sparks and

shooting gleams of fires still quivered, imbued with a tenacious life.

She had a momentary glimpse of a naked Indian boy flinging loose his

blanket, a bronze statue glistening in a leap of flame. Nearer by a

woman's figure bent over a kettle black on a bed of embers, then a

girl's fire-touched form, with raised arms, shaking down a snake of

hair, which broke and grew cloudy under her disturbing hands. A

resounding smack sounded on a horse's flank, a low ripple of laughter

came tangled with a child's querulous crying, and through the walls of

tents and the thickness of smoke the notes of a flute filtered.

Her ear caught the pad of a footstep on the grass, and her eyes seized

on a shadow that grew from dusky uncertainty to a small, bent shape.

She waited, suffocated with heartbeats, then made a noiseless pounce on

it.

"Daddy John," she gasped, clutching at him.

The old man staggered, almost taken off his feet.

"Is he worse?" he said.

"He's told me. Did you find anyone?"

"Yes--two. One's Episcopal--in a train from St. Louis."

A sound came from her that he did not understand. She gripped at his

shoulders as if she were drowning. He thought she was about to swoon

and put his arm around her saying:

"Come back to the tent. You're all on a shake as if you had ague."

"I can't go back. Don't bring him. Don't bring him. Don't tell

father. Not now. I will later, some other time. When we get to

California, but not now--not to-night."

The sentences were cut apart by breaths that broke from her as if she

had been running. He was frightened and tried to draw her to the light

and see her face.

"Why, Missy!" he said with scared helplessness, "Why, Missy! What's

got you?"

"Don't get the clergyman. Tell him there isn't any. Tell him you've

looked all over. Tell him a lie."

He guessed the trouble was something more than the grief of the moment,

and urged in a whisper:

"What's the matter now? Go ahead and tell me. I'll stick by you."

She bent her head back to look into his face.

"I don't want to marry him now. I can't. I can't. I _can't_."

Her hands on his shoulders shook him with each repetition. The force

of the words was heightened by the suppressed tone. They should have

been screamed. In these whispered breaths they burst from her like

blood from a wound. With the last one her head bowed forward on his

shoulder with a movement of burrowing as though she would have crawled

up and hidden under his skin, and tears, the most violent he had ever

seen her shed, broke from her. They came in bursting sobs, a

succession of rending throes that she struggled to stifle, swaying and

quivering under their stress.

He thought of nothing now but this new pain added to the hour's

tragedy, and stroked her shoulder with a low "Keep quiet--keep quiet,"

then leaned his face against her hair and breathed through its tangles.

"It's all right, I'll do it. I'll say I couldn't find anyone. I'll

lie for you, Missy."

She released him at once, dropped back a step and, lifting a distorted

face, gave a nod. He passed on, and she fell on the grass, close to

the tent ropes and lay there, hidden by the darkness.

She did not hear a step approaching from the herded tents. Had she

been listening it would have been hard to discern, for the feet were

moccasin shod, falling noiseless on the muffling grass. A man's figure

with fringes wavering along its outline came round the tent wall. The

head was thrust forward, the ear alert for voices. Faring softly his

foot struck her and he bent, stretching down a feeling hand. It

touched her shoulder, slipped along her side, and gripped at her arm.

"What's the matter?" came a deep voice, and feeling the pull on her arm

she got to her knees with a strangled whisper for silence. When the

light fell across her, he gave a smothered cry, jerked her to her feet

and thrust his hand into her hair, drawing her head back till her face

was uplifted to his.

There was no one to see, and he let his eyes feed full upon it, a thief

with the coveted treasure in his hands. She seemed unconscious of him,

a broken thing without sense or volition, till a stir came from the

tent. Then he felt her resist his grasp. She put a hand on his breast

and pressed herself back from him.

"Hush," she breathed. "Daddy John's in there."

A shadow ran up the canvas wall, bobbing on it, huge and wavering. She

turned her head toward it, the tears on her cheeks glazed by the light.

He watched her with widened nostrils and immovable eyes. In the mutual

suspension of action that held them he could feel her heart beating.

"Well?" came the doctor's voice.

The old servant answered:

"There weren't no parsons anywhere, I've been all over and there's not

one."

"Parsons?" Courant breathed.

She drew in the fingers spread on his breast with a clawing movement

and emitted an inarticulate sound that meant "Hush."

"Not a clergyman or missionary among all these people?"

"Not one."

"We must wait till to-morrow, then."

"Yes--mebbe there'll be one to-morrow."

"I hope so."

Then silence fell and the shadow flickered again on the canvas.

She made a struggle against Courant's hold, which for a moment he tried

to resist, but her fingers plucked against his hand, and she tore

herself free and ran to the tent opening. She entered without

speaking, threw herself at the foot of the couch, and laid her head

against her father's knees.

"Is that you, Missy?" he said, feeling for her with a groping hand.

"Daddy John couldn't find a clergyman."

"I know," she answered, and lay without moving, her face buried in the

folds of the blanket.

They said no more, and Daddy John stole out of the tent.

The next day the doctor was too ill to ask for a clergyman, to know or

to care. At nightfall he died. The Emigrant Trail had levied its

first tribute on them, taken its toll.

END OF PART III

PART IV

The Desert

CHAPTER I

They were camped on the edges of that harsh land which lay between the

Great Salt Lake and the Sierra. Behind them the still, heavy reach of

water stretched, reflecting in mirrored clearness the mountains

crowding on its southern rim. Before them the sage reached out to dim

infinities of distance. The Humboldt ran nearby, sunk in a stony bed,

its banks matted with growths of alder and willow. The afternoon was

drawing to the magical sunset hour. Susan, lying by the door of her

tent, could see below the growing western blaze the bowl of the earth

filling with the first, liquid oozings of twilight.

A week ago they had left the Fort. To her it had been a blank space of

time, upon which no outer interest had intruded. She had presented an

invulnerable surface to all that went on about her, the men's care, the

day's incidents, the setting of the way. Cold-eyed and dumb she had

moved with them, an inanimate idol, unresponsive to the observances of

their worship, aloof from them in somber uncommunicated musings.

The men respected her sorrow, did her work for her, and let her alone.

To them she was set apart in the sanctuary of her mourning, and that

her grief should express itself by hours of drooping silence was a

thing they accepted without striving to understand. Once or twice

David tried to speak to her of her father, but it seemed to rouse in

her an irritated and despairing pain. She begged him to desist and got

away from him as quickly as she could, climbing into the wagon and

lying on the sacks, with bright, unwinking eyes fastened on Daddy

John's back. But she did not rest stunned under an unexpected blow as

they thought. She was acutely alive, bewildered, but with senses keen,

as if the world had taken a dizzying revolution and she had come up

panting and clutching among the fragments of what had been her life.

If there had been some one to whom she could have turned, relieving

herself by confession, she might have found solace and set her feet in

safer ways. But among the three men she was virtually alone, guarding

her secret with that most stubborn of all silences, a girl's in the

first wakening of sex. She had a superstitious hope that she could

regain peace and self-respect by an act of reparation, and at such

moments turned with expiatory passion to the thought of David. She

would go to California, live as her father had wished, marry her

betrothed, and be as good a wife to him as man could have. And for a

space these thoughts brought her ease, consoled her as a compensating

act of martyrdom.

She shunned Courant, rarely addressing him, keeping her horse to the

rear of the train where the wagon hood hid him from her. But when his

foot fell on the dust beside her, or he dropped back for a word with

Daddy John, a stealthy, observant quietude held her frame. She turned

her eyes from him as from an unholy sight, but it was useless, for her

mental vision called up his figure, painted in yellow and red upon the

background of the sage. She knew the expression of the lithe body as

it leaned from the saddle, the gnarled hand from which the rein hung

loose, the eyes, diamond hard and clear, living sparks set in leathery

skin wrinkled against the glare of the waste. She did not lie to

herself any more. No delusions could live in this land stripped of all

conciliatory deception.

The night before they left the Fort the men had had a consultation.

Sitting apart by the tent she had watched them, David and Daddy John

between her and the fire, Courant beyond it. His face, red lit between

the hanging locks of hair, his quick eyes, shifting from one man to the

other, was keen with a furtive anxiety. At a point in the murmured

interview, he had looked beyond them to the darkened spot where she

sat. Then Daddy John and David had come to her and told her that if

she wished they would turn back, take her home to Rochester, and stay

there with her always. There was money enough they said. The doctor

had left seven thousand dollars in his chest, and David had three to

add to it. It would be ample to live on till the men could set to work

and earn a maintenance for them. No word was spoken of her marriage,

but it lay in the offing of their argument as the happy finale that the

long toil of the return journey and the combination of resources were

to prelude.

The thought of going back had never occurred to her, and shocked her

into abrupt refusal. It would be an impossible adaptation to outgrown

conditions. She could not conjure up the idea of herself refitted into

the broken frame of her girlhood. She told them she would go on, there

was nothing now to go back for. Their only course was to keep to the

original plan, emigrate to California and settle there. They returned

to the fire and told Courant. She could see him with eager gaze

listening. Then he smiled and, rising to his feet, sent a bold,

exultant glance through the darkness to her. She drew her shawl over

her head to shut it out, for she was afraid.

They rested now on the lip of the desert, gathering their forces for

the last lap of the march. There had been no abatement in the pressure

of their pace, and Courant had told them it must be kept up. He had

heard the story of the Donner party two years before, and the first of

September must see them across the Sierra. In the evenings he

conferred with Daddy John on these matters and kept a vigilant watch on

the animals upon whose condition the success of the journey depended.

David was not included in these consultations. Both men now realized

that he was useless when it came to the rigors of the trail. Of late

he had felt a physical and spiritual impairment, that showed in a

slighted observance of his share of the labor. He had never learned to

cord his pack, and day after day it turned under his horse's belly,

discharging its cargo on the ground. The men, growling with

irritation, finally took the work from him, not from any pitying

consideration, but to prevent further delay.

He was, in fact, coming to that Valley of Desolation where the body

faints and only the spirit's dauntlessness can keep it up and doing.

What dauntlessness his spirit once had was gone. He moved wearily,

automatically doing his work and doing it ill. The very movements of

his hands, slack and fumbling, were an exasperation to the other men,

setting their strength to a herculean measure, and giving of it without

begrudgment. David saw their anger and did not care. Fatigue made him

indifferent, ate into his pride, brought down his self-respect. He

plodded on doggedly, the alkali acrid on his lips and burning in his

eyeballs, thinking of California, not as the haven of love and dreams,

but as a place where there was coolness, water, and rest. When in the

dawn he staggered up to the call of "Catch up," and felt for the buckle

of his saddle girth, he had a vision of a place under trees by a river

where he could sleep and wake and turn to sleep again, and go on

repeating the performance all day with no one to shout at him if he was

stupid and forgot things.

Never having had the fine physical endowment of the others all the

fires of his being were dying down to smoldering ashes. His love for

Susan faded, if not from his heart, from his eyes and lips. She was as

dear to him as ever, but now with a devitalized, undemanding affection

in which there was something of a child's fretful dependence. He rode

beside her not looking at her, contented that she should be there, but

with the thought of marriage buried out of sight under the weight of

his weariness. It did not figure at all in his mind, which, when

roused from apathy, reached forward into the future to gloat upon the

dream of sleep. She was grateful for his silence, and they rode side

by side, detached from one another, moving in separated worlds of

sensation.

This evening he came across to where she sat, dragging a blanket in an

indolent hand. He dropped it beside her and threw himself upon it with

a sigh. He was too empty of thought to speak, and lay outstretched,

looking at the plain where dusk gathered in shadowless softness. In

contrast with his, her state was one of inner tension, strained to the

breaking point. Torturings of conscience, fears of herself, the

unaccustomed bitterness of condemnation, melted her, and she was ripe

for confession. A few understanding words and she would have poured

her trouble out to him, less in hope of sympathy than in a craving for

relief. The widening gulf would have been bridged and he would have

gained the closest hold upon her he had yet had. But if she were more

a woman than ever before, dependent, asking for aid, he was less a man,

wanting himself to rest on her and have his discomforts made bearable

by her consolations.

She looked at him tentatively. His eyes were closed, the lids

curiously dark, and fringed with long lashes like a girl's.

"Are you asleep?" she asked.

"No," he answered without raising them. "Only tired."

She considered for a moment, then said:

"Have you ever told a lie?"

"A lie? I don't know. I guess so. Everybody tells lies sometime or

other."

"Not little lies. Serious ones, sinful ones, to people you love."

"No. I never told that kind. That's a pretty low-down thing to do."

"Mightn't a person do it--to--to--escape from something they didn't

want, something they suddenly--at that particular moment--dreaded and

shrank from?"

"Why couldn't they speak out, say they didn't want to do it? Why did

they have to lie?"

"Perhaps they didn't have time to think, and didn't want to hurt the

person who asked it. And--and--if they were willing to do the thing

later, sometime in the future, wouldn't that make up for it?"

"I can't tell. I don't know enough about it. I don't understand what

you mean." He turned, trying to make himself more comfortable. "Lord,

how hard this ground is! I believe it's solid iron underneath."

He stretched and curled on the blanket, elongating his body in a mighty

yawn which subsided into the solaced note of a groan. "There, that's

better. I ache all over to-night."

She made no answer, looking at the prospect from morose brows. More at

ease he returned to the subject and asked, "Who's been telling lies?"

"I," she answered.

He gave a short laugh, that drew from her a look of quick protest. He

was lying on his side, one arm crooked under his head, his eyes on her

in a languid glance where incredulity shone through amusement.

"Your father told me once you were the most truthful woman he'd ever

known, and I agree with him."

"It was to my father I lied," she answered.

She began to tremble, for part at least of the story was on her lips.

She clasped her shaking hands round her knees, and, not looking at him,

said "David," and then stopped, stifled by the difficulties and the

longing to speak.

David answered by laughing outright, a pleasant sound, not guiltless of

a suggestion of sleep, a laugh of good nature that refuses to abdicate.

It brushed her back into herself as if he had taken her by the

shoulders, pushed her into her prison, and slammed the door.

"That's all imagination," he said. "When some one we love dies we're

always thinking things like that--that we neglected them, or slighted

them, or told them what wasn't true. They stand out in our memories

bigger than all the good things we did. Don't you worry about any lies

you ever told your father. You've got nothing to accuse yourself of

where he's concerned--or anybody else, either."

Her heart, that had throbbed wildly as she thought to begin her

confession, sunk back to a forlorn beat. He noticed her dejected air,

and said comfortingly:

"Don't be downhearted, Missy. It's been terribly hard for you, but

you'll feel better when we get to California, and can live like

Christians again."

"California!" Her intonation told of the changed mind with which she

now looked forward to the Promised Land.

His consolatory intentions died before his own sense of grievance at

the toil yet before them.

"Good Lord, it does seem far--farther than it did in the beginning. I

used to be thinking of it all the time then, and how I'd get to work

the first moment we arrived. And now I don't care what it's like or

think of what I'm going to do. All I want to get there for is to stop

this eternal traveling and rest."

She, too, craved rest, but of the spirit. Her outlook was blacker than

his, for it offered none and drew together to a point where her

tribulations focused in a final act of self-immolation. There was a

pause, and he said, drowsiness now plain in his voice:

"But we'll be there some day unless we die on the road, and then we can

take it easy. The first thing I'm going to do is to get a mattress to

sleep on. No more blankets on the ground for me. Do you ever think

what it'll be like to sleep in a room again under a roof, a good,

waterproof roof, that the sun and the rain can't come through? The way

I feel now that's my idea of Paradise."

She murmured a low response, her thoughts far from the flesh pots of

his wearied longing.

"I think just at this moment," he went on dreamily, "I'd rather have a

good sleep and a good meal than anything else in the world. I often

dream of 'em, and then Daddy John's kicking me and it's morning and I

got to crawl out of the blanket and light the fire. I don't know

whether I feel worse at that time or in the evening when we're making

the last lap for the camping ground." His voice dropped as if

exhausted before the memory of these unendurable moments, then came

again with a note of cheer: "Thank God, Courant's with us or I don't

believe we'd ever get there."

She had no reply to make to this. Neither spoke for a space, and then

she cautiously stole a glance at him and was relieved to see that he

was asleep. Careful to be noiseless she rose, took up a tin water pail

and walked to the river.

The Humboldt rushed through a deep-cut bed, nosing its way between

strewings of rock. Up the banks alders and willows grew thick,

thrusting roots, hungry for the lean deposits of soil, into cracks and

over stony ledges. By the edge the current crisped about a flat rock,

and Susan, kneeling on this, dipped in her pail. The water slipped in

in a silvery gush which, suddenly seething and bubbling, churned in the

hollowed tin, nearly wrenching it from her. She leaned forward,

dragging it awkwardly toward her, clutching at an alder stem with her

free hand. Her head was bent, but she raised it with a jerk when she

heard Courant's voice call, "Wait, I'll do it for you."

He was on the opposite bank, the trees he had broken through swishing

together behind him. She lowered her head without answering, her face

suddenly charged with color. Seized by an overmastering desire to

escape him, she dragged at the pail, which, caught in the force of the

current, leaped and swayed in her hand. She took a hurried upward

glimpse, hopeful of his delayed progress, and saw him jump from the

bank to a stone in mid-stream. His moccasined feet clung to its

slippery surface, and for a moment he oscillated unsteadily, then

gained his balance and, laughing, looked at her. For a breathing space

each rested motionless, she with strained, outstretched arm, he on the

rock, a film of water covering his feet. It was a moment of physical

mastery without conscious thought. To each the personality of the

other was so perturbing, that without words or touch, the heart beats

of both grew harder, and their glances held in a gaze fixed and

gleaming. The woman gained her self-possession first, and with it an

animal instinct to fly from him, swiftly through the bushes.

But her flight was delayed. A stick, whirling in the current, caught

between the pail's rim and handle and ground against her fingers. With

an angry cry she loosed her hold, and the bucket went careening into

midstream. That she had come back to harmony with her surroundings was

attested by the wail of chagrin with which she greeted the accident.

It was the last pail she had left. She watched Courant wade into the

water after it, and forgot to run in her anxiety to see if he would get

it. "Oh, good!" came from her in a gasp as he caught the handle. But

when he came splashing back and set it on the rock beside her, it

suddenly lost its importance, and as suddenly she became a prey to

low-voiced, down-looking discomfort. A muttered "thank you," was all

the words she had for him, and she got to her feet with looks directed

to the arrangement of her skirt.

He stood knee-high in the water watching her, glad of her down-drooped

lids, for he could dwell on the bloom that deepened under his eye.

"You haven't learned the force of running water yet," he said. "It can

be very strong sometimes, so strong that a little woman's hand like

yours has no power against it."

"It was because the stick caught in the handle," she muttered, bending

for the pail. "It hurt my fingers."

"You've never guessed that I was called 'Running Water,' have you?"

"You?" she paused with look arrested in sudden interest. "Who calls

you that?"

"Everybody--you. _L'eau courante_ means running water, doesn't it?

That's what you call me."

In the surprise of the revelation she forgot her unease and looked at

him, repeating slowly, "L'eau courante, running water. Why, of course.

But it's like an Indian's name."

"It is an Indian's name. The Blackfeet gave it to me because they said

I could run so fast. They were after me once and a man makes the best

time he can then. It was a fine race and I won it, and after that they

called me, 'The man that goes like Running Water.' The voyageurs and

coureurs des bois put it into their lingo and it stuck."

"But your real name?" she asked, the pail forgotten.

"Just a common French one, Duchesney, Napoleon Duchesney, if you want

to know both ends of it. It was my father's. He was called after the

emperor whom my grandfather knew years ago in France. He and Napoleon

were students together in the military school at Brienne. In the

Revolution they confiscated his lands, and he came out to Louisiana and

never wanted to go back." He splashed to the stone and took up the

bucket.

She stood absorbed in the discovery, her child's mind busy over this

new conception of him as a man whose birth and station had evidently

been so different to the present conditions of his life. When she

spoke her mental attitude was naïvely displayed.

"Why didn't you tell before?"

He shrugged.

"What was there to tell? The mountain men don't always use their own

names."

The bucket, swayed by the movement, threw a jet of water on her foot.

He moved back from her and said, "I like the Indian name best."

"It is pretty," and in a lower key, as though trying its sound, she

repeated softly, "_L'eau Courante_, Running Water."

"It's something clear and strong, sometimes shallow and then again

deeper than you can guess. And when there's anything in the way, it

gathers all its strength and sweeps over it. It's a mighty force. You

have to be stronger than it is--and more cunning too--to stop it in the

way it wants to go."

Above their heads the sky glowed in red bars, but down in the stream's

hollow the dusk had come, cool and gray. She was suddenly aware of it,

noticed the diminished light, and the thickening purplish tones that

had robbed the trees and rocks of color. Her warm vitality was invaded

by chill that crept inward and touched her spirit with an eerie dread.

She turned quickly and ran through the bushes calling back to him, "I

must hurry and get supper. They'll be waiting. Bring the pail."

Courant followed slowly, watching her as she climbed the bank.

CHAPTER II

For some days their route followed the river, then they would leave it

and strike due west, making marches from spring to spring. The country

was as arid as the face of a dead planet, save where the water's course

was marked by a line of green. Here and there the sage was broken by

bare spaces where the alkali cropped out in a white encrusting. Low

mountains edged up about the horizon, thrusting out pointed scarps like

capes protruding into slumbrous, gray-green seas. These capes were

objects upon which they could fix their eyes, goals to reach and pass.

In the blank monotony they offered an interest, something to strive

for, something that marked an advance. The mountains never seemed to

retreat or come nearer. They encircled the plain in a crumpled wall,

the same day after day, a low girdle of volcanic shapes, cleft with

moving shadows.

The sun was the sun of August. It reeled across a sky paled by its

ardor, at midday seeming to pause and hang vindictive over the little

caravan. Under its fury all color left the blanched earth, all shadows

shrunk away to nothing. The train alone, as if in desperate defiance,

showed a black blot beneath the wagon, an inky snake sliding over the

ground under each horse's sweating belly. The air was like a stretched

tissue, strained to the limit of its elasticity, in places parting in

delicate, glassy tremblings. Sometimes in the distance the mirage hung

brilliant, a blue lake with waves crisping on a yellow shore. They

watched it with hungry eyes, a piece of illusion framed by the bleached

and bitter reality.

When evening came the great transformation began. With the first

deepening of color the desert's silent heart began to beat in

expectation of its hour of beauty. Its bleak detail was lost in

shrouding veils and fiery reflection. The earth floor became a golden

sea from which the capes reared themselves in shapes of bronze and

copper. The ring of mountains in the east flushed to the pink of the

topaz, then bending westward shaded from rosy lilac to mauve, and where

the sunset backed them, darkened to black. As the hour progressed the

stillness grew more profound, the naked levels swept out in wilder

glory, inundated by pools of light, lines of fire eating a glowing way

through sinks where twilight gathered. With each moment it became a

more tremendous spectacle. The solemnity attendant on the passage of a

miracle held it. From the sun's mouth the voice of God seemed calling

the dead land to life.

Each night the travelers gazed upon it, ragged forms gilded by its

radiance, awed and dumb. Its splendors crushed them, filling them with

nostalgic longings. They bore on with eyes that were sick for a sight

of some homely, familiar thing that would tell them they were still

human, still denizens of a world they knew. The life into which they

fitted and had uses was as though perished from the face of the earth.

The weak man sunk beneath the burden of its strangeness. Its beauty

made no appeal to him. He felt lost and dazed in its iron-ringed

ruthlessness, dry as a skeleton by daylight, at night transformed by

witchfires of enchantment. The man and woman, in whom vitality was

strong, combatted its blighting force, refused to be broken by its

power. They desired with vehemence to assert themselves, to rebel, not

to submit to the sense of their nothingness. They turned to one

another hungry for the life that now was only within themselves. They

had passed beyond the limits of the accustomed, were like detached

particles gone outside the law of gravity, floating undirected through

spaces where they were nothing and had nothing but their bodies, their

passions, themselves.

To a surface observation they would have appeared as stolid as savages,

but their nerves were taut as drawn violin strings. Strange

self-assertions, violences of temper, were under the skin ready to

break out at a jar in the methodical routine. Had the train been

larger, its solidarity less complete, furious quarrels would have taken

place. With an acknowledged leader whom they believed in and obeyed,

the chances of friction were lessened. Three of them could meet the

physical demands of the struggle. It was David's fate that, unable to

do this, he should fall to a position of feeble uselessness, endurable

in a woman, but difficult to put up with in a man.

One morning Susan was waked by angry voices. An oath shook sleep from

her, and thrusting her head out of the wagon where she now slept, she

saw the three men standing in a group, rage on Courant's face, disgust

on Daddy John's, and on David's an abstraction of aghast dismay that

was not unlike despair. To her question Daddy John gave a short

answer. David's horses, insecurely picketed, had pulled up their

stakes in the night and gone. A memory of the young man's exhaustion

the evening before, told the girl the story; David had forgotten to

picket them and immediately after supper had fallen asleep. He had

evidently been afraid to tell and invented the explanation of dragged

picket pins. She did not know whether the men believed it, but she saw

by their faces they were in no mood to admit extenuating circumstances.

The oath had been Courant's. When he heard her voice he shut his lips

on others, but they welled up in his eyes, glowering furiously on the

culprit from the jut of drawn brows.

"What am I to do?" said the unfortunate young man, sending a despairing

glance over the prospect. Under his weak misery, rebellious ill humor

was visible.

"Go after them and bring them back."

Susan saw the leader had difficulty in confining himself to such brief

phrases. Dragging a blanket round her shoulders she leaned over the

seat. She felt like a woman who enters a quarrel to protect a child.

"Couldn't we let them go?" she cried. "We've still my father's horse.

David can ride it and we can put his things in the wagon."

"Not another ounce in the wagon," said Daddy John. "The mules are

doing their limit now." The wagon was his kingdom over which he ruled

an absolute monarch.

Courant looked at her and spoke curtly, ignoring David. "We can't lose

a horse now. We need every one of them. It's not here. It's beyond

in the mountains. We've got to get over by the first of September, and

we want every animal we have to do it. _He's_ not able to walk."

He shot a contemptuous glance at David that in less bitter times would

have made the young man's blood boil. But David was too far from his

normal self to care. He was not able to walk and was glad that Courant

understood it.

"I've got to go after them, I suppose," he said sullenly and turned to

where the animals looked on with expectant eyes. "But it's the last

time I'll do it. If they go again they'll stay gone."

There was a mutter from the other men. Susan, full of alarm, scrambled

into the back of the wagon and pulled on her clothes. When she emerged

David had the doctor's horse saddled and was about to mount. His face,

heavy-eyed and unwashed, bore an expression of morose anger, but

fatigue spoke pathetically in his slow, lifeless movements, the droop

of his thin, high shoulders.

"David," she called, jumping out over the wheel, "wait."

He did not look at her or answer, but climbed into the saddle and

gathered his rein. She ran toward him crying, "Wait and have some

breakfast. I'll get it for you."

He continued to pay no attention to her, glancing down at his foot as

it felt for the stirrup. She stopped short, repulsed by his manner,

watching him as he sent a forward look over the tracks of the lost

horses. They wound into the distance fading amid the sweep of

motionless sage. It would be a long search and the day was already

hot. Pity rose above all other feelings, and she said:

"Have they told you what they're going to do? Whether we'll wait here

or go on and have you catch us up?"

"I don't know what they're going to do and don't care," he answered,

and touching the horse with his spur rode away between the brushing

bushes.

She turned to Daddy John, her eyes full of alarmed question.

"He knows all about it," said the old man with slow phlegm, "I told him

myself. There's food and water for him packed on behind the saddle, I

done that too. He'd have gone without it just to spite himself. We'll

rest here this morning, and if he ain't back by noon move on slow till

he catches us up. Don't you worry. He done the wrong thing and he's

got to learn."

No more was said about David, and after breakfast they waited doing the

odd tasks that accumulated for their few periods of rest. Susan sat

sewing where the wagon cast a cooling slant of shade. Daddy John was

beyond her in the sun, his sere old body, from which time had stripped

the flesh, leaving only a tenuous bark of muscle, was impervious to the

heat. In the growing glare he worked over a broken saddle, the

whitening reaches stretching out beyond him to where the mountains

waved in a clear blue line as if laid on with one wash of a saturated

paint brush. Courant was near him in the shadow of his horse, cleaning

a gun, sharp clicks of metal now and then breaking into the stillness.

As the hours passed the shadow of the wagon shrunk and the girl moved

with it till her back was pressed against the wheel. She was making a

calico jacket, and as she moved it the crisp material emitted low

cracklings. Each rustle was subdued and stealthy, dying quickly away

as if it were in conspiracy with the silence and did not want to

disturb it. Courant's back was toward her. He had purposely set his

face away, but he could hear the furtive whisperings of the stirred

calico. He was full of the consciousness of her, and this sound, which

carried a picture of her drooped head and moving hands, came with a

stealing unquiet, urgently intrusive and persistent. He tried to hold

his mind on his work, but his movements slackened, grew intermittent,

his ear attentive for the low rustling that crept toward him at

intervals like the effervescent approach of waves. Each time he heard

it the waves washed deeper to his inner senses and stole something from

his restraining will. For days the desert had been stealing from it

too. He knew it and was guarded and fearful of it, but this morning he

forgot to watch, forgot to care. His reason was drugged by the sound,

the stifled, whispering sound that her hands made moving the material

from which she fashioned a covering for her body.

He sat with his back turned to her, his hands loose on the gun, his

eyes fixed in an unseeing stare. He did not know what he looked at or

that the shadow of the horse had slipped beyond him. When he heard her

move his quietness increased to a trancelike suspension of movement,

the inner concentration holding every muscle in spellbound rigidness.

Suddenly she tore the calico with a keen, rending noise, and it was as

if her hands had seized upon and so torn the tension that held him.

His fists clinched on the gun barrel, and for a moment the mountain

line undulated to his gaze. Had they been alone, speech would have

burst from him, but the presence of the old man kept him silent. He

bowed his head over the gun, making a pretense of giving it a last

inspection, then, surer of himself, leaped to his feet and said gruffly:

"Let's move on. There's no good waiting here."

The other two demurred. Susan rose and walked into the glare sweeping

the way David had gone. Against the pale background she stood out a

vital figure, made up of glowing tints that reached their brightest

note in the heated rose of her cheeks and lips. Her dark head with its

curly crest of hair was defined as if painted on the opaque blue of the

sky. She stood motionless, only her eyes moving as they searched the

distance. All of life that remained in the famished land seemed to

have flowed into her and found a beautified expression in the rich

vitality of her upright form, the flushed bloom of her face. Daddy

John bent to pick up the saddle, and the mountain man, safe from

espial, looked at her with burning eyes.

"David's not in sight," she said. "Do you think we'd better go on?"

"Whether we'd better or not we will," he answered roughly. "Catch up,

Daddy John."

They were accustomed to obeying him like children their master. So

without more parley they pulled up stakes, loaded the wagon, and

started. As Susan fell back to her place at the rear, she called to

Courant:

"We'll go as slowly as we can. We mustn't get too far ahead. David

can't ride hard the way he is now."

The man growled an answer that she did not hear, and without looking at

her took the road.

They made their evening halt by the river. It had dwindled to a

fragile stream which, wandering away into the dryness, would creep

feebly to its sink and there disappear, sucked into secret subways that

no man knew. To-morrow they would start across the desert, where they

could see the road leading straight in a white seam to the west. David

had not come. The mules stood stripped of their harness, the wagon

rested with dropped tongue, the mess chest was open and pans shone in

mingled fire and sunset gleams, but the mysteries of the distance, over

which twilight veils were thickening, gave no sign of him. Daddy John

built up the desert fire as a beacon--a pile of sage that burned like

tinder. It shot high, tossed exultant flames toward the dimmed stars

and sent long jets of light into the encircling darkness. Its wavering

radiance, red and dancing, touched the scattered objects of the camp,

revealing and then losing them as new flame ran along the leaves or

charred branches dropped. Outside the night hung, deep and silent.

Susan hovered on the outskirts of the glow. Darkness was thickening,

creeping from the hills that lay inky-edged against the scarlet of the

sky. Once she sent up a high cry of David's name. Courant, busy with

his horses, lifted his head and looked at her, scowling over his

shoulder.

"Why are you calling?" he said. "He can see the fire."

She came back and stood near him, her eyes on him in uneasy scrutiny:

"We shouldn't have gone on. We should have waited for him."

There was questioning and also a suggestion of condemnation in her

voice. She was anxious and her tone and manner showed she thought it

his fault.

He bent to loosen a girth.

"Are you afraid he's lost?" he said, his face against the horse.

"No. But if he was?"

"Well! And if he was?"

The girth was uncinched and he swept saddle and blanket to the ground.

"We'd have to go back for him, and you say we must lose no time."

He kicked the things aside and made no answer. Then as he groped for

the picket pins he was conscious that she turned again with the nervous

movement of worry and swept the plain.

"He was sick. We oughtn't to have gone on," she repeated, and the note

of blame was stronger. "Oh, I wish he'd come!"

Their conversation had been carried on in a low key. Suddenly Courant,

wheeling round on her, spoke in the raised tone of anger.

"And am I to stop the train because that fool don't know enough or care

enough to picket his horses? Is it always to be him? Excuses made and

things done for him as if he was a sick girl or a baby. Let him be

lost, and stay lost, and be damned to him."

Daddy John looked up from the sheaf of newly gathered sage with the

alertness of a scared monkey. Susan stepped back, feeling suddenly

breathless. Courant made a movement as if to follow her, then stopped,

his face rived with lines and red with rage. He was shaken by what to

her was entirely inexplicable anger, and in her amazement she stared

vacantly at him.

"What's that, what's that?" chirped Daddy John, scrambling to his feet

and coming toward them with chin thrust belligerently forward and

blinking eyes full of fight.

Neither spoke to him and he added sharply:

"Didn't I hear swearing? Who's swearing now?" as if he had his doubts

that it might be Susan.

Courant with a stifled phrase turned from them, picked up his hammer

and began driving in the stakes.

"What was it?" whispered the old man. "What's the matter with him? Is

he mad at David?"

She shook her head, putting a finger on her lip in sign of silence, and

moving away to the other side of the fire. She felt the strain in the

men and knew it was her place to try and keep the peace. But a sense

of forlorn helplessness amid these warring spirits lay heavily on her

and she beckoned to the old servant, wanting him near her as one who,

no matter how dire the circumstances, would never fail her.

"Yes, he's angry," she said when they were out of earshot. "I suppose

it's about David. But what can we do? We can't make David over into

another man, and we can't leave him behind just because he's not as

strong as the rest of us. I feel as if we were getting to be savages."

The old man gave a grunt that had a note of cynical acquiescence, then

held up his hand in a signal for quiet. The thud of a horse's hoofs

came from the outside night. With a quick word to get the supper

ready, she ran forward and stood in the farthest rim of the light

waiting for her betrothed.

David was a pitiable spectacle. The dust lay thick on his face, save

round his eyes, whence he had rubbed it, leaving the sockets looking

unnaturally sunken and black. His collar was open and his neck rose

bare and roped with sinews. There was but one horse at the end of the

trail rope. As he slid out of the saddle, he dropped the rope on the

ground, saying that the other animal was sick, he had left it dying he

thought. He had found them miles off, miles and miles--with a weak

wave of his hand toward the south--near an alkaline spring where he

supposed they had been drinking. The other couldn't move, this one he

had dragged along with him. The men turned their attention to the

horse, which, with swollen body and drooping head, looked as if it

might soon follow its mate. They touched it, and spoke together, brows

knit over the trouble, not paying any attention to David, who, back in

the flesh, was sufficiently accounted for.

Susan was horrified by his appearance. She had never seen him look so

much a haggard stranger to himself. He was prostrate with fatigue, and

throughout the day he had nursed a sense of bitter injury. Now back

among them, seeing the outspread signs of their rest, and with the good

smell of their food in his nostrils, this rose to the pitch of

hysterical rage, ready to vent itself at the first excuse. The sight

of the girl, fresh-skinned from a wash in the river, instead of

soothing, further inflamed him. Her glowing well-being seemed bought

at his expense. Her words of concern spoke to his sick ear with a note

of smug, unfeeling complacence.

"David, you're half dead. Every thing'll be ready in a minute. Sit

down and rest. Here, take my blanket."

She spread her blanket for him, but he stood still, not answering,

staring at her with dull, accusing eyes. Then, with a dazed movement,

he pushed his hand over the crown of his head throwing off his hat.

The hand was unsteady, and it fell, the hooked forefinger catching in

the opening of his shirt, dragging it down and showing his bony breast.

If he had been nothing to her she would have pitied him. Sense of

wrongs done him made the pity passionate. She went to him, the

consoling woman in her eyes, and laid her hand on the one that rested

on his chest.

"David, sit down and rest. Don't move again. I'll get you everything.

I never saw you look as you do to-night."

With an angry movement he threw her hand off.

"You don't care," he said. "What does it matter to you when you've

been comfortable all day? So long as you and the others are all right

I don't matter."

It was so unlike him, his face was so changed and charged with a

childish wretchedness, that she felt no check upon her sympathy. She

knew it was not David that spoke, but a usurping spirit born of evil

days. The other men pricked their ears and listened, but she was

indifferent to their watch, and tried again to take his hand, saying,

pleadingly:

"Sit down. When I get your supper you'll be better. I'll have it

ready in a few minutes."

This time he threw her hand off with violence. His face, under its

dust mask, flamed with the anger that had been accumulating through the

day.

"Let me alone," he cried, his voice strangled like a wrathful child's.

"I don't want anything to do with you. Eat your supper. When I'm

ready I'll get mine without any help from you. Let me be."

He turned from her, and moving over the blanket, stumbled on its folds.

The jar was the breaking touch to his overwrought nerves. He

staggered, caught his breath with a hiccoughing gasp, and dropping his

face into his hands burst into hysterical tears. Then in a sudden

abandonment of misery he threw himself on the blanket, buried his head

in his folded arms and rending sobs broke from him. For a moment they

were absolutely still, staring at him in stupefied surprise. Daddy

John, his neck craned round the blaze, surveyed him with bright, sharp

eyes of unemotional query, then flopped the bacon pan on the embers,

and said:

"He's all done."

Courant advanced a step, looked down on him and threw a sidelong glance

at Susan, bold with meaning. After her first moment of amazement, she

moved to David's side, drew the edge of the blanket over him, touched

his head with a light caress, and turned back to the fire. The plates

and cups were lying there and she quietly set them out, her eye now and

then straying for a needed object, her hand hanging in suspended search

then dropping upon it, and noiselessly putting it in its place.

Unconsciously they maintained an awed silence, as if they were sitting

by the dead. Daddy John turned the bacon with stealthy care, the

scrape of his knife on the pan sounding a rude and unseemly intrusion.

Upon this scrupulously maintained quietude the man's weeping broke

insistent, the stifled regular beat of sobs hammering on it as if

determined to drive their complacency away and reduce them to the low

ebb of misery in which he lay.

They had almost finished their meal when the sounds lessened, dwindling

to spasmodic, staggering gasps with lengthening pauses that broke

suddenly in a quivering intake of breath and a vibration of the

recumbent frame. The hysterical paroxysm was over. He lay limp and

turned his head on his arms, too exhausted to feel shame for the shine

of tears on his cheek. Susan took a plate of food and a coffee cup and

stole toward him, the two men watching her under their eyelids. She

knelt beside him and spoke very gently, "Will you take this, David?

You'll feel stronger after you've eaten."

"Put it down," he said hoarsely, without moving.

"Shall I give you the coffee?" She hung over him looking into his

face. "I can hold the cup and you can drink it."

"By and by," he muttered.

She bent lower and laid her hand on his hair.

"David, I'm so sorry," she breathed.

Courant leaped to his feet and walked to where his horses stood. He

struck one of them a blow on the flank that after the silence and the

low tones of the girl's crooning voice sounded as violent as a pistol

shot. They all started, even David lifted his head.

"What's the matter now?" said Daddy John, alert for any outbreak of man

or beast.

But Courant made no answer, and moved away into the plain. It was some

time before he came back, emerging from the darkness as noiselessly as

he had gone. David had eaten his supper and was asleep, the girl

sitting beyond him withdrawn from the fire glow. Daddy John was

examining the sick horse, and Courant joined him, walking round the

beast and listening to the old man's opinions as to its condition.

They were not encouraging. It seemed likely that David's carelessness

would cost the train two valuable animals.

To the outward eye peace had again settled on the camp. The low

conferrings of the two men, the dying snaps of the charred twigs, were

the only sounds. The night brooded serene about the bivouac, the large

stars showing clear now that the central glare had sunk to a red heap

of ruin. Far away, on the hills, the sparks of Indian fires gleamed.

They had followed the train for days, watching it like the eyes of

hungry animals, too timid to come nearer. But there was no cause for

alarm, for the desert Indians were a feeble race, averse to bloodshed,

thieves at their worst, descending upon the deserted camping grounds to

carry away what the emigrants left.

Nevertheless, when the sound of hoof beats came from the trail both men

made a quick snatch for their rifles, and Susan jumped to her feet with

a cry of "Some one's coming." They could see nothing, the darkness

hanging like a curtain across their vision. Courant, with his rifle in

the hollow of his arm, moved toward the sounds, his hail reaching clear

and deep into the night. An answer came in a man's voice, the hoof

beats grew louder, and the reaching light defined approaching shapes.

Daddy John threw a bunch of sage on the fire, and in the rush of flame

that flew along its branches, two mounted men were visible.

They dropped to the ground and came forward. "From California to the

States," the foremost said to Susan, seeing a woman with fears to be

allayed. He was tall and angular with a frank, copper-tanned face,

overtopped by a wide spread of hat, and bearded to the eyes. He wore a

loose hickory shirt and buckskin breeches tucked into long boots,

already broken from the soles. The other was a small and comical

figure with an upstanding crest of sunburned blond hair, tight curled

and thick as a sheep's fleece. When he saw Susan he delayed his

advance to put on a ragged army overcoat that hung to his heels, and

evidently hid discrepancies in his costume not meet for a lady's eye.

Both men were powdered with dust, and announced themselves as hungry

enough to eat their horses.

Out came pans and supplies, and the snapping of bacon fat and smell of

coffee rose pungent. Though, by their own account, they had ridden

hard and far, there was a feverish energy of life in each of them that

roused the drooping spirits of the others like an electrifying current.

They ate ravenously, pausing between mouthfuls to put quick questions

on the condition of the eastward trail, its grazing grounds, what

supplies could be had at the Forts. It was evident they were new to

journeying on the great bare highways of the wilderness, but that fact

seemed to have no blighting effect on their zeal. What and who they

were came out in the talk that gushed in the intervals of feeding. The

fair-haired man was a sailor, shipped from Boston round the Horn for

California eight months before. The fact that he was a deserter

dropped out with others. He was safe here--with a side-long laugh at

Susan--no more of the sea for him.

He was going back for money, money and men. It was too late to get

through to the States now? Well he'd wait and winter at Fort Laramie

if he had to, but he guessed he'd make a pretty vigorous effort to get

to St. Louis. His companion was from Philadelphia, and was going back

for his wife and children, also money. He'd bring them out next

spring, collect a big train, stock it well, and carry them across with

him.

"And start early, not waste any time dawdling round and talking. Start

with the first of 'em and get to California before the rush begins."

"Rush?" said Courant. "Are you looking for a rush next year?"

The man leaned forward with upraised, arresting hand, "The biggest rush

in the history of this country. Friends, there's gold in California."

Gold! The word came in different keys, their flaccid bodies stiffened

into upright eagerness-- Gold in the Promised Land!

Then came the great story, the discovery of California's treasure told

by wanderers to wanderers under the desert stars. Six months before

gold had been found in the race of Sutter's mill in the foothills. The

streams that sucked their life from the snow crests of the Sierras were

yellow with it. It lay, a dusty sediment, in the prospector's pan. It

spread through the rock cracks in sparkling seams.

The strangers capped story with story, chanted the tales of fantastic

exaggeration that had already gone forth, and up and down California

were calling men from ranch and seaboard. They were coming down from

Oregon along the wild spine of the coast ranges and up from the Mission

towns strung on highways beaten out by Spanish soldier and padre. The

news was now en route to the outer world carried by ships. It would

fly from port to port, run like fire up the eastern coast and leap to

the inland cities and the frontier villages. And next spring, when the

roads were open, would come the men, the regiments of men, on foot,

mounted, in long caravans, hastening to California for the gold that

was there for anyone who had the strength and hardihood to go.

The bearded man got up, went to his horse and brought back his pack.

He opened it, pulled off the outer blanketing, and from a piece of

dirty calico drew a black sock, bulging and heavy. From this in turn

he shook a small buckskin sack. He smoothed the calico, untied a

shoestring from the sack's mouth, and let a stream of dun-colored dust

run out. It shone in the firelight in a slow sifting rivulet, here and

there a bright flake like a spangle sending out a yellow spark.

Several times a solid particle obstructed the lazy flow, which broke

upon it like water on a rock, dividing and sinking in two heavy

streams. It poured with unctious deliberation till the sack was empty,

and the man held it up to show the powdered dust of dust clinging to

the inside.

"That's three weeks' washing on the river across the valley beyond

Sacramento," he said, "and it's worth four thousand dollars in the

United States mint."

The pile shone yellow in the fire's even glow, and they stared at it,

wonderstruck, each face showing a sudden kindling of greed, the longing

to possess, to know the power and peace of wealth. It came with added

sharpness in the midst of their bare distress. Even the girl felt it,

leaning forward to gloat with brightened eyes on the little pyramid.

David forgot his injuries and craned his neck to listen, dreams once

more astir. California became suddenly a radiant vision. No longer a

faint line of color, vaguely lovely, but a place where fortune waited

them, gold to fill their coffers, to bring them ease, to give their

aspirations definite shape, to repay them for their bitter pilgrimage.

They were seized with the lust of it, and their attentive faces

sharpened with the strain of the growing desire. They felt the onward

urge to be up and moving, to get there and lay their hands on the

waiting treasure.

The night grew old and still they talked, their fatigue forgotten.

They heard the tale of Marshall's discovery and how it flew right and

left through the spacious, idle land. There were few to answer the

call, ranches scattered wide over the unpeopled valleys, small traders

in the little towns along the coast. In the settlement of Yerba Buena,

fringing the edge of San Francisco Bay, men were leaving their goods at

their shop doors and going inland. Ships were lying idle in the tide

water, every sailor gone to find the golden river. The fair-haired man

laughed and told how he'd swam naked in the darkness, his money in his

mouth, and crawled up the long, shoal shore, waist high in mud.

The small hours had come when one by one they dropped to sleep as they

lay. A twist of the blanket, a squirming into deeper comfort, and rest

was on them. They sprawled in the caked dust like dead men fallen in

battle and left as they had dropped. Even the girl forgot the habits

of a life-long observance and sunk to sleep among them, her head on a

saddle, the old servant curled at her feet.

CHAPTER III

In the even dawn light the strangers left. It was hail and farewell in

desert meetings. They trotted off into the ghostlike stillness of the

plain which for a space threw back their hoof beats, and then closed

round them. The departure of the westward band was not so prompt.

With unbound packs and unharnessed animals, they stood, a dismayed

group, gathered round a center of disturbance. David was ill. The

exertions of the day before had drained his last reserve of strength.

He could hardly stand, complained of pain, and a fever painted his

drawn face with a dry flush. Under their concerned looks, he climbed

on his horse, swayed there weakly, then slid off and dropped on the

ground.

"I'm too sick to go on," he said in the final collapse of misery. "You

can leave me here to die."

He lay flat, looking up at the sky, his long hair raying like a

mourning halo from the outline of his skull, his arms outspread as if

his soul had submitted to its crucifixion and his body was in

agreement. That he was ill was beyond question. The men had their

suspicions that he, like the horses, had drunk of the alkaline spring.

Susan was for remaining where they were till he recovered, the others

wanted to go on. He gave no ear to their debate, interrupting it once

to announce his intention of dying where he lay. This called forth a

look of compassion from the girl, a movement of exasperation from the

mountain man. Daddy John merely spat and lifted his hat to the faint

dawn air. It was finally agreed that David should be placed in the

wagon, his belongings packed on his horse, while the sick animal must

follow as best it could.

During the morning's march no one spoke. They might have been a

picture moving across a picture for all the animation they showed. The

exaltation of the evening before had died down to a spark, alight and

warming still, but pitifully shrunk from last night's high-flaming

buoyancy. It was hard to keep up hopes in these distressful hours.

California had again receded. The desert and the mountains were yet to

pass. The immediate moment hemmed them in so closely that it was an

effort to look through it and feel the thrill of joys that lay so far

beyond. It was better to focus their attention on the lone

promontories that cut the distance and gradually grew from flat

surfaces applied on the plain to solid shapes, thick-based and shadow

cloven.

They made their noon camp at a spring, bubbling from a rim of

white-rooted grass. David refused to take anything but water, groaning

as he sat up in the wagon and stretching a hot hand for the cup that

Susan brought. The men paid no attention to him. They showed more

concern for the sick horse, which when not incapacitated did its part

with good will, giving the full measure of its strength. That they

refrained from open anger and upbraiding was the only concession they

made to the conventions they had learned in easier times. Whether

David cared or not he said nothing, lying fever-flushed, his wandering

glance held to attention when Susan's face appeared at the canvas

opening. He hung upon her presence, querulously exacting in his

unfamiliar pain.

Making ready for the start their eyes swept a prospect that showed no

spot of green, and they filled their casks neck high and rolled out

into the dazzling shimmer of the afternoon. The desert was widening,

the hills receding, shrinking away to a crenelated edge that fretted a

horizon drawn as straight as a ruled line. The plain unrolled more

spacious and grimmer, not a growth in sight save sage, not a trickle of

water or leaf murmur, even the mirage had vanished leaving the distance

bare and mottled with a leprous white. At intervals, outstretched like

a pointing finger, the toothed summit of a ridge projected, its base

uplifted in clear, mirrored reflection.

The second half of the day was as unbroken by speech or incident as the

morning. They had nothing to say, as dry of thought as they were

despoiled of energy. The shadows were beginning to lengthen when they

came to a fork in the trail. One branch bore straight westward, the

other slanted toward the south, and both showed signs of recent travel.

Following them to the distance was like following the tracks of

creeping things traced on a sandy shore. Neither led to

anything--sage, dust, the up-standing combs of rocky reefs were all the

searching eye could see till sight lost itself in the earth's curve.

The girl and the two men stood in the van of the train consulting. The

region was new to Courant, but they left it to him, and he decided for

the southern route.

For the rest of the afternoon they followed it. The day deepened to

evening and they bore across a flaming level, striped with gigantic

shadows. Looking forward they saw a lake of gold that lapped the roots

of rose and lilac hills. The road swept downward to a crimsoned butte,

cleft apart, and holding in its knees a gleam of water. The animals,

smelling it, broke for it, tearing the wagon over sand hummocks and

crackling twigs. It was a feeble upwelling, exhausted by a single

draught. Each beast, desperately nosing in its coolness, drained it,

and there was a long wait ere the tiny depression filled again.

Finally, it was dried of its last drop, and the reluctant ooze stopped.

The animals, their thirst half slaked, drooped about it, looking with

mournful inquiry at the disturbed faces of their masters.

It was a bad sign. The men knew there were waterless tracts in the

desert that the emigrant must skirt. They mounted to the summit of the

butte and scanned their surroundings. The world shone a radiant floor

out of which each sage brush rose a floating, feathered tuft, but of

gleam or trickle of water there was none. When they came down David

lay beside the spring his eyes on its basin, now a muddied hole, the

rim patterned with hoof prints. When he heard them coming he rose on

his elbow awaiting them with a haggard glance, then seeing their blank

looks sank back groaning. To Susan's command that a cask be broached,

Courant gave a sullen consent. She drew off the first cupful and gave

it to the sick man, his lean hands straining for it, his fingers

fumbling in a search for the handle. The leader, after watching her

for a moment, turned away and swung off, muttering. David dropped back

on the ground, his eyes closed, his body curved about the damp

depression.