The Emigrant Trail Part 13

"He's a good boy," he said thoughtfully. "No one can say he ain't.

But some way or other, I'd rather have had a bigger man for you, Missy."

"Bigger!" she exclaimed indignantly. "He's nearly six feet. And girls don't pick out their husbands because of their height."

"I ain't meant it that way. Bigger in what's in him--can get hold o'

more, got a bigger reach."

"I don't know what you mean. If you're trying to say he's not got a big mind you're all wrong. He knows more than anybody I ever met except father. He's read hundreds and hundreds of books."

"That's it--too many books. Books is good enough but they ain't the right sort 'er meat for a feller that's got to hit out for himself in a new country. They're all right in the city where you got the butcher and the police and a kerosene lamp to read 'em by. David 'ud be a fine boy in the town just as his books is suitable in the town. But this ain't the town. And the men that are the right kind out here ain't particularly set on books. I'd 'a' chose a harder feller for you, Missy, that could have stood up to anything and didn't have no soft feelings to hamper him."

"Rubbish," she snapped. "Why don't you encourage me?"

Her tone drew his eyes, sharp as a squirrel's and charged with quick concern. Her face was partly turned away. The curve of her cheek was devoid of its usual dusky color, her fingers played on her under lip as if it were a little flute.

"What do you want to be encouraged for?" he said low, as if afraid of being overheard.

She did not move her head, but looked at the bluffs.

"I don't know," she answered, then hearing her--voice hoa.r.s.e cleared her throat. "It's all--so--so--sort of new. I--I--feel--I don't know just how--I think it's homesick."

Her voice broke in a bursting sob. Her control gone, her pride fell with it. Wheeling on the seat she cast upon him a look of despairing appeal.

"Oh, Daddy John," was all she could gasp, and then bent her head so that her hat might hide the shame of her tears.

He looked at her for a nonplused moment, at her brown arms bent over her shaken bosom, at the shield of her broken hat. He was thoroughly discomfited for he had not the least idea what was the matter. Then he shifted the reins to his left hand and edging near her laid his right on her knee.

"Don't you want to marry him?" he said gently.

"It isn't that, it's something else."

"What else? You can say anything you like to me. Ain't I carried you when you were a baby?"

"I don't know what it is." Her voice came cut by sobbing breaths. "I don't understand. It's like being terribly lonesome."

The old frontiersman had no remedy ready for this complaint. He, too, did not understand.

"Don't you marry him if you don't like him," he said. "If you want to tell him so and you're afraid, I'll do it for you."

"I do like him. It's not that."

"Well, then, what's making you cry?"

"Something else, something way down deep that makes everything seem so far away and strange."

He leaned forward and spat over the wheel, then subsided against the roof prop.

"Are you well?" he said, his imagination exhausted.

"Yes, very."

Daddy John looked at the backs of the mules. The off leader was a capricious female by name Julia who required more management and coaxing than the other five put together, and whom he loved beyond them all. In his bewildered anxiety the thought pa.s.sed through his mind that all creatures of the feminine gender, animal or human, were governed by laws inscrutable to the male, who might never aspire to comprehension and could only strive to please and placate.

A footfall struck on his ear and, thrusting his head beyond the canvas hood, he saw Leff loafing up from the rear.

"Saw her come in here," thought the old man, drawing his head in, "and wants to hang round and snoop."

Since the Indian episode he despised Leff. His contempt was unveiled, for the country lout who had shown himself a coward had dared to raise his eyes to the one star in Daddy John's firmament. He would not have hidden his dislike if he could. Leff was of the outer world to which he relegated all men who showed fear or lied.

He turned to Susan:

"Go back in the wagon and lie down. Here comes Leff and I don't want him to see you."

The young girl thought no better of Leff than he did. The thought of being viewed in her abandonment by the despised youth made her scramble into the back of the wagon where she lay concealed on a pile of sacks.

In the forward opening where the canvas was drawn in a circle round a segment of sky, Daddy John's figure fitted like a picture in a circular frame. As a step paused at the wheel she saw him lean forward and heard his rough tones.

"Yes, she's here, asleep in the back of the wagon."

Then Leff's voice, surprised:

"Asleep? Why, it ain't an hour since we started."

"Well, can't she go to sleep in the morning if she wants? Don't you go to sleep every Sunday under the wagon?"

"Yes, but that's afternoon."

"Mebbe, but everybody's not as slow as you at getting at what they want."

This appeared to put Susan's retirement in a light that gave rise to pondering. There was a pause, then came the young man's heavy footsteps slouching back to his wagon. Daddy John settled down on the seat.

"I'm almighty glad it weren't him, Missy," he said, over his shoulder.

"I'd 'a' known then why you cried."

CHAPTER V

Late the same day Leff, who had been riding on the bluffs, came down to report a large train a few miles ahead of them. It was undoubtedly the long-looked-for New York Company.

The news was as a tonic to their slackened energies. A cheering excitement ran through the train. There was stir and loud talking.

Its contagion lifted Susan's spirits and with her father she rode on in advance, straining her eyes against the glare of the glittering river.

Men and women, who daily crowded by them unnoted on city streets, now loomed in the perspective as objective points of avid interest. No party Susan had ever been to called forth such hopeful antic.i.p.ation.

To see her fellows, to talk with women over trivial things, to demand and give out the human sympathies she wanted and that had lain withering within herself, drew her from the gloom under which she had lain weeping in the back of Daddy John's wagon.

They were nearing the Forks of the Platte where the air was dryly transparent and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a congeries of broken white dots on the river's edge, they could hear the bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a woman's voice.

It was like a handclasp across s.p.a.ce. Drawing nearer the sounds of men and life reached forward to meet them--laughter, the neighing of horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they still longed for.