AN IDYL OF THE ROCKYS.
I shall make short work of our journey to Laramie.
We bent northeastwardly by ways known to our leader,--alas! leader no
more. He could guide, but no more gallop in front and beckon on the
cavalcade.
It was a grand journey. A wild one, and rough for a lady. But this lady
was made of other stuff than the mistresses of lapdogs.
We crossed the backbone of the continent, climbing up the clefts
between the ragged vertebræ, and over the top of that meandering spine,
fleshed with great grassy mounds; then plunging down again among the
rifts and glens.
A brilliant quartette ours would have been, but for my friend’s wound.
Four people, all with fresh souls and large and peculiar experience.
Except for my friend’s wound!
My friend, closer than a brother, how I felt for him every mile of that
stern journey! He never complained. Only once he said to me, “Bodily
agony has something to teach, I find, as well as mental.”
Never one word of his suffering, except that. He wore slowly away.
Every day he grew a little weaker in body; but every day the strong
spirit lifted the body to its work. He must live to be our guide, that
he felt. He must be cheerful, gay even, lest the lady he had saved
should too bitterly feel that her safety was daily paid for by his
increasing agony. Every day that ichor of love baptized him with new
life. He breathed love and was strong. But it was love confined to his
own consciousness. Wounded, and dying perhaps, unless his life could
beat time by a day or an hour, he would not throw any share of his
suffering on another, on her, by calling for the sympathy which a woman
gives to her lover.
Did she love him? Ah! that is the ancient riddle. Only the Sphinx
herself can answer. Those fair faces of women, with their tender
smiles, their quick blushes, their starting tears, still wear a mask
until the moment comes for unmasking. If she did not love him,--this
man of all men most lovable, this feminine soul in the body of a hero,
this man who had spilled his blood for her, whose whole history had
trained him for those crowning hours of a chivalric life when the
lover led our Gallop of Three; if she did not love him, she must be, I
thought, some bloodless creature of a type other than human, an angel
and no woman, a creature not yet truly embodied into the body of love
we seemed to behold.
She was sweetly tender to him; but that the wound, received for her
sake, merited; _that_ was hardly more than the gracious thankfulness
she lavished upon us all. What an exquisite woman! How calmly she took
her place, lofty and serene, above all the cloudy atmosphere of such a
bewildering life as hers had been! How large and deep and mature the
charity she had drawn, even so young, from the strange contrasts of her
history! How her keen observation of a woman of genius had grasped and
stored away the diamond, or the dust of diamond, in every drift across
her life!
She grew more beautiful daily. Those weary days when, mile after dreary
mile, the listless march of the Mormon caravan bore her farther and
farther away into hopeless exile, were gone forever. She breathed ruddy
hope now. Before, she had filtered hope from every breath and only
taken the thin diet of pale endurance. All future possibility of trial,
after her great escape, seemed nothing. She was confident of Brent’s
instant recovery, with repose, and a surgeon more skilful than she,
at Fort Laramie. She was sure that now her father’s wandering life was
over, and that he would let her find him a home and win him a living in
some quiet region of America, where all his sickly fancies would pass
away, and his old age would glide serenely.
It would be long, too long, for the movement of this history, should I
attempt to detail the talks and minor adventures of that trip by which
the character of all my companions became better known to me.
For the wounded man’s sake we made lengthened rests at noonday, and
camped with the earliest coming of twilight. Those were the moonlight
nights of brilliant October. How strange and solemn and shadowy the
mountains rose about our bivouacs! It was the poetry of camp life,
and to every scene by a fountain, by a torrent, in a wild dell, on a
mountain meadow with a vision of a snow-peak watching us all the starry
night and passing through rosiness into splendor at sunrise,--to every
scene, stern or fair, our comrade gave the poetry of a woman’s presence
and a woman’s fine perception of the minuter charm of nature.
And then--think of it!--she had a genius for cookery. I have known this
same power in other fine poetic and artistic beings. She had a genius
for imaginative cookery,--a rich inheritance from her father’s days
of poverty and coal-mining. She insisted upon her share of camp-duty;
and her great gray eyes were often to be seen gravely fixed upon a
frying-pan, or watching a roasting bird, as it twirled slowly before
the fire, with a strip of pork featly disposed overhead to baste that
succulent revolver; while Brent, poor fellow, lay upon the grass,
wrapped in blankets, slowly accumulating force for the next day’s
journey, and watched her with wonderment and delight that she could
condescend to be a household goddess.
“Ther ain’t her ikwill to be scared up,” would Armstrong say on these
occasions. “I’m gittin’ idees to make my Ellen the head woman on all
the Umpqua. I wish I had her along; for she’s a doughcyle gal, and
takes nat’ral to pooty notions in thinkin’ and behavior and fixin’ up
things ginerally.”
Armstrong became more and more the paternal element in our party.
Memory of the Ellen on the Umpqua made him fatherly thoughtful for the
Ellen here, a wanderer across the Rocky Mountains. And she returned
more than he gave, in the sweet civilizing despotism of a lady. That
grizzly turban presently disappeared from his head. Decorous bandages
replaced it. With that token went from him the sternness. He was a
frank, honest, kindly fellow, shrewd and unflinching, but one who
would never have lifted his hand against a human being except for that
great, solemn duty of an exterminating vengeance. That done, he was his
genial self again. We never tired of his tales of plains and Oregon
life, told in his own vivid dialect. He was the patriarchal pioneer,
a man with the personal freedom of a nomad, and the unschooled wisdom
of a founder of states in the wilderness. A mighty hunter, too, was
Armstrong. No day passed that we did not bag an antelope, a deer, or
a big-horn. It was the very land of Cocaigne for game. The creatures
were so hospitable that it hardly seemed proper gratitude to kill them;
even that great brown she-bear, who one night “popped her head into the
shop,” and, muttering something which in the Bruin lingo may have been,
“What! no soap!” smote Armstrong with a paw which years of sucking had
not made tender.
Except for Brent’s wound, we four might have had a joyous journey, full
of the true savor of brave travel. But that ghastly, murderous hurt of
his needed most skilful surgery, and needed most of all repose with a
mind at peace. He did not mend; but all the while
“The breath
Of her sweet tendance hovering over him
Filled all the genial courses of his blood
With deeper and with ever deeper love.”
But he did not mend. He wasted daily. His sleeps became deathly
trances. We could not wear him out with haste. Brave heart! he bore up
like a brave.
And at last one noon we drew out of the Black Hills, and saw before us,
across the spurs of Laramie Peak, the broad plain of Fort Laramie.
Brent revived. We rode steadily. Just before sunset, we pulled up at
our goal.