Their first sensation was one of purely animal freedom.
They looked at each other with sparkling eyes and long silent breaths.
But this spontaneous outburst of savage nature soon passed. Susy's
little hand presently reached forward and clutched Clarence's jacket.
The boy understood it, and said quickly,--
“They ain't gone far, and they'll stop as soon as they find us gone.”
They trotted on a little faster; the sun they had followed every day and
the fresh wagon tracks being their unfailing guides; the keen, cool air
of the plains, taking the place of that all-pervading dust and smell of
the perspiring oxen, invigorating them with its breath.
“We ain't skeered a bit, are we?” said Susy.
“What's there to be afraid of?” said Clarence scornfully. He said this
none the less strongly because he suddenly remembered that they had been
often left alone in the wagon for hours without being looked after,
and that their absence might not be noticed until the train stopped to
encamp at dusk, two hours later. They were not running very fast, yet
either they were more tired than they knew, or the air was thinner, for
they both seemed to breathe quickly. Suddenly Clarence stopped.
“There they are now.”
He was pointing to a light cloud of dust in the far-off horizon, from
which the black hulk of a wagon emerged for a moment and was lost. But
even as they gazed the cloud seemed to sink like a fairy mirage to the
earth again, the whole train disappeared, and only the empty stretching
track returned. They did not know that this seemingly flat and level
plain was really undulatory, and that the vanished train had simply
dipped below their view on some further slope even as it had once
before. But they knew they were disappointed, and that disappointment
revealed to them the fact that they had concealed it from each other.
The girl was the first to succumb, and burst into a quick spasm of
angry tears. That single act of weakness called out the boy's pride and
strength. There was no longer an equality of suffering; he had become
her protector; he felt himself responsible for both. Considering her no
longer his equal, he was no longer frank with her.
“There's nothin' to boo-boo for,” he said, with a half-affected
brusqueness. “So quit, now! They'll stop in a minit, and send some one
back for us. Shouldn't wonder if they're doin' it now.”
But Susy, with feminine discrimination detecting the hollow ring in his
voice, here threw herself upon him and began to beat him violently with
her little fists. “They ain't! They ain't! They ain't. You know it!
How dare you?” Then, exhausted with her struggles, she suddenly threw
herself flat on the dry grass, shut her eyes tightly, and clutched at
the stubble.
“Get up,” said the boy, with a pale, determined face that seemed to have
got much older.
“You leave me be,” said Susy.
“Do you want me to go away and leave you?” asked the boy.
Susy opened one blue eye furtively in the secure depths of her
sun-bonnet, and gazed at his changed face.
“Ye-e-s.”
He pretended to turn away, but really to look at the height of the
sinking sun.
“Kla'uns!”
“Well?”
“Take me.”
She was holding up her hands. He lifted her gently in his arms, dropping
her head over his shoulder. “Now,” he said cheerfully, “you keep a good
lookout that way, and I this, and we'll soon be there.”
The idea seemed to please her. After Clarence had stumbled on for a few
moments, she said, “Do you see anything, Kla'uns?”
“Not yet.”
“No more don't I.” This equality of perception apparently satisfied her.
Presently she lay more limp in his arms. She was asleep.
The sun was sinking lower; it had already touched the edge of the
horizon, and was level with his dazzled and straining eyes. At times it
seemed to impede his eager search and task his vision. Haze and black
spots floated across the horizon, and round wafers, like duplicates of
the sun, glittered back from the dull surface of the plains. Then he
resolved to look no more until he had counted fifty, a hundred,
but always with the same result, the return of the empty, unending
plains--the disk growing redder as it neared the horizon, the fire it
seemed to kindle as it sank, but nothing more.
Staggering under his burden, he tried to distract himself by fancying
how the discovery of their absence would be made. He heard the listless,
half-querulous discussion about the locality that regularly pervaded
the nightly camp. He heard the discontented voice of Jake Silsbee as he
halted beside the wagon, and said, “Come out o' that now, you two, and
mighty quick about it.” He heard the command harshly repeated. He saw
the look of irritation on Silsbee's dusty, bearded face, that followed
his hurried glance into the empty wagon. He heard the query, “What's
gone o' them limbs now?” handed from wagon to wagon. He heard a few
oaths; Mrs. Silsbee's high rasping voice, abuse of himself, the hurried
and discontented detachment of a search party, Silsbee and one of the
hired men, and vociferation and blame. Blame always for himself, the
elder, who might have “known better!” A little fear, perhaps, but he
could not fancy either pity or commiseration. Perhaps the thought upheld
his pride; under the prospect of sympathy he might have broken down.
At last he stumbled, and stopped to keep himself from falling forward on
his face. He could go no further; his breath was spent; he was dripping
with perspiration; his legs were trembling under him; there was
a roaring in his ears; round red disks of the sun were scattered
everywhere around him like spots of blood. To the right of the trail
there seemed to be a slight mound where he could rest awhile, and yet
keep his watchful survey of the horizon. But on reaching it he found
that it was only a tangle of taller mesquite grass, into which he sank
with his burden. Nevertheless, if useless as a point of vantage, it
offered a soft couch for Susy, who seemed to have fallen quite naturally
into her usual afternoon siesta, and in a measure it shielded her from a
cold breeze that had sprung up from the west. Utterly exhausted himself,
but not daring to yield to the torpor that seemed to be creeping over
him, Clarence half sat, half knelt down beside her, supporting himself
with one hand, and, partly hidden in the long grass, kept his straining
eyes fixed on the lonely track.
The red disk was sinking lower. It seemed to have already crumbled away
a part of the distance with its eating fires. As it sank still lower,
it shot out long, luminous rays, diverging fan-like across the plain,
as if, in the boy's excited fancy, it too were searching for the lost
estrays. And as one long beam seemed to linger over his hiding-place,
he even thought that it might serve as a guide to Silsbee and the other
seekers, and was constrained to stagger to his feet, erect in its
light. But it soon sank, and with it Clarence dropped back again to his
crouching watch. Yet he knew that the daylight was still good for an
hour, and with the withdrawal of that mystic sunset glory objects became
even more distinct and sharply defined than at any other time. And with
the merciful sheathing of that flaming sword which seemed to have swayed
between him and the vanished train, his eyes already felt a blessed
relief.