The girl, with a deep sigh, dropped her head upon her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes. She weakened with the sudden promise of rest. It was in the air, soft as a caress, in the mild, beneficent sun, in the stillness which had nothing of the desert's sinister quiet. Courant put his arm about her, and looking into her face, saw it drawn and pinched, all beauty gone. Her closed eyelids were dark and seamed with fine folds, the cheek bones showed under her skin, tanned to a dry brown, its rich bloom withered. Round her forehead and ears her hair hung in ragged locks, its black gloss hidden under the trail's red dust. Even her youth had left her, she seemed double her age. It was as if he looked at the woman she would be twenty years from now.

Something in the sight of her, unbeautiful, enfeebled, her high spirit dimmed, stirred in him a new, strange tenderness. His arm tightened about her, his look lost its jealous ardor and wandering over her blighted face, melted to a passionate concern. The appeal of her beauty gave place to a stronger, more gripping appeal, never felt by him before. She was no longer the creature he owned and ruled, no longer the girl he had broken to an abject submission, but the woman he loved. Uplifted in the sudden realization he felt the world widen around him and saw himself another man. Then through the wonder of the revelation came the thought of what he had done to win her. It astonished him as a dart of pain would have done. Why had he remembered it? Why at this rich moment should the past send out this eerie reminder? He pushed it from him, and bending toward her murmured a lover's phrase.

She opened her eyes and they met an expression in his that she had felt the need of, hoped and waited for, an answer to what she had offered and he had not seen or wanted. It was completion, arrival at the goal, so longed for and despaired of, and she turned her face against his shoulder, her happiness too sacred even for his eyes. He did not understand the action, thought her spirit languished and, pointing outward, cried in his mounting gladness:

"Look—that's where our home will be."

She lifted her head and followed the directing finger. The old man stood beside them also gazing down.

"It's a grand sight," he said. "But it's as yellow as the desert. Must be almighty dry."

"There's plenty of water," said Courant. "Rivers come out of these mountains and go down there into the plain. And they carry the gold, the gold that's going to make us rich."

He pressed her shoulder with his encircling arm and she answered dreamily:

"We are rich enough."

He thought she alluded to the Doctor's money that was hidden in the wagon.

"But we'll be richer. We've got here before the rest of 'em. We're the first comers and it's ours. You'll be queen here, Susan. I'll make you one." His glance ranged over the splendid prospect, eager with the man's desire to fight and win for his own. She thought little of what he said, lost in her perfect content.

"When we've got the gold we'll take up land and I'll build a house for you, a good house, my wife won't live in a tent. It'll be of logs, strong and water tight, and as soon as they bring things in—and the ships will be coming soon—we'll furnish it well. And that'll be only the beginning."

"Where will we build it?" she said, catching his enthusiasm and straining her eyes as if then and there to pick out the spot.

"By the river under a pine."

"With a place for Daddy John," she cried, stretching a hand toward the old man. "He must be there too."

He took it and stood linked to the embracing pair by the girl's warm grasp.

"I'll stick by the tent," he said; "no four walls for me."

"And you two," she looked from one to the other, "will wash for the gold and I'll take care of you. I'll keep everything clean and comfortable. It'll be a cozy little home—our log house under the pine."

She laughed, the first time in many weeks, and the clear sound rang joyously.

"And when we've got all the dust we want," Courant went on, his spirit expanding on the music of her laughter, "we'll go down to the coast. They'll have a town there soon for the shipping. We'll grow up with it, build it into a city, and as it gets richer so will we. It's going to be a new empire, out here by the Pacific, with the gold rivers back of it and the ocean in front. And it's going to be ours."

She looked over the foreground of hill and vale to the shimmering sweep of the rich still land. Her imagination, wakened by his words, passed from the log house to the busy rush of a city where the sea shone between the masts of ships. It was a glowing future they were to march on together, with no cloud to mar it now that she had seen the new look in his eyes.

A few days later they were in the Sacramento Valley camped near the walls of Sutter's Fort. The plain, clad with a drab grass, stretched to where the low-lying Sacramento slipped between oozy banks. Here were the beginnings of a town, shacks and tents dumped down in a helter skelter of slovenly hurry. Beyond, the American river crept from the mountains and threaded the parched land. Between the valley and the white sky-line of the Sierra, the foot hills swelled, indented with ravines and swathed in the matted robe of the chaparral.

While renewing their supplies at the fort they camped under a live oak. It was a mighty growth, its domed outline fretted with the fineness of horny leaves, its vast boughs outflung in contorted curves. The river sucked about its roots. Outside its shade the plain grew dryer under unclouded suns, huge trees casting black blots of shadow in which the Fort's cattle gathered. Sometimes vaqueros came from the gates in the adobe walls, riding light and with the long spiral leap of the lasso rising from an upraised hand. Sometimes groups of half-naked Indians trailed through the glare, winding a way to the spot of color that was their camp.

To the girl it was all wonderful, the beauty, the peace, the cessation of labor. When the men were at the Fort she lay beneath the great tree watching the faint, white chain of the mountains, or the tawny valley burning to orange in the long afternoons. For once she was idle, come at last to the end of all her journeyings. Only the present, the tranquil, perfect present, existed. What did not touch upon it, fit in and have some purpose in her life with the man of whom she was a part, was waste matter. She who had once been unable to endure the thought of separation from her father could now look back on his death and say, "How I suffered then," and know no reminiscent pang. She would have wondered at herself if, in the happiness in which she was lapped, she could have drawn her mind from its contemplation to wonder at anything. There was no world beyond the camp, no interest in what did not focus on Courant, no people except those who added to his trials or his welfare. The men spent much of their time at the Fort, conferring with others en route to the river bed below Sutter's mill. When they came back to the camp there was lively talk under the old tree. The silence of the trail was at an end. The pendulum swung far, and now they were garrulous, carried away by the fever of speculation. The evening came and found them with scattered stores and uncleaned camp, their voices loud against the low whisperings of leaves and water.

Courant returned from these absences aglow with fortified purpose. Reestablished contact with the world brightened and humanized him, acting with an eroding effect on a surface hardened by years of lawless roving. In his voluntary exile he had not looked for or wanted the company of his fellows. Now he began to soften under it, shift his viewpoint from that of the all-sufficing individual to that of the bonded mass from which he had so long been an alien. The girl's influence had revivified a side almost atrophied by disuse. Men's were aiding it. As her sympathies narrowed under the obsession of her happiness, his expanded, awaked by a reversion to forgotten conditions.

One night, lying beside her under the tent's roof, he found himself wakeful. It was starless and still, the song of the river fusing in a continuous flow of low sound with the secret, self-communings of the tree. The girl's light breathing was at his ear, a reminder of his ownership and its responsibilities. In the idleness of the unoccupied mind he mused on the future they were to share till death should come between. It was pleasant thinking, or so it began. Then, gradually, something in the darkness and the lowered vitality of night caused it to lose its joy, become suffused by a curious, doubting uneasiness. He lay without moving, given up to the strange feeling, not knowing what induced it or from whence it came. It grew in poignancy, clearer and stronger, till it led him like a clew to the body of David.

For the first time that savage act came back to him with a surge of repudiation, of scared denial. He had a realizing sense of how it would look to other men—the men he had met at the Fort. Distinctly, as if their mental attitude were substituted for his, he saw it as they would see it, as the world he was about to enter would see it. His heart began to thump with something like terror and the palms of his hands grew moist. Turning stealthily that he might not wake her, he stared at the triangle of paler darkness that showed through the tent's raised flap. He had no fear that Susan would find out. Even if she did, he knew her securely his, till the end of time, her thoughts to take their color from him, her fears to be lulled at his wish. But the others—the active, busy, practical throng into which he would be absorbed. His action, in the heat of a brutal passion, had made him an outsider from the close-drawn ranks of his fellows. He had been able to do without them, defied their laws, scorned their truckling to public opinion—but now?

The girl turned in her sleep, pressing her head against his shoulder and murmuring drowsily. He edged away from her, flinching from the contact, feeling a grievance against her. She was the link between him and them. Hers was the influence that was sapping the foundations of his independence. She was drawing him back to the place of lost liberty outside which he had roamed in barbarous content. His love was riveting bonds upon him, making his spirit as water. He felt a revolt, a resistance against her power, which was gently impelling him toward home, hearth, neighbors—the life in which he felt his place was gone.

The next day the strange mood seemed an ugly dream. It was not he who had lain wakeful and questioned his right to bend Fate to his own demands. He rode beside his wife at the head of the train as they rolled out in the bright, dry morning on the road to the river. There were men behind them, and in front the dust rose thick on the rear of pack trains. They filed across the valley, watching the foot hills come nearer and the muffling robe of the chaparral separate into checkered shadings where the manzanita glittered and the faint, bluish domes of small pines rose above the woven greenery.

Men were already before them, scattered along the river's bars, waist high in the pits. Here and there a tent showed white, but a blanket under a tree, a pile of pans by a blackened heap of fire marked most of the camps. Some of the gold-hunters had not waited to undo their packs which lay as they had been dropped, and the owners, squatting by the stream's lip, bent over their pans round which the water sprayed in a silver fringe. There were hails and inquiries, answering cries of good or ill luck. Many did not raise their eyes, too absorbed by the hope of fortune to waste one golden moment.

These were the vanguard, the forerunners of next year's thousands, scratching the surface of the lower bars. The sound of their voices was soon left behind and the river ran free of them. Pack trains dropped from the line, spreading themselves along the rim of earth between the trail and the shrunken current. Courant's party moved on, going higher, veiled in a cloud of brick-colored dust. The hills swept up into bolder lines, the pines mounted in sentinel files crowding out the lighter leafage. At each turn the vista showed a loftier uprise, crest peering above crest, and far beyond, high and snow-touched, the summits of the Sierra. The shadows slanted cool from wall to wall, the air was fresh and scented with the forest's resinous breath. Across the tree tops, dense as the matted texture of moss, the winged shadows of hawks floated, and paused, and floated again.

Here on a knoll under a great pine they pitched the tent. At its base the river ran, dwindled to a languid current, the bared mud banks waiting for their picks. The walls of the canon drew close, a drop of naked granite opposite, and on the slopes beyond were dark-aisled depths, golden-moted, and stirred to pensive melodies. The girl started to help, then kicked aside the up-piled blankets, dropped the skillets into the mess chest, and cried:

"Oh, I can't, I want to look and listen. Keep still—" The men stopped their work, and the music of the murmurous boughs and the gliding water filled the silence. She turned her head, sniffing the forest's scents, her glance lighting on the blue shoulders of distant hills.

"And look at the river, yellow, yellow with gold! I can't work now, I want to see it all—and feel it too," and she ran to the water's edge where she sat down on a rock and gazed up and down the canon.

When the camp was ready Courant joined her. The rock was wide enough for two and he sat beside her.

"So you like it, Missy?" he said, sending a side-long glance at her flushed face.

"Like it!" though there was plenty of room she edged nearer to him, "I'm wondering if it really is so beautiful or if I just think it so after the trail."

"You'll be content to stay here with me till we've made our pile?"

She looked at him and nodded, then slipped her fingers between his and whispered, though there was no one by to hear, "I'd be content to stay anywhere with you."

He was growing accustomed to this sort of reply. Deprived of it he would have noticed the omission, but it had of late become so common a feature in the conversation he felt no necessity to answer in kind. He glanced at the pine trunks about them and said:

"If the claim's good, we'll cut some of those and build a cabin. You'll see how comfortable I can make you, the way they do on the frontier."

She pressed his fingers for answer and he went on:

"When the winter comes we can move farther down. Up here we may get snow. But there'll be time between now and then to put up something warm and waterproof."

"Why should we move down? With a good cabin we can be comfortable here. The snow won't be heavy this far up. They told Daddy John all about it at the Fort. And you and he can ride in there sometimes when we want things."

These simple words gratified him more than she guessed. It was as if she had seen into the secret springs of his thought and said what he was fearful she would not say. That was why—in a spirit of testing a granted boon to prove its genuineness—he asked with tentative questioning:

"You won't be lonely? There are no people here."

She made the bride's answer and his contentment increased, for again it was what he would have wished her to say. When he answered he spoke almost sheepishly, with something of uneasy confession in his look:

"I'd like to live in places like this always. I feel choked and stifled where there are walls shutting out the air and streets full of people. Even in the Fort I felt like a trapped animal. I want to be where there's room to move about and nobody bothering with different kinds of ideas. It's only in the open, in places without men, that I'm myself."

For the first time he had dared to give expression to the mood of the wakeful night. Though it was dim in the busy brightness of the present—a black spot on the luster of cheerful days—he dreaded that it might come again with its scaring suggestions. With a nerve that had never known a tremor at any menace from man, he was frightened of a thought, a temporary mental state. In speaking thus to her, he recognized her as a help-meet to whom he could make a shamed admission of weakness and fear no condemnation or diminution of love. This time, however, she made the wrong reply:

"But we'll go down to the coast after a while, if our claim's good and we get enough dust out of it. I think of it often. It will be so nice to live in a house again, and have some one to do the cooking, and wear pretty clothes. It will be such fun living where there are people and going about among them, going to parties and maybe having parties of our own."

He withdrew his hand from hers and pushed the hair back from his forehead. Though he said nothing she was conscious of a drop in his mood. She bent forward to peer into his face and queried with bright, observing eyes:

"You don't seem to like the thought of it."

"Oh, it's not me," he answered. "I was just wondering at the queer way women talk. A few minutes ago you said you'd be content anywhere with me. Now you say you think it would be such fun living in a city and going to parties."

"With you, too," she laughed, pressing against his shoulder. "I don't want to go to the parties alone."

"Well, I guess if you ever go it'll have to be alone," he said roughly.

She understood now that she had said something that annoyed him, and not knowing how she had come to do it, felt aggrieved and sought to justify herself:

"But we can't live here always. If we make money we'll want to go back some day where there are people, and comforts and things going on. We'll want friends, everybody has friends. You don't mean for us always to stay far away from everything in these wild, uncivilized places?"

"Why not?" he said, not looking at her, noting her rueful tone and resenting it.

"But we're not that kind of people. You're not a real mountain man. You're not like Zavier or the men at Fort Laramie. You're Napoleon Duchesney just as I'm Susan Gillespie. Your people in St. Louis and New Orleans were ladies and gentlemen. It was just a wild freak that made you run off into the mountains. You don't want to go on living that way. That part of your life's over. The rest will be with me."

"And you'll want the cities and the parties?"

"I'll want to live the way Mrs. Duchesney should live, and you'll want to, too." He did not answer, and she gave his arm a little shake and said, "Won't you?"

"I'm more Low Courant than I am Napoleon Duchesney," was his answer.

"Well, maybe so, but whichever you are, you've got a wife now and that makes a great difference."

She tried to infuse some of her old coquetry into the words, but the eyes, looking sideways at him, were troubled, for she did not yet see where she had erred.

"I guess it does," he said low, more as if speaking to himself than her.

This time she said nothing, feeling dashed and repulsed. They continued to sit close together on the rock, the man lost in morose reverie, the girl afraid to move or touch him lest he should show further annoyance.

The voice of Daddy John calling them to supper came to both with relief. They walked to the camp side by side, Low with head drooped, the girl at his elbow stealing furtive looks at him. As they approached the fire she slid her hand inside his arm and, glancing down, he saw the timid questioning of her face and was immediately contrite. He laid his hand on hers and smiled, and she caught her breath in a deep sigh and felt happiness come rushing back. Whatever it was she had said that displeased him she would be careful not to say it again, for she had already learned that the lion in love is still the lion.



CHAPTER II

Their claim was rich and they buckled down to work, the old man constructing a rocker after a model of his own, and Courant digging in the pits. Everything was with them, rivals were few, the ground uncrowded, the season dry. It was the American River before the Forty-niners swarmed along its edges, and there was gold in its sands, sunk in a sediment below its muddy deposit, caked in cracks through the rocks round which its currents had swept for undisturbed ages.

They worked feverishly, the threat of the winter rains urging them on. The girl helped, leaving her kettle settled firm on a bed of embers while the water heated for dish washing, to join them on the shore, heaped with their earth piles. She kept the rocker in motion while the old man dipped up the water in a tin ladle and sent it running over the sifting bed of sand and pebbles. The heavier labor of digging was Courant's. Before September was over the shore was honeycombed with his excavations, driven down to the rock bed. The diminishing stream shrunk with each day and he stood in it knee high, the sun beating on his head, his clothes pasted to his skin by perspiration, and the thud of his pick falling with regular stroke on the monotonous rattle of the rocker.

Sometimes she was tired and they ordered her to leave them and rest in the shade of the camp. She loitered about under the spread of the pine boughs, cleaning and tidying up, and patching the ragged remnants of their clothes. Often, as she sat propped against the trunk, her sewing fell to her lap and she looked out with shining, spell-bound eyes. The men were shapes of dark importance against the glancing veil of water, the soaked sands and the low brushwood yellowing in the autumn's soft, transforming breath. Far away the film of whitened summits dreamed against the blue. In the midwash of air, aloft and dreaming, too, the hawk's winged form poised, its shadow moving below it across the sea of tree tops.

She would sit thus, motionless and idle, as the long afternoon wore away, and deep-colored veils of twilight gathered in the canon. She told the men the continuous sounds of their toil made her drowsy. But her stillness was the outward sign of an inner concentration. If delight in rest had replaced her old bodily energy, her mind had gained a new activity. She wondered a little at it, not yet at the heart of her own mystery. Her thoughts reached forward into the future, busied themselves with details of the next twelve months, dwelt anxiously on questions of finance. The nest-building instinct was astir in her and she pondered on the house they were to build, how they must arrange something for a table, and maybe fashion armchairs of barrels and red flannel. Finally, in a last voluptuous flight of ecstasy, she saw herself riding into Sacramento with a sack of dust and abandoning herself to an orgie of bartering.

One afternoon three men, two Mexicans and an Australian sailor from a ship in San Francisco cove, stopped at the camp for food. The Australian was a loquacious fellow, with faculties sharpened by glimpses of life in many ports. He told them of the two emigrant convoys he had just seen arrive in Sacramento, worn and wasted by the last forced marches over the mountains. Susan, who had been busy over her cooking, according him scant attention, at his description of the trains, suddenly lifted intent eyes and leaned toward him:

"Did you see a man among them, a young man, tall and thin, with black hair and beard?"

"All the men were tall and thin, or any ways thin," said the sailor, laughing. "How tall was he?"

"Six feet," she replied, her face devoid of any answering smile, "with high shoulders and walking with a stoop. He had a fine, handsome face, and long black hair to his shoulders and gray eyes."

"Have you lost your sweetheart?" said the man, who did not know the relations of the party.

"No," she said gravely, "my friend."

Courant explained:

"She's my wife. The man she's speaking of was a member of our company that we lost on the desert. We thought Indians had got him and hoped he'd get away and join with a later westbound train. His name was David."

The sailor shook his head.

"Ain't seen no one answering to that name, nor to that description. There wasn't a handsome-featured one in the lot, nor a David. But if you're expecting him along, why don't you take her in and let her look 'em over? They told me at the Fort the trains was mostly all in or ought to be. Any time now the snow on the summit will be too deep for 'em. If they get caught up there they can't be got out, so they're coming over hot foot and are dumped down round Hock Farm. Not much to see, but if you're looking for a friend it's worth trying."

That night Courant was again wakeful. Susan's face, as she had questioned the sailor, floated before him on the darkness. With it came the thought of the dead man. In the silence David called upon him from the sepulcher beneath the rock, sent a message through the night which said that, though he was hidden from mortal vision, the memory of him was still alive, imbued with an unquenchable vitality. His unwinking eyes, with the rock crumbs sifting on them, looked at those of his triumphant enemy and spoke through their dusted films. In the moment of death they had said nothing to him, now they shone—not angrily accusing as they had been in life—but stern with a vindictive purpose.

Courant began to have a fearful understanding of their meaning. Though dead to the rest of the world, David would maintain an intense and secret life in his murderer's conscience. He had never fought such a subtle and implacable foe, and he lay thinking of how he could create conditions that would give him escape, push the phantom from him, make him forget, and be as he had been when no one had disputed his sovereignty over himself. He tried to think that time would mitigate this haunting discomfort. His sense of guilt, his fear of his wife, would die when the novelty of once again being one with the crowd had worn away. It was not possible that he, defiant of man and God, could languish under this dread of a midnight visitation or a discovery that never would be made. It was the reentering into the communal life that had upset his poise—or was it the influence of the woman, the softly pervasive, enervating influence? He came up against this thought with a dizzying impact and felt himself droop and sicken as one who is faced with a task for which his strength is inadequate.

He turned stealthily and lay on his back, his face beaded with sweat. The girl beside him waked and sat up casting a side glance at him. By the starlight, slanting in through the raised tent door, she saw his opened eyes and, leaning toward him, a black shape against the faintly blue triangle, said:

"Low, are you awake?"

He answered without moving, glad to hear her speak, to know that sleep had left her and her voice might conjure away his black imaginings.

"Why aren't you sleeping?" she asked. "You must be half dead after such work as you did today."

"I was thinking—" then hastily, for he was afraid that she might sense his mood and ply him with sympathetic queries: "Sometimes people are too tired to sleep. I am, and so I was lying here just thinking of nothing."

His fears were unnecessary. She was as healthily oblivious of his disturbance as he was morbidly conscious of it. She sat still, her hands clasped round her knees, about which the blanket draped blackly.

"I was thinking, too," she said.

"Of what?"

"Of what that man was saying of David."

There was a silence. He lay motionless, his trouble coming back upon him. He wished that he might dare to impose upon her a silence on that one subject. David, given a place in her mind, would sit at every feast, walk beside them, lie between them in their marriage bed.

"Why do you think of him?" he asked.

"Because—" her tone showed surprise. "It's natural, isn't it? Don't you? I'm sure you do. I do often, much oftener than you think. I'm always hoping that he'll come."

"You never loved him," he said, in a voice from which all spring was gone.

"No, but he was my friend, and I would like to keep him so for always. I think of his kindness, his gentleness, all the good part of him before the trail broke him down. And, I think, too, how cruel I was to him."

The darkness hid her face, but her voice told that she, too, had her little load of guilt where David was concerned.

The man moved uneasily.

"That's foolishness. You only told the truth. If it was cruel, that's not your affair."

"He loved me. A woman doesn't forget that."

"That's over and done with. He's probably here somewhere, come through with a train that's scattered. And, anyway, you can't do any good by thinking about him."

This time the false reassurances came with the pang that the dead man was rousing in tardy retribution.

"I should like to know it," she said wistfully, "to feel sure. It's the only thing that mars our happiness. If I knew he was safe and well somewhere there'd be nothing in the world for me but perfect joy."

Her egotism of satisfied body and spirit jarred upon him. The passion she had evoked had found no peace in its fulfillment. She had got what he had hoped for. All that he had anticipated was destroyed by the unexpected intrusion of a part of himself that had lain dead till she had quickened it, and quickening it she had killed his joy. In a flash of divination he saw that, if she persisted in her worry over David, she would rouse in him an antagonism that would eventually drive him from her. He spoke with irritation:

"Put him out of your mind. Don't worry about him. You can't do any good, and it spoils our love."

After a pause, she said with a hesitating attempt at cajolery:

"Let me and Daddy John drive into the valley and try and get news of him. We need supplies and we'll be gone only two or three days. We can inquire at the Fort and maybe go on to Sacramento, and if he's been there we'll hear of it. If we could only hear, just hear, he was safe, it would be such a relief. It would take away this dreary feeling of anxiety, and guilt too, Low. For I feel guilty when I think of how we left him."

"Where was the guilt? You've no right to say that. You understood we had to go. I could take no risks with you and the old man."

"Yes," she said, slowly, tempering her agreement with a self-soothing reluctance, "but even so, it seemed terrible. I often tell myself we couldn't have done anything else, but——"

Her voice dropped to silence and she sat staring out at the quiet night, her head blurred with the filaments of loosened hair.

He did not speak, gripped by his internal torment, aggravated now by torment from without. He wondered, if he told her the truth, would she understand and help him to peace. But he knew that such knowledge would set her in a new attitude toward him, an attitude of secret judgment, of distracted pity, of an agonized partisanship built on loyalty and the despairing passion of the disillusioned. He could never tell her, for he could never support the loss of her devoted belief, which was now the food of his life.

"Can I go?" she said, turning to look at him, smiling confidently as one who knows the formal demand unnecessary.

"If you want," he answered.

"Then we'll start to-morrow," she said, and, leaning down, kissed him.

He was unresponsive to the touch of her lips, lay inert as she nestled down into soft-breathing, child-like sleep. He watched the tent opening pale into a glimmering triangle wondering what their life would be with the specter of David standing in the path, an angel with a flaming sword barring the way to Paradise.

Two days later she and Daddy John, sitting on the front seat of the wagon, saw the low drab outlines of the Fort rising from the plain. Under their tree was a new encampment, one tent with the hood of a wagon behind it, and oxen grazing in the sun. As they drew near they could see the crouched forms of two children, the light filtering through the leafage on the silky flax of their heads. They were occupied over a game, evidently a serious business, its floor of operations the smooth ground worn bare about the camp fire. One of them lay flat with a careful hand patting the dust into mounds, the other squatted near by watching, a slant of white hair falling across a rounded cheek. They did not heed the creak of the wagon wheels, but as a woman's voice called from the tent, raised their heads listening, but not answering, evidently deeming silence the best safeguard against interruption.

Susan laid a clutching hand on Daddy John's arm.

"It's the children," she cried in a choked voice. "Stop, stop!" and before he could rein the mules to order she was out and running toward them, calling their names.

They made a clamor of welcome, Bob running to her and making delighted leaps up at her face, the little girl standing aloof for the first bashful moment, then sidling nearer with mouth upheld for kisses. Bella heard them and came to the tent door, gave a great cry, and ran to them. There were tears on her cheeks as she clasped Susan, held her oft and clutched her again, with panted ejaculations of "Deary me!" and "Oh, Lord, Missy, is it you?"

It was like a meeting on the other side of the grave. They babbled their news, both talking at once, not stopping to finish sentences, or wait for the answer to questions of the marches they had not shared. Over the clamor they looked at each other with faces that smiled and quivered, the tie between them strengthened by the separation when each had longed for the other, closer in understanding by the younger's added experience, both now women.

Glen was at the Fort and Daddy John rolled off to meet him there. The novelty of the moment over, the children returned sedately to their play, and the women sat together under the canopy of the tree. Bella's adventures had been few and tame, Susan's was the great story. She was not discursive about her marriage. She was still shy on the subject and sensitively aware of the disappointment that Bella was too artlessly amazed to conceal. She passed over it quickly, pretending that she did not hear Bella's astonished:

"But why did you get married at Humboldt? Why didn't you wait till you got here?"

It was the loss of David that she made the point of her narrative, anxiously impressing on her listener their need of going on. She stole quick looks at Bella, watchful for the first shade of disapprobation, with all Low's arguments ready to sweep it aside. But Bella, with maternal instincts in place of a comprehensive humanity, agreed that Low had done right. Nature, in the beginning, combined with the needs of the trail, had given her a viewpoint where expediency counted for more than altruism. She with two children and a helpless man would have gone on and left anyone to his fate. She did not say this, but Susan, with intelligence sharpened by a jealous passion, felt that there was no need to defend her husband's action. As for the rest of the world—deep in her heart she had already decided it should never know.

"You couldn't have done anything else," said Bella. "I've learned that when you're doing that sort of thing, you can't have the same feelings you can back in the States, with everything handy and comfortable. You can be fair, but you got to fight for your own. They got to come first."

She had neither seen nor heard anything of David. No rumor of a man held captive by the Indians had reached their train. She tried not to let Susan see that she believed the worst. But her melancholy headshake and murmured "Poor David—and him such a kind, whole-hearted man" was as an obituary on the dead.

"Well," she said in pensive comment when Susan had got to the end of her history, "you can't get through a journey like that without some one coming to grief. It's not in human nature. But your father—that grand man! And then the young feller that would have made you such a good husband—" Susan moved warningly—"Not but what I'm sure you've got as good a one as it is. And we've got to take what we can get in this world," she added, spoiling it all by the philosophical acceptance of what she evidently regarded as a make-shift adjusting to Nature's needs.

When the men came back Glen had heard all about the gold in the river and was athirst to get there. Work at his trade could wait, and, anyway, he had been in Sacramento and found, while his services were in demand on every side, the materials wherewith he was to help raise a weatherproof city were not to be had. Men were content to live in tents and cloth shacks until the day of lumber and sawmills dawned, and why wait for this millennium when the river called from its golden sands?

No one had news of David. Daddy John had questioned the captains of two recently arrived convoys, but learned nothing. The men thought it likely he was dead. They agreed as to the possibility of the Indian abduction and his future reappearance. Such things had happened. But it was too late now to do anything. No search party could be sent out at this season when at any day the mountain trails might be neck high in snow. There was nothing to do but wait till the spring.

Susan listened with lowered brows. It was heavy news. She did not know how she had hoped till she heard that all hope must lie in abeyance for at least six months. It was a long time to be patient. She was selfishly desirous to have her anxieties at rest, for, as she had told her husband, they were the only cloud on her happiness, and she wanted that happiness complete. It was not necessary for her peace to see David again. To know he was safe somewhere would have satisfied her.

The fifth day after leaving the camp they sighted the pitted shores of their own diggings. Sitting in the McMurdos' wagon they had speculated gayly on Low's surprise. Susan, on the seat beside Glen, had been joyously full of the anticipation of it, wondered what he would say, and then fell to imagining it with closed lips and dancing eyes. When the road reached the last concealing buttress she climbed down and mounted beside Daddy John, whose wagon was some distance in advance.

"It's going to be a surprise for Low," she said in the voice of a mischievous child. "You mustn't say anything. Let me tell him."

The old man, squinting sideways at her, gave his wry smile. It was good to see his Missy this way again, in bloom like a refreshed flower.

"Look," she cried, as her husband's figure came into view kneeling by the rocker. "There he is, and he doesn't see us. Stop!"

Courant heard their wheels and, turning, started to his feet and came forward, the light in his face leaping to hers. She sprang down and ran toward him, her arms out. Daddy John, slashing the wayside bushes with his whip, looked reflectively at the bending twigs while the embrace lasted. The McMurdos' curiosity was not restrained by any such inconvenient delicacy. They peeped from under the wagon hood, grinning appreciatively, Bella the while maintaining a silent fight with the children, who struggled for an exit. None of them could hear what the girl said, but they saw Courant suddenly look with a changed face, its light extinguished, at the second wagon.

"He don't seem so terrible glad to see us," said Glen. "I guess he wanted to keep the place for himself."

Bella noted the look and snorted.

"He's a cross-grained thing," she said; "I don't see what got into her to marry him when she could have had David."

"She can't have him when he ain't round to be had," her husband answered. "Low's better than a man that's either a prisoner with the Indians or dead somewhere. David was a good boy, but I don't seem to see he'd be much use to her now."

Bella sniffed again, and let the squirming children go to get what good they could out of the unpromising moment of the surprise.

What Low had said to Susan was an angry,

"Why did you bring them?"

She fell back from him not so crestfallen at his words as at his dark frown of disapproval.

"Why, I wanted them," she faltered, bewildered by his obvious displeasure at what she thought would be welcome news, "and I thought you would."

"I'd rather you hadn't. Aren't we enough by ourselves?"

"Yes, of course. But they're our friends. We traveled with them for days and weeks, and it's made them like relations. I was so glad to see them I cried when I saw Bella. Oh, do try and seem more as if you liked it. They're here and I've brought them."

He slouched forward to greet them. She was relieved to see that he made an effort to banish his annoyance and put some warmth of welcome into his voice. But the subtlety with which he could conceal his emotions when it behooved him had deserted him, and Bella and Glen saw the husband did not stand toward them as the wife did.

It was Susan who infused into the meeting a fevered and fictitious friendliness, chattering over the pauses that threatened to fall upon it, leaving them a reunited company only in name. She presently swept Bella to the camp, continuing her nervous prattle as she showed her the tent and the spring behind it, and told of the log house they were to raise before the rains came. Bella was placated. After all, it was a lovely spot, good for the children, and if Glen could do as well on a lower bend of the river as they had done here, it looked as if they had at last found the Promised Land.

After supper they sat by Daddy John's fire, which shot an eddying column of sparks into the plumed darkness of the pine. It was like old times only—with a glance outward toward the water and the star-strewn sky—so much more—what was the word? Not quiet; they could never forget the desert silence. "Homelike," Susan suggested, and they decided that was the right word.

"You feel as if you could stay here and not want to move on," Bella opined.

Glen thought perhaps you felt that way because you knew you'd come to the end and couldn't move much farther.

But the others argued him down. They all agreed there was something in the sun maybe, or the mellow warmth of the air, or the richness of wooded slope and plain, that made them feel they had found a place where they could stay, not for a few days' rest, but forever. Susan had hit upon the word "homelike," the spot on earth that seemed to you the one best fitted for a home.

The talk swung back to days on the trail and finally brought up on David. They rehearsed the tragic story, conned over the details that had begun to form into narrative sequence as in the time-worn lay of a minstrel. Bella and Glen asked all the old questions that had once been asked by Susan and Daddy John, and heard the same answers, leaning to catch them while the firelight played on the strained attention of their faces. With the night pressing close around them, and the melancholy, sea-like song sweeping low from the forest, a chill crept upon them, and their lost comrade became invested with the unreality of a spirit. Dead in that bleak and God-forgotten land, or captive in some Indian stronghold, he loomed a tragic phantom remote from them and their homely interests like a historical figure round which legend has begun to accumulate.

The awed silence that had fallen was broken by Courant rising and walking away toward the diggings. This brought their somber pondering to an end. Bella and Glen picked up the sleeping children and went to their tent, and Susan, peering beyond the light, saw her man sitting on a stone, dark against the broken silver of the stream. She stole down to him and laid her hand on his shoulder. He started as if her touch scared him, then saw who it was and turned away with a gruff murmur. The sound was not encouraging, but the wife, already so completely part of him that his moods were communicated to her through the hidden subways of instinct, understood that he was in some unconfessed trouble.

"What's the matter, Low?" she asked, bending to see his face.

He turned it toward her, met the penetrating inquiry of her look, and realized his dependence on her, feeling his weakness but not caring just then that he should be weak.

"Nothing," he answered. "Why do they harp so on David?"

"Don't you like them to?" she asked in some surprise.

He took a splinter from the stone and threw it into the water, a small silvery disturbance marking its fall.

"There's nothing more to be said. It's all useless talk. We can do no more than we've done."

"Shall I tell them you don't like the subject, not to speak of it again?"

He glanced at her with sudden suspicion:

"No, no, of course not. They've a right to say anything they please. But it's a waste of time, there's nothing but guessing now. What's the use of guessing and wondering all through the winter. Are they going to keep on that way till the spring?"

"I'll tell them not to," she said as a simple solution of the difficulty. "I'll tell them it worries you."

"Don't," he said sharply. "Do you hear? Don't. Do you want to act like a fool and make me angry with you?"

He got up and moved away, leaving her staring blankly at his back. He had been rough to her often, but never before spoken with this note of peremptory, peevish displeasure. She felt an obscure sense of trouble, a premonition of disaster. She went to him and, standing close, put her hand inside his arm.

"Low," she pleaded, "what's wrong with you? You were angry that they came. Now you're angry at what they say. I don't understand. Tell me the reason of it. If there's something that I don't know let me hear it, and I'll try and straighten things out."

For a tempted moment he longed to tell her, to gain ease by letting her share his burden. The hand upon his arm was a symbol of her hold upon him that no action of his could ever loose. If he could admit her within the circle of his isolation he would have enough. He would lose the baleful consciousness of forever walking apart, separated from his kind, a spiritual Ishmaelite. She had strength enough. For the moment he felt that she was the stronger of the two, able to bear more than he, able to fortify him and give him courage for the future. He had a right to claim such a dole of her love, and once the knowledge hers, they two would stand, banished from the rest of the world, knit together by the bond of their mutual knowledge.

The temptation clutched him and his breast contracted in the rising struggle. His pain clamored for relief, his weakness for support. The lion man, broken and tamed by the first pure passion of his life, would have cast the weight of his sin upon the girl he had thought to bear through life like a pampered mistress.

With the words on his lips he looked at her. She met the look with a smile that she tried to make brave, but that was only a surface grimace, her spirit's disturbance plain beneath it. There was pathos in its courage and its failure. He averted his eyes, shook his arm free of her hand, and, moving toward the water, said:

"Go back to the tent and go to bed."

"What are you going to do?" she called after him, her voice sounding plaintive. Its wistful note gave him strength:

"Walk for a while. I'm not tired. I'll be back in an hour," and he walked away, down the edge of the current, past the pits and into the darkness.

She watched him, not understanding, vaguely alarmed, then turned and went back to the tent.



CHAPTER III

The stretch of the river where the McMurdos had settled was richer than Courant's location. Had Glen been as mighty a man with the pick, even in the short season left to him, he might have accumulated a goodly store. But he was a slack worker. His training as a carpenter made him useful, finding expression in an improvement on Daddy John's rocker, so they overlooked his inclination to lie off in the sun with his ragged hat pulled over his eyes. In Courant's camp Bella was regarded as the best man of the two. To her multiform duties she added that of assistant in the diggings, squatting beside her husband in the mud, keeping the rocker going, and when Glen was worked out, not above taking a hand at the shovel. Her camp showed a comfortable neatness, and the children's nakedness was covered with garments fashioned by the firelight from old flour sacks.

There was no crisp coming of autumn. A yellowing of the leafage along the river's edge was all that denoted the season's change. Nature seemed loth to lay a desecrating hand on the region's tranquil beauty. They had been told at the Fort that they might look for the first rains in November. When October was upon them they left the pits and set to work felling trees for two log huts.

Susan saw her home rising on the knoll, a square of logs, log roofed, with a door of woven saplings over which canvas was nailed. They built a chimney of stones rounded by the water's action, and for a hearth found a slab of granite which they sunk in the earth before the fireplace. The bunk was a frame of young pines with canvas stretched across, and cushioned with spruce boughs and buffalo robes. She watched as they nailed up shelves of small, split trunks and sawed the larger ones into sections for seats. The bottom of the wagon came out and, poised on four log supports, made the table.

Her housewife's instincts rose jubilant as the shell took form, and she sang to herself as she stitched her flour sacks together for towels. No princess decked her palace with a blither spirit. All the little treasures that had not been jettisoned in the last stern march across the desert came from their hiding places for the adornment of the first home of her married life. The square of mirror stood on the shelf near the door where the light could fall on it, and the French gilt clock that had been her mother's ticked beside it. The men laughed as she set out on the table the silver mug of her baby days and a two-handled tankard bearing on its side a worn coat of arms, a heritage from the adventurous Poutrincourt, a drop of whose blood had given boldness and courage to hers.

It was her home—very different from the home she had dreamed of—but so was her life different from the life she and her father had planned together in the dead days of the trail. She delighted in it, gloated over it. Long before the day of installation she moved in her primitive furnishings, disposed the few pans with an eye to their effect as other brides arrange their silver and crystal, hung her flour-sack towels on the pegs with as careful a hand as though they had been tapestries, and folded her clothes neat and seemly in her father's chest. Then came a night when the air was sharp, and they kindled the first fire in the wide chimney mouth. It leaped exultant, revealing the mud-filled cracks, playing on the pans, and licking the bosses of the old tankard. The hearthstone shone red with its light, and they sat drawn back on the seats of pine looking into its roaring depths—housed, sheltered, cozily content. When Glen and Bella retired to their tent a new romance seemed to have budded in the girl's heart. It was her bridal night—beneath a roof, beside a hearth, with a door to close against the world, and shut her away with her lover.

In these days she had many secret conferrings with Bella. They kept their heads together and whispered, and Bella crooned and fussed over her and pushed the men into the background in a masterful, aggressive manner. Susan knew now what had waked the nest-building instinct. The knowledge came with a thrilling, frightened joy. She sat apart adjusting herself to the new outlook, sometimes fearful, then uplifted in a rapt, still elation. All the charm she had once held over the hearts of men was gone. Glen told Bella she was getting stupid, even Daddy John wondered at her dull, self-centered air. She would not have cared what they had said or thought of her. Her interest in men as creatures to snare and beguile was gone with her lost maidenhood. All that she had of charm and beauty she hoarded, stored up and jealously guarded, for her husband and her child.

"It'll be best for you to go down to the town," Bella had said to her, reveling discreetly in her position as high priestess of these mysteries, "there'll be doctors in Sacramento, some kind of doctors."

"I'll stay here," Susan answered. "You're here and my husband and Daddy John. I'd die if I was sent off among strangers. I can't live except with the people I'm fond of. I'm not afraid."

And the older woman decided that maybe she was right. She could see enough to know that this girl of a higher stock and culture, plucked from a home of sheltered ease to be cast down in the rude life of the pioneer, was only a woman like all the rest, having no existence outside her own small world.

So the bright, monotonous days filed by, always sunny, always warm, till it seemed as if they were to go on thus forever, glide into a winter which was still spring. An excursion to Sacramento, a big day's clean up, were their excitements. They taught little Bob to help at the rocker, and the women sat by the cabin door sewing, long periods of silence broken by moments of desultory talk. Susan had grown much quieter. She would sit with idle hands watching the shifting lights and the remoter hills turning from the afternoon's blue to the rich purple of twilight. Bella said she was lazy, and urged industry and the need of speed in the preparation of the new wardrobe. She laughed indolently and said, time enough later on. She had grown indifferent about her looks—her hair hanging elfish round her ears, her blouse unfastened at the throat, the new boots Low had brought her from Sacramento unworn in the cabin corner, her feet clothed in the ragged moccasins he had taught her to make.

In the evening she sat on a blanket on the cabin floor, blinking sleepily at the flames. Internally she brimmed with a level content. Life was coming to the flood with her, her being gathering itself for its ultimate expression. All the curiosity and interest she had once turned out to the multiple forms and claims of the world were now concentrated on the two lives between which hers stood. She was the primitive woman, a mechanism of elemental instincts, moving up an incline of progressive passions. The love of her father had filled her youth, and that had given way to the love of her mate, which in time would dim before the love of her child. Outside these phases of a governing prepossession—filial, conjugal, maternal—she knew nothing, felt nothing, and could see nothing.

Low, at first, had brooded over her with an almost ferocious tenderness. Had she demanded a removal to the town he would have given way. He would have acceded to anything she asked, but she asked nothing. As the time passed her demands of him, even to his help in small matters of the household, grew less. A slight, inscrutable change had come over her: she was less responsive, often held him with an eye whose blankness told of inner imaginings, when he spoke made no answer, concentrated in her reverie. When he watched her withdrawn in these dreams, or in a sudden attack of industry, fashioning small garments from her hoarded store of best clothes, he felt an alienation in her, and he realized with a start of alarmed divination that the child would take a part of what had been his, steal from him something of that blind devotion in the eternal possession of which he had thought to find solace.

It was a shock that roused him to a scared scrutiny of the future. He put questions to her for the purpose of drawing out her ideas, and her answers showed that all her thoughts and plans were gathering round the welfare of her baby. Her desire for its good was to end her unresisting subservience to him. She was thinking already of better things. Ambitions were awakened that would carry her out of the solitudes, where he felt himself at rest, back to the world where she would struggle to make a place for the child she had never wanted for herself.

"We'll take him to San Francisco soon"—it was always "him" in her speculations—"We can't keep him here."

"Why not?" he asked. "Look at Bella's children. Could anything be healthier and happier?"

"Bella's children are different. Bella's different. She doesn't know anything better, she doesn't care. To have them well fed and healthy is enough for her. We're not like that. Our child's going to have everything."

"You're content enough here by yourself and you're a different sort to Bella."

"For myself!" she gave a shrug. "I don't care any more than Bella does. But for my child—my son—I want everything. Want him a gentleman like his ancestors, French and American"—she gave his arm a propitiating squeeze for she knew he disliked this kind of talk—"want him to be educated like my father, and know everything, and have a profession."

"You're looking far ahead."

"Years and years ahead," and then with deprecating eyes and irrepressible laughter, "Now don't say I'm foolish, but sometimes I think of him getting married and the kind of girl I'll choose for him—not stupid like me, but one who's good and beautiful and knows all about literature and geography and science. The finest girl in the world, and I'll find her for him."

He didn't laugh, instead he looked sulkily thoughtful:

"And where will we get the money to do all this?"

"We'll make it. We have a good deal now. Daddy John told me the other day he thought we had nearly ten thousand dollars in dust beside what my father left. That will be plenty to begin on, and you can go into business down on the coast. They told Daddy John at the Fort there would be hundreds and thousands of people coming in next spring. They'll build towns, make Sacramento and San Francisco big places with lots going on. We can settle in whichever seems the most thriving and get back into the kind of life where we belong."

It was her old song, the swan song of his hopes. He felt a loneliness more bitter than he had ever before conceived of. In the jarring tumult of a growing city he saw himself marked in his own eyes, aloof in the street and the market place, a stranger by his own fireside. In his fear he swore that he would thwart her, keep her in the wild places, crush her maternal ambitions and force her to share his chosen life, the life of the outcast. He knew that it would mean conflict, the subduing of a woman nerved by a mother's passion. And as he worked in the ditches he thought about it, arranging the process by which he would gradually break her to his will, beat down her aspirations till she was reduced to the abject docility of a squaw. Then he would hold her forever under his hand and eye, broken as a dog to his word, content to wander with him on those lonely paths where he would tread out the measure of his days.

Toward the end of November the rains came. First in hesitant showers, then in steadier downpourings, finally, as December advanced, in torrential fury. Veils of water descended upon them, swept round their knoll till it stood marooned amid yellow eddies. The river rose boisterous, swirled into the pits, ate its way across the honey-combed reach of mud and fingered along the bottom of their hillock. They had never seen such rain. The pines bowed and wailed under its assault, and the slopes were musical with the voices of liberated streams. Moss and mud had to be pressed into the cabin's cracks, and when they sat by the fire in the evening their voices fell before the angry lashings on the roof and the groaning of the tormented forest.

Daddy John and Courant tried to work but gave it up, and the younger man, harassed by the secession of the toil that kept his body wearied and gave him sleep, went abroad on the hills, roaming free in the dripping darkness. Bella saw cause for surprise that he should absent himself willingly from their company. She grumbled about it to Glen, and noted Susan's acquiescence with the amaze of the woman who holds absolute sway over her man. One night Courant came back, drenched and staggering, on his shoulders a small bear that he had shot on the heights above. The fresh bear meat placated Bella, but she shook her head over the mountain man's morose caprices, and in the bedtime hour made dismal prophecies as to the outcome of her friend's strange marriage.

The bear hunt had evil consequences that she did not foresee. It left Courant, the iron man, stricken by an ailment marked by shiverings, when he sat crouched over the fire, and fevered burnings when their combined entreaties could not keep him from the open door and the cool, wet air. When the clouds broke and the landscape emerged from its mourning, dappled with transparent tints, every twig and leaf washed clean, his malady grew worse and he lay on the bed of spruce boughs tossing in a sickness none of them understood.

They were uneasy, came in and out with disturbed looks and murmured inquiries. He refused to answer them, but on one splendid morning, blaring life like a trumpet call, he told them he was better and was going back to work. He got down to the river bank, fumbled over his spade, and then Daddy John had to help him back to the cabin. With gray face and filmed eyes he lay on the bunk while they stood round him, and the children came peeping fearfully through the doorway. They were thoroughly frightened, Bella standing by with her chin caught in her hand and her eyes fastened on him, and Susan on the ground beside him, trying to say heartening phrases with lips that were stiff. The men did not know what to do. They pushed the children from the door roughly, as if it were their desire to hurt and abuse them. In some obscure way it seemed to relieve their feelings.

The rains came back more heavily than ever. For three days the heavens descended in a downpour that made the river a roaring torrent and isled the two log houses on their hillocks. The walls of the cabin trickled with water. The buffets of the wind ripped the canvas covering from the door, and Susan and Daddy John had to take a buffalo robe from the bed and nail it over the rent. They kept the place warm with the fire, but the earth floor was damp to their feet, and the tinkle of drops falling from the roof into the standing pans came clear through the outside tumult.

The night when the storm was at its fiercest the girl begged the old man to stay with her. Courant had fallen into a state of lethargy from which it was hard to rouse him. Her anxiety gave place to anguish, and Daddy John was ready for the worst when she shook him into wakefulness, her voice at his ear:

"You must go somewhere and get a doctor. I'm afraid."

He blinked at her without answering, wondering where he could find a doctor and not wanting to speak till he had a hope to offer. She read his thoughts and cried as she snatched his hat and coat from a peg:

"There must be one somewhere. Go to the Fort, and if there's none there go to Sacramento. I'd go with you but I'm afraid to leave him."

Daddy John went. She stood in the doorway and saw him lead the horse from the brush shed and, with his head low against the downpour, vault into the saddle. The moaning of the disturbed trees mingled with the triumphant roar of the river. There was a shouted good-by, and she heard the clatter of the hoofs for a moment sharp and distinct, then swallowed in the storm's high clamor.

In three days he was back with a ship's doctor, an Englishman, who described himself as just arrived from Australia. Daddy John had searched the valley, and finally run his quarry to earth at the Porter Ranch, one of a motley crew waiting to swarm inland to the rivers. The man, a ruddy animal with some rudimentary knowledge of his profession, pronounced the ailment "mountain fever." He looked over the doctor's medicine chest with an air of wisdom and at Susan with subdued gallantry.

"Better get the wife down to Sacramento," he said to Daddy John. "The man's not going to last and you can't keep her up here."

"Is he going to die?" said the old man.

The doctor pursed his lips.

"He oughtn't to. He's a Hercules. But the strongest of 'em go this way with the work and exposure. Think they can do anything and don't last as well sometimes as the weak ones."

"Work and exposure oughtn't to hurt him. He's bred upon it. Why should he cave in and the others of us keep up?"

"Can't say. But he's all burned out—hollow. There's no rebound. He's half gone now. Doesn't seem to have the spirit that you'd expect in such a body."

"Would it do any good to get him out of here, down to the valley or the coast?"

"It might—change of air sometimes knocks out these fevers. You could try the coast or Hock Farm. But if you want my opinion I don't think there's much use."

Then on the first fine day the doctor rode away with some of their dust in his saddlebags, spying on the foaming river for good spots to locate when the rains should cease and he, with the rest of the world, could try his luck.

His visit had done no good, had given no heart to the anguished woman or roused no flicker of life in the failing man. Through the weakness of his wasting faculties Courant realized the approach of death and welcomed it. In his forest roamings, before his illness struck him, he had thought of it as the one way out. Then it had come to him vaguely terrible as a specter in dreams. Now bereft of the sustaining power of his strength the burden of the days to come had grown insupportable. To live without telling her, to live beside her and remain a partial stranger, to live divorcing her from all she would desire, had been the only course he saw, and in it he recognized nothing but misery. Death was the solution for both, and he relinquished himself to it with less grief at parting from her than relief at the withdrawal from an existence that would destroy their mutual dream. What remained to him of his mighty forces went to keep his lips shut on the secret she must never know. Even as his brain grew clouded, and his senses feeble, he retained the resolution to leave her her belief in him. This would be his legacy. His last gift of love would be the memory of an undimmed happiness.

But Susan, unknowing, fought on. The doctor had not got back to the Porter Ranch before she began arranging to move Low to Sacramento and from there to the Coast. He would get better care, they would find more competent doctors, the change of air would strengthen him. She had it out with Bella, refusing to listen to the older woman's objections, pushing aside all references to her own health. Bella was distracted. "For," as she said afterwards to Glen, "what's the sense of having her go? She can't do anything for him, and it's like as not the three of them'll die instead of one."

There was no reasoning with Susan. The old willfulness was strengthened to a blind determination. She plodded back through the rain to Daddy John and laid the matter before him. As of old he did not dispute with her, only stipulated that he be permitted to go on ahead, make arrangements, and then come back for her. He, too, felt there was no hope, but unlike the others he felt the best hope for his Missy was in letting her do all she could for her husband.

In the evening, sitting by the fire, they talked it over—the stage down the river, the stop at the Fort, then on to Sacramento, and the long journey to the seaport settlement of San Francisco. The sick man seemed asleep, and their voices unconsciously rose, suddenly dropping to silence as he stirred and spoke:

"Are you talking of moving me? Don't. I've had twelve years of it. Let me rest now."

Susan went to him and sat at his feet.

"But we must get you well," she said, trying to smile. "They'll want you in the pits. You must be back there working with them by the spring."

He looked at her with a wide, cold gaze, and said:

"The spring. We're all waiting for the spring. Everything's going to happen then."

A silence fell. The wife sat with drooped head, unable to speak. Daddy John looked into the fire. To them both the Angel of Death seemed to have paused outside the door, and in the stillness they waited for his knock. Only Courant was indifferent, staring at the wall with eyes full of an unfathomable unconcern.

The next day Daddy John left. He was to find the accommodations, get together such comforts as could be had, and return for them. He took a sack of dust and the fleetest horse, and calculated to be back inside two days. As he clattered away he turned for a last look at her, standing in the sunshine, her hand over her eyes. Man or devil would not stop him, he thought, as he buckled to his task, and his seventy years sat as light as a boy's twenty, the one passion of his heart beating life through him.

Two days later, at sundown, he came back. She heard the ringing of hoofs along the trail and ran forward to meet him, catching the bridle as the horse, a white lather of sweat, came to a panting halt. She did not notice the lined exhaustion of the old man's face, had no care for anything but his news.

"I've got everything fixed," he cried, and then slid off holding to the saddle for he was stiff and spent. "The place is ready and I've found a doctor and got him nailed. It'll be all clean and shipshape for you. How's Low?"

An answer was unnecessary. He could see there were no good tidings.

"Weaker a little," she said. "But if it's fine we can start to-morrow."

He thought of the road he had traveled and felt they were in God's hands. Then he stretched a gnarled and tremulous claw and laid it on her shoulder.

"And there's other news, Missy. Great news. I'm thinking that it may help you."

There was no news that could help her but news of Low. She was so fixed in her preoccupation that her eye was void of interest, as his, bright and expectant, held it:

"I seen David."

He was rewarded. Her face flashed into excitement and she grabbed at him with a wild hand:

"David! Where?"

"In Sacramento. I seen him and talked to him."

"Oh, Daddy John, how wonderful! Was he well?"

"Well and hearty, same as he used to be. Plumped up considerable."

"How had he got there?"

"A train behind us picked him up, found him lyin' by the spring where he'd crawled lookin' for us."

"Then, it wasn't Indians? Had he got lost?"

"That's what I says to him first-off—'Well, gol darn yer, what happened to yer?' and before he answers me he says quick, 'How's Susan?' It ain't no use settin' on bad news that's bound to come out so I give it to him straight that you and Low was married at Humboldt. And he took it very quiet, whitened up a bit, and says no words for a spell, walkin' off a few steps. Then he turns back and says, 'Is she happy?'"

Memory broke through the shell of absorption and gave voice to a forgotten sense of guilt:

"Oh, poor David! He always thought of me first."

"I told him you was. That you and Low was almighty sot on each other and that Low was sick. And he was quiet for another spell, and I could see his thoughts was troublesome. So to get his mind off it I asked him how it all happened. He didn't answer for a bit, standin' thinkin' with his eyes lookin' out same as he used to look at the sunsets before he got broke down. And then he tells me it was a fall, that he clum up to the top of the rock and thinks he got a touch o' sun up there. For first thing he knew he was all dizzy and staggerin' round, goin' this side and that, till he got to the edge where the rock broke off and over he went. He come to himself lying under a ledge alongside some bushes, with a spring tricklin' over him. He guessed he rolled there and that's why we couldn't find him. He don't know how long it was, or how long it took him to crawl round to the camp—maybe a day, he thinks, for he was 'bout two thirds dead. But he got there and saw we was gone. The Indians hadn't come down on the place, and he seen the writing on the rock and found the cache. The food and the water kep' him alive, and after a bit a big train come along, the finest train he even seen—eighteen wagons and an old Ashley man for pilot. They was almighty good to him; the women nursed him like Christians, and he rid in the wagons and come back slow to his strength. The reason we didn't hear of him before was because they come by a southern route that took 'em weeks longer, moving slow for the cattle. They was fine people, he says, and he's thick with one of the men who's a lawyer, and him and David's goin' to the coast to set up a law business there."

The flicker of outside interest was dying. "Thank Heaven," she said on a rising breath, then cast a look at the cabin and added quickly:

"I'll go and tell Low. Maybe it'll cheer him up. He was always so worried about David. You tell Bella and then come to the cabin and see how you think he is."

There was light in the cabin, a leaping radiance from the logs on the hearth, and a thin, pale twilight from the uncovered doorway. She paused there for a moment, making her step light and composing her features into serener lines. The gaunt form under the blanket was motionless. The face, sunk away to skin clinging on sharp-set bones, was turned in profile. He might have been sleeping but for the glint of light between the eyelids. She was accustomed to seeing him thus, to sitting beside the inanimate shape, her hand curled round his, her eyes on the face that took no note of her impassioned scrutiny. Would her tidings of David rouse him? She left herself no time to wonder, hungrily expectant.

"Low," she said, bending over him, "Daddy John's been to Sacramento and has brought back wonderful news."

He turned his head with an effort and looked at her. His glance was vacant as if he had only half heard, as if her words had caught the outer edges of his senses and penetrated no farther.

"He has seen David."

Into the dull eyes a slow light dawned, struggling through their apathy till they became the eyes of a live man, hanging on hers, charged with a staring intelligence. He made an attempt to move, lifted a wavering hand and groped for her shoulder.

"David!" he whispered.

The news had touched an inner nerve that thrilled to it. She crouched on the edge of the bunk, her heart beating thickly:

"David, alive and well."

The fumbling hand gripped on her shoulder. She felt the fingers pressing in stronger than she had dreamed they could be. It pulled her down toward him, the eyes fixed on hers, searching her face, glaring fearfully from blackened hollows, riveted in a desperate questioning.

"What happened to him?" came the husky whisper.

"He fell from the rock; thinks he had a sunstroke up there and then lost his balance and fell over and rolled under a ledge. And after a few days a train came by and found him."

"Is that what he said?"

Her answering voice began to tremble, for the animation of his look grew wilder and stranger. It was as if all the life in his body was burning in those hungry eyes. The hand on her shoulder clutched like a talon, the muscles informed with an unnatural force. Was it the end coming with a last influx of strength and fire? Her tears began to fall upon his face, and she saw it through them, ravaged and fearful, with new life struggling under the ghastliness of dissolution. There was an awfulness in this rekindling of the spirit where death had set its stamp that broke her fortitude, and she forgot the legend of her courage and cried in her agony:

"Oh, Low, don't die, don't die! I can't bear it. Stay with me!"

The hand left her shoulder and fumblingly touched her face, feeling blindly over its tear-washed surface.

"I'm not going to die," came the feeble whisper. "I can live now."

Half an hour later when Daddy John came in he found her sitting on the side of the bunk, a hunched, dim figure against the firelight. She held up a warning hand, and the old man tiptoed to her side and leaned over her to look. Courant was sleeping, his head thrown back, his chest rising in even breaths. Daddy John gazed for a moment, then bent till his cheek was almost against hers.

"Pick up your heart, Missy," he whispered. "He looks to me better."



CHAPTER IV

From the day of the good news Courant rallied. At first they hardly dared to hope. Bella and Daddy John talked about it together and wondered if it were only a pause in the progress of his ailment. But Susan was confident, nursing her man with a high cheerfulness that defied their anxious faces.

She had none of their fear of believing. She saw their doubts and angrily scouted them. "Low will be all right soon," she said, in answer to their gloomily observing looks. In her heart she called them cowards, ready to join hands with death, not rise up and fight till the final breath. Her resolute hope seemed to fill the cabin with light and life. It transformed her haggardness, made her a beaming presence, with eyes bright under tangled locks of hair, and lips that hummed snatches of song. He was coming back to her like a child staggering to its mother's outheld hands. While they were yet unconvinced "when Low gets well" became a constant phrase on her tongue. She began to plan again, filled their ears with speculations of the time when she and her husband would move to the coast. They marveled at her, at the dauntlessness of her spirit, at the desperate courage that made her grip her happiness and wrench it back from the enemy.

They marveled more when they saw she had been right—Susan who had been a child so short a time before, knowing more than they, wiser and stronger in the wisdom and strength of her love.

There was a great day when Low crept out to the door and sat on the bench in the sun with his wife beside him. To the prosperous passerby they would have seemed a sorry pair—a skeleton man with uncertain feet and powerless hands, a worn woman, ragged and unkempt. To them it was the halcyon hour, the highest point of their mutual adventure. The cabin was their palace, the soaked prospect a pleasance decked for their delight. And from this rude and ravaged outlook their minds reached forward in undefined and unrestricted visioning to all the world that lay before them, which they would soon advance on and together win.

Nature was with them in their growing gladness. The spring was coming. The river began to fall, and Courant's eyes dwelt longingly on the expanding line of mud that waited for his pick. April came with a procession of cloudless days, with the tinkling of streams shrinking under the triumphant sun, with the pines exhaling scented breaths, and a first, faint sprouting of new green. The great refreshed landscape unveiled itself, serenely brooding in a vast, internal energy of germination. The earth was coming to life as they were, gathering itself for the expression of its ultimate purpose. It was rising to the rite of rebirth and they rose with it, with faces uplifted to its kindling glory and hearts in which joy was touched by awe.

On a May evening, when the shadows were congregating in the canon, Susan lay on the bunk with her son in the hollow of her arm. The children came in and peeped fearfully at the little hairless head, pulling down the coverings with careful fingers and eying the newcomer dubiously, not sure that they liked him. Bella looked over their shoulders radiating proud content. Then she shooed them out and went about her work of "redding up," pacing the earthen floor with the proud tread of victory. Courant was sitting outside on the log bench. She moved to the door and smiled down at him over the tin plate she was scouring.

"Come in and sit with her while I get the supper," she said. "Don't talk, just sit where she can see you."

He came and sat beside her, and she drew the blanket down from the tiny, crumpled face. They were silent, wondering at it, looking back over the time when it had cried in their blood, inexorably drawn them together, till out of the heat of their passion the spark of its being had been struck. Both saw in it their excuse and their pardon.

She recovered rapidly, all her being revivified and reinforced, coming back glowingly to a mature beauty. Glimpses of the Susan of old began to reappear. She wanted her looking-glass, and, sitting up in the bunk with the baby against her side, arranged her hair in the becoming knot and twisted the locks on her temples into artful tendrils. She would sew soon, and kept Bella busy digging into the trunks and bringing out what was left of her best things. They held weighty conferences over these, the foot of the bunk littered with wrinkled skirts and jackets that had fitted a slimmer and more elegant Susan. A trip to Sacramento was talked of, in which Daddy John was to shop for a lady and baby, and buy all manner of strange articles of which he knew nothing.

"Calico, that's a pretty color," he exclaimed testily. "How am I to know what's a pretty color? Now if it was a sack of flour or a spade—but I'll do my best, Missy," he added meekly, catching her eye in which the familiar imperiousness gleamed through softening laughter.

Soon the day came when she walked to the door and sat on the bench. The river was settling decorously into its bed, and in the sunlight the drenched shores shone under a tracery of pools and rillets as though a silvery gauze had been rudely torn back from them, catching and tearing here and there. The men were starting the spring work. The rocker was up, and the spades and picks stood propped against the rock upon which she and Low had sat on that first evening. He sat there now, watching the preparations soon to take part again. His lean hand fingered among the picks, found his own, and he walked to the untouched shore and struck a tentative blow. Then he dropped the pick, laughing, and came back to her.

"I'll be at it in a week," he said, sitting down on the bench. "It'll be good to be in the pits again and feel my muscles once more."

"It'll be good to see you," she answered.

In a week he was back, in two weeks he was himself again—the mightiest of those mighty men who, sixty years ago, measured their strength along the American River. The diggings ran farther upstream and were richer than the old ones. The day's takings were large, sometimes so large that the men's elation beat like a fever in their blood. At night they figured on their wealth, and Susan listened startled to the sums that fell so readily from their lips. They were rich, rich enough to go to the coast and for Courant to start in business there.

It was he who wanted this. The old shrinking and fear of the city were gone. Now, with a wife and child, he turned his face that way. He was longing to enter the fight for them, to create and acquire for them, to set them as high as the labor of his hands and work of his brain could compass. New ambitions possessed him. As Susan planned for a home and its comforts, he did for his work in the market place in competition with those who had once been his silent accusers.

But there was also a strange humbleness in him. It did not weaken his confidence or clog his aspiration, but it took something from the hard arrogance that had recognized in his own will the only law. He had heard from Daddy John of that interview with David, and he knew the reason of David's lie. He knew, too, that David would stand to that lie forever. Of the two great passions that the woman had inspired the one she had relinquished was the finer. He had stolen her from David, and David had shown that for love of her he could forego vengeance. Once such an act would have been inexplicable to the mountain man. Now he understood, and in his humility he vowed to make the life she had chosen as perfect as the one that might have been. Through this last, and to him, supremest sacrifice, David ceased to be the puny weakling and became the hero, the thought of whom would make Courant "go softly all his days."

The summer marched upon them, with the men doing giant labor on the banks and the women under the pine at work beside their children. The peace of the valley was broken by the influx of the Forty-niners, who stormed its solitudes, and changed the broken trail to a crowded highway echoing with the noises of life. The river yielded up its treasure to their eager hands, fortunes were made, and friendships begun that were to make the history of the new state. These bronzed and bearded men, these strong-thewed women, were waking from her sleep the virgin California.

Sometimes in the crowded hours Susan dropped her work and, with her baby in her arms, walked along the teeming river trail or back into the shadows of the forest. All about her was the stir of a fecund earth, growth, expansion, promise. From beneath the pines she looked up and saw the aspiration of their proud up-springing. At her feet the ground was bright with flower faces completing themselves in the sunshine. Wherever her glance fell there was a busyness of development, a progression toward fulfillment, a combined, harmonious striving in which each separate particle had its purpose and its meaning. The shell of her old self-engrossment cracked, and the call of a wider life came to her. It pierced clear and arresting through the fairy flutings of "the horns of elfland" that were all she had heretofore heard.

The desire to live as an experiment in happiness, to extract from life all there was for her own enjoying, left her. Slowly she began to see it as a vast concerted enterprise in which she was called to play her part. The days when the world was made for her pleasure were over. The days had begun when she saw her obligation, not alone to the man and child who were part of her, but out and beyond these to the diminishing circles of existences that had never touched hers. Her love that had met so generous a response, full measure, pressed down and running over, must be paid out without the stipulation of recompense. Her vision widened, dimly descried horizons limitless as the prairies, saw faintly how this unasked giving would transform a gray and narrow world as the desert's sunsets had done.

So gradually the struggling soul came into being and possessed the fragile tissue that had once been a girl and was now a woman.

They left the river on a morning in September, the sacks of dust making the trunk heavy. The old wagon was ready, the mess chest strapped to the back, Julia in her place. Bella and the children were to follow as soon as the rains began, so the parting was not sad. The valley steeped in crystal shadow, the hills dark against the flush of dawn, held Susan's glance for a lingering minute as she thought of the days in the tent under the pine. She looked at her husband and met his eyes in which she saw the same memory. Then the child, rosy with life, leaped in her arms, bending to snatch with dimpled hands at its playmates, chuckling baby sounds as they pressed close to give him their kisses.

Daddy John, mounting to his seat, cried:

"There's the sun coming up to wish us God-speed."

She turned and saw it rising huge and red over the hill's shoulder, and held up her son to see. The great ball caught his eyes and he stared in tranced delight. Then he leaped against the restraint of her arm, kicking on her breast with his heels, stretching a grasping hand toward the crimson ball, a bright and shining toy to play with.

Its light fell red on the three faces—the child's waiting for life to mold its unformed softness, the woman's stamped with the gravity of deep experience, the man's stern with concentrated purpose. They watched in silence till the baby gave a cry, a thin, sweet sound of wondering joy that called them back to it. Again they looked at one another, but this time their eyes held no memories. The thoughts of both reached forward to the coming years, and they saw themselves shaping from this offspring of their lawless passion what should be a man, a molder of the new Empire, a builder of the Promised Land.



FINIS