He nodded:

"'When I was a child I thought as a child—now I have put away childish things.' Is that it?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Then you wouldn't like to go back to the old life?"

She scattered the stones with an impatient gesture:

"I couldn't. I'd hate it. I wouldn't squeeze back into the same shape. I'd be all cramped and crowded up. You see every day out here I've been growing wider and wider," she stretched her arms to their length, "widening out to fit these huge, enormous places."

"The new life will be wide enough for you. You'll grow like a tree, a beautiful, tall, straight tree that has plenty of room for its branches to spread and plenty of sun and air to nourish it. There'll be no crowding or cramping out there. It's good to know you'll be happy in California. In the beginning I had fears."

She picked up a stone and with its pointed edge drew lines on the dust which seemed to interest her, for she followed them with intent eyes, not answering. He waited for a moment, then said with an undernote of pleading in his voice, "You think you will be happy, dearie?"

"I—I—don't—know," she stammered. "Nobody can tell. We're not there yet."

"I can tell." He raised himself on his elbow to watch her face. She knew that he expected to see the maiden's bashful happiness upon it, and the difference between his fond imaginings and the actual facts sickened her with an intolerable sense of deception. She could never tell him, never strike out of him his glad conviction of her contentment.

"We're going back to the Golden Age, you and I, and David. We'll live as we want, not the way other people want us to. When we get to California we'll build a house somewhere by a river and we'll plant our seeds and have vines growing over it and a garden in the front, and Daddy John will break Julia's spirit and harness her to the plow. Then when the house gets too small—houses have a way of doing that—I'll build a little cabin by the edge of the river, and you and David will have the house to yourselves where the old, white-headed doctor won't be in the way."

He smiled for the joy of his picture, and she turned her head from him, seeing the prospect through clouded eyes.

"You'll never go out of my house," she said in a low voice.

"Other spirits will come into it and fill it up."

A wish that anything might stop the slow advance to this roseate future choked her. She sat with averted face wrestling with her sick distaste, and heard him say:

"You don't know how happy you're going to be, my little Missy."

She could find no answer, and he went on: "You have everything for it, health and youth and a pure heart and David for your mate."

She had to speak now and said with urgence, trying to encourage herself, since no one else could do it for her,

"But that's all in the future, a long time from now."

"Not so very long. We ought to be in California in five or six weeks."

To have the dreaded reality suddenly brought so close, set at the limit of a few short weeks, grimly waiting at a definite point in the distance, made her repugnance break loose in alarmed words.

"Longer than that," she cried. "The desert's the hardest place, and we'll go slow, very slow, there."

"You sound as if you wanted to go slow," he answered, his smile indulgently quizzical, as completely shut away from her, in his man's ignorance, as though no bond of love and blood held them together.

"No, no, of course not," she faltered. "But I'm not at all sure we'll get through it so easily. I'm making allowance for delays. There are always delays."

"Yes, there may be delays, but we'll hope to be one of the lucky trains and get through on time."

She swallowed dryly, her heart gone down too far to be plucked up by futile contradition [Transcriber's note: contradiction?]. He mused a moment, seeking the best method of broaching a subject that had been growing in his mind for the past week. Frankness seemed the most simple, and he said:

"I've something to suggest to you. I've been thinking of it since we left the Pass. Bridger is a large post. They say there are trains there from all over the West and people of all sorts, and quite often there are missionaries."

"Missionaries?" in a faint voice.

"Yes, coming in and going out to the tribes of the Northwest. Suppose we found one there when we arrived?"

He stopped, watching her.

"Well?" her eyes slanted sideways in a fixity of attention.

"Would you marry David? Then we could all go on together."

Her breath left her and she turned a frightened face on him.

"Why?" she gasped. "What for?"

He laid his hand on hers and said quietly:

"Because, as you say, the hardest part of the journey is yet to come, and I am—well—not a strong man any more. The trip hasn't done for me what I hoped. If by some mischance—if anything should happen to me—then I'd know you'd be taken care of, protected and watched over by some one who could be trusted, whose right it was to do that."

"Oh, no. Oh, no," she cried in a piercing note of protest. "I couldn't, I couldn't."

She made as if to rise, then sank back, drawn down by his grasping hand. He thought her reluctance natural, a girl's shrinking at the sudden intrusion of marriage into the pretty comedy of courtship.

"Susan, I would like it," he pleaded.

"No," she tried to pull her hand away, as if wishing to draw every particle of self together and shut it all within her own protecting shell.

"Why not?"

"It's—it's—I don't want to be married out here in the wilds. I want to wait and marry as other girls do, and have a real wedding and a house to go to. I should hate it. I couldn't. It's like a squaw. You oughtn't to ask it."

Her terror lent her an unaccustomed subtlety. She eluded the main issue, seizing on objections that did not betray her, but that were reasonable, what might have been expected by the most unsuspicious of men:

"And as for your being afraid of falling sick in these dreadful places, isn't that all the more reason why I should be free to give all my time and thought to you? If you don't feel so strong, then marrying is the last thing I'd think of doing. I'm going to be with you all the time, closer than I ever was before. No man's going to come between us. Marry David and push you off into the background when you're not well and want me most—that's perfectly ridiculous."

She meant all she said. It was the truth, but it was the truth reinforced, given a fourfold strength by her own unwillingness. The thought that she had successfully defeated him, pushed the marriage away into an indefinite future, relieved her so that the dread usually evoked by his ill health was swept aside. She turned on him a face, once again bright, all clouds withdrawn, softened into dimpling reassurance.

"What an idea!" she said. "Men have no sense."

"Very well, spoiled girl. I suppose we'll have to put it off till we get to California."

She dropped back full length on the ground, and in the expansion of her relief laid her cheek against the hand that clasped hers.

"And until we get the house built," she cried, beginning to laugh.

"And the garden laid out and planted, I suppose?"

"Of course. And the vines growing over the front porch."

"Why not over the second story? We'll have a second story by that time."

"Over the whole house, up to the chimneys."

They both laughed, a cheerful bass and a gay treble, sweeping out across the unquiet water.

"It's going to be the Golden Age," she said, in the joy of her respite pressing her lips on the hand she held. "A cottage covered with vines to the roof and you and I and Daddy John inside it."

"And David, don't forget David."

"Of course, David," she assented lightly, for David's occupancy was removed to a comfortable distance.

After supper she and David climbed to the top of the bank to see the sunset. The breeze had dropped, the dust devils died with it. The silence of evening lay like a cool hand on the heated earth. Dusk was softening the hard, bright colors, wiping out the sharpness of stretching shadows the baked reflection of sun on clay. The West blazed above the mountains, but the rest of the sky was a thick, pure blue. Against it to the South, a single peak rose, snow-enameled on a turquoise background.

Susan felt at peace with the moment and her own soul. She radiated the good humor of one who has faced peril and escaped. Having postponed the event that was to make her David's forever, she felt bound to offer recompense. Her conscience went through one of those processes by which the consciences of women seek ease through atonement, prompting them to actions of a baleful kindliness. Contrition made her tender to the man she did not love. The thought that she had been unfair added a cruel sweetness to her manner.

He lay on the edge of the bluff beside her, not saying much, for it was happiness to feel her within touch of his hand, amiable and gentle as she had been of late. It would have taken an eye shrewder than David's to have seen into the secret springs of her conduct. He only knew that she had been kinder, friendlier, less withdrawn into the sanctuary of her virgin coldness, round which in the beginning he had hovered. His heart was high, swelled by the promise of her beaming looks and ready smiles. At last, in this drama of slow winning she was drawing closer, shyly melting, her whims and perversities mellowing to the rich, sweet yielding of the ultimate surrender.

"We ought to be at Fort Bridger now in a few days," he said. "Courant says if all goes well we can make it by Thursday and of course he knows."

"Courant!" she exclaimed with the familiar note of scorn. "He knows a little of everything, doesn't he?"

"Why don't you like him, Missy? He's a fine man for the trail."

"Yes, I dare say he is. But that's not everything."

"Why don't you like him? Come, tell the truth."

They had spoken before of her dislike of Courant. She had revealed it more frankly to David than to anyone else. It was one of the subjects over which she could become animated in the weariest hour. She liked to talk to her betrothed about it, to impress it upon him, warming to an eloquence that allayed her own unrest.

"I don't know why I don't like him. You can't always tell why you like or dislike a person. It's just something that comes and you don't know why."

"But it seems so childish and unfair. I don't like my girl to be unfair. Has he ever done anything or said anything to you that offended you?"

She gave a petulant movement: "No, but he thinks so much of himself, and he's hard and has no feeling, and— Oh, I don't know—it's just that I don't like him."

David laughed:

"It's all prejudice. You can't give any real reason."

"Of course I can't. Those things don't always have reasons. You're always asking for reasons and I never have any to give you."

"I'll have to teach you to have them."

She looked slantwise at him smiling. "I'm afraid that will be a great undertaking. I'm very stupid about learning things. You ask father and Daddy John what a terrible task it was getting me educated. The only person that didn't bother about it was this one"—she laid a finger on her chest— "She never cared in the least."

"Well I'll begin a second education. When we get settled I'll teach you to reason."

"Begin now." She folded her hands demurely in her lap and lifting her head back laughed: "Here I am waiting to learn."

"No. We want more time. I'll wait till we're married."

Her laughter diminished to a smile that lay on her lips, looking stiff and uncomfortable below the fixity of her eyes.

"That's such a long way off," she said faintly.

"Not so very long."

"Oh, California's hundreds of miles away yet. And then when we get there we've got to find a place to settle, and till the land, and lay out the garden and build a house, quite a nice house; I don't want to live in a cabin. Father and I have just been talking about it. Why it's months and months off yet."

He did not answer. She had spoken this way to him before, wafting the subject away with evasive words. After a pause he said slowly: "Why need we wait so long?"

"We must. I'm not going to begin my married life the way the emigrant women do. I want to live decently and be comfortable."

He broke a sprig off a sage bush and began to pluck it apart. She had receded to her defenses and peeped nervously at him from behind them.

"Fort Bridger," he said, his eyes on the twig, "is a big place, a sort of rendezvous for all kinds of people."

She stared at him, her face alert with apprehension, ready to dart into her citadel and lower the drawbridge.

"Sometimes there are missionaries stopping there."

"Missionaries?" she exclaimed in a high key. "I hate missionaries!"

This was a surprising statement. David knew the doctor to be a supporter and believer in the Indian missions, and had often heard his daughter acquiesce in his opinions.

"Why do you hate them?"

"I don't know. There's another thing you want a reason for. It's getting cold up here—let's go down by the fire."

She gathered herself together to rise, but he turned quickly upon her, and his face, while it made her shrink, also arrested her. She had come to dread that expression, persuasion hardened into desperate pleading. It woke in her a shocked repugnance, as though something had been revealed to her that she had no right to see. She felt shame for him, that he must beg where a man should conquer and subdue.

"Wait a moment," he said. "Why can't one of those missionaries marry us there?"

She had scrambled to her knees, and snatched at her skirt preparatory to the jump to her feet.

"No," she said vehemently. "No. What's the matter with you all talking about marriages and missionaries when we're in the middle of the wilds?"

"Susan," he cried, catching at her dress, "just listen a moment. I could take care of you then, take care of you properly. You'd be my own, to look after and work for. It's seemed to me lately you loved me enough. I wouldn't have suggested such a thing if you were as you were in the beginning. But you seem to care now. You seem as if—as if—it wouldn't be so hard for you to live with me and let me love you."

She jerked her skirt away and leaped to her feet crying again, "No, David, no. Not for a minute."

He rose too, very pale, the piece of sage in his hand shaking. They looked at each other, the yellow light clear on both faces. Hers was hard and combative, as if his suggestion had outraged her and she was ready to fight it. Its expression sent a shaft of terror to his soul, for with all his unselfishness he was selfish in his man's longing for her, hungered for her till his hunger had made him blind. Now in a flash of clairvoyance he saw truly, and feeling the joy of life slipping from him, faltered:

"Have I made a mistake? Don't you care?"

It was her opportunity, she was master of her fate. But her promise was still a thing that held, the moment had not come when she saw nothing but her own desire, and to gain it would have sacrificed all that stood between. His stricken look, his expression of nerving himself for a blow, pierced her, and her words rushed out in a burst of contrition.

"Of course, of course, I do. Don't doubt me. Don't. But— Oh, David, don't torment me. Don't ask anything like that now. I can't, I can't. I'm not ready—not yet."

Her voice broke and she put her hand to her mouth to hide its trembling. Over it, her eyes, suddenly brimming with tears, looked imploringly into his.

It was a heart-tearing sight to the lover. He forgot himself and, without knowing what he did, opened his arms to inclose her in an embrace of pity and remorse.

"Oh, dearest, I'll never ask it till you're willing to come to me," he cried, and saw her back away, with upheld shoulders raised in defense against his hands.

"I won't touch you," he said, quickly dropping his arms. "Don't draw back from me. If you don't want it I'll never lay a finger on you."

The rigidity of her attitude relaxed. She turned away her head and wiped her tears on the end of the kerchief knotted round her neck. He stood watching her, struggling with passion and foreboding, reassured and yet with the memory of the seeing moment, chill at his heart.

Presently she shot a timid glance at him, and met his eyes resting questioningly upon her. Her face was tear stained, a slight, frightened smile on the lips.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Susan, do you truly care for me?"

"Yes," she said, looking down. "Yes—but—let me wait a little while longer."

"As long as you like. I'll never ask you to marry me till you say you're willing."

She held out her hand shyly, as if fearing a repulse. He took it, and feeling it relinquished to his with trust and confidence, swore that never again would he disturb her, never demand of her till she was ready to give.



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 naively 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.