The Emigrant Trail Part 14

The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day's labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring, the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night's bivouac. It shone bright on the darkness of the gra.s.s, a cordon of flame that some kindly magician had drawn about the resting place of the tired camp.

With the night pressing on its edges it was a tiny nucleus of life dropped down between the immemorial plains and the ancient river. Home was here in the pitched tents, a hearthstone in the flame lapping on the singed gra.s.s, humanity in the loud welcome that rose to meet the newcomers. The doctor had known but one member of the Company, its organizer, a farmer from the Mohawk Valley. But the men, dropping their ox yokes and water pails, crowded forward, laughing deep-mouthed greetings from the bush of their beards, and extending hands as hard as the road they had traveled.

The women were cooking. Like G.o.ddesses of the waste places they stood around the fires, a line of half-defined shapes. Films of smoke blew across them, obscured and revealed them, and round about them savory odors rose. Fat spit in the pans, coffee bubbled in blackened pots, and strips of buffalo meat impaled on sticks sent a dribble of flame to the heat. The light was strong on their faces, lifted in greeting, lips smiling, eyes full of friendly curiosity. But they did not move from their posts for they were women and the men and the children were waiting to be fed.

Most of them were middle-aged, or the trail had made them look middle-aged. A few were very old. Susan saw a face carved with seventy years of wrinkles mumbling in the framing folds of a shawl.

Nearby, sitting on the dropped tongue of a wagon, a girl of perhaps sixteen, sat ruminant, nursing a baby. Children were everywhere, helping, fighting, rolling on the gra.s.s. Babies lay on spread blankets with older babies sitting by to watch. It was the woman's hour. The day's march was over, but the intimate domestic toil was at its height.

The home makers were concentrated upon their share of the activities--cooking food, making the shelter habitable, putting their young to bed.

Separated from Susan by a pile of scarlet embers stood a young girl, a large spoon in her hand. The light shot upward along the front of her body, painting with an even red glow her breast, her chin, the under side of her nose and finally transforming into a coppery cloud the bright confusion of her hair. She smiled across the fire and said:

"I'm glad you've come. We've been watching for you ever since we struck the Platte. There aren't any girls in the train. I and my sister are the youngest except Mrs. Peebles over there," with a nod in the direction of the girl on the wagon tongue, "and she's married."

The woman beside her, who had been too busy over the bacon pan to raise her head, now straightened herself, presenting to Susan's eye a face more buxom and mature but so like that of the speaker that it was evident they were sisters. A band of gold gleamed on her wedding finger and her short skirt and loose calico jacket made no attempt to hide the fact that another baby was soon to be added to the already well-supplied train. She smiled a placid greeting and her eye, lazily sweeping Susan, showed a healthy curiosity tempered by the self-engrossed indifference of the married woman to whom the outsider, even in the heart of the wilderness, is forever the outsider.

"Lucy'll be real glad to have a friend," she said. "She's lonesome.

Turn the bacon, Lucy, it makes my back ache to bend"; and as the sister bowed over the frying pan, "move, children, you're in the way."

This was directed to two children who lay on the gra.s.s by the fire, with blinking eyes, already half asleep. As they did not immediately obey she a.s.sisted them with a large foot, clad in a man's shoe. The movement though peremptory was not rough. It had something of the quality of the mother tiger's admonishing pats to her cubs, a certain gentleness showing through force. The foot propelled the children into a murmurous drowsy heap. One of them, a little girl with a shock of white hair and a bunch of faded flowers wilting in her tight baby grasp, looked at her mother with eyes glazed with sleep, a deep look as though her soul was gazing back from the mysteries of unconsciousness.

"Now lie there till you get your supper," said the mother, having by gradual pressure pried them out of the way. "And you," to Susan, "better bring your things over and camp here and use our fire. We've nearly finished with it."

In the desolation of the morning Susan had wished for a member of her own s.e.x, not to confide in but to feel that there was some one near, who, if she did know, could understand. Now here were two. Their fresh, simple faces on which an artless interest was so navely displayed, their pleasant voices, not cultured as hers was but women's voices for all that, gave her spirits a lift. Her depression quite dropped away, the awful lonely feeling, all the more whelming because n.o.body could understand it, departed from her. She ran back to the camp singing and for the first time that day looked at David, whose presence she had shunned, with her old, brilliant smile.

An hour later and the big camp rested, relaxed in the fading twilight that lay a yellow thread of separation between the day's high colors and the dewless darkness of the night. It was like a scene from the migrations of the ancient peoples when man wandered with a woman, a tent, and a herd. The barrier of the wagons, with its girdle of fire sparks, incased a gra.s.sy oval green as a lawn. Here they sat in little groups, collecting in tent openings as they were wont to collect on summer nights at front gates and piazza steps. The crooning of women putting babies to sleep fell in with the babblings of the river. The men smoked in silence. Nature had taught them something of her large reticence in their day-long companionship. Some few lounged across the gra.s.s to have speech of the pilot, a grizzled mountain man, who had been one of the Sublette's trappers, and had wise words to say of the day's travel and the promise of the weather. But most of them lay on the gra.s.s by the tents where they could see the stars through their pipe smoke and hear the talk of their wives and the breathing of the children curled in the blankets.

A youth brought an accordion from his stores and, sitting cross-legged on the ground, began to play. He played "Annie Laurie," and a woman's voice, her head a black outline against the west, sang the words. Then there was a clamor of applause, sounding thin and futile in the evening's suave quietness, and the player began a Scotch reel in the production of which the accordion uttered asthmatic gasps as though unable to keep up with its own proud pace. The tune was sufficiently good to inspire a couple of dancers. The young girl called Lucy rose with a partner--her brother-in-law some one told Susan--and facing one another, hand on hip, heads high, they began to foot it lightly over the blackening gra.s.s.

Seen thus Lucy was handsome, a tall, long-limbed sapling of a girl, with a flaming crest of copper-colored hair and movements as lithe and supple as a cat's. She danced buoyantly, without losing breath, advancing and retreating with mincing steps, her face grave as though the performance had its own dignity and was not to be taken lightly.

Her partner, a tanned and long-haired man, took his part in a livelier spirit, laughing at her, bending his body grotesquely and growing red with his caperings. Meanwhile from the tent door the wife looked on and Susan heard her say to the doctor with whom she had been conferring:

"And when will it be my turn to dance the reel again? There wasn't a girl in the town could dance it with me."

Her voice was weighted with the wistfulness of the woman whose endless patience battles with her unwillingness to be laid by.

Susan saw David's fingers feeling in the gra.s.s for her hand. She gave it, felt the hard stress of his grip, and conquered her desire to draw the hand away. All her coquetry was gone. She was cold and subdued.

The pa.s.sionate hunger of his gaze made her feel uncomfortable. She endured it for a s.p.a.ce and then said with an edge of irritation on her voice:

"What are you staring at me for? Is there something on my face?"

He breathed in a roughened voice:

"No, I love you."

Her discomfort increased. Tumult and coldness make uncongenial neighbors. The man, all pa.s.sion, and the woman, who has no answering spark, grope toward each other through devious and unillumined ways.

He whispered again:

"I love you so. You don't understand."

She did not and looked at him inquiringly, hoping to learn something from his face. His eyes, meeting hers, were full of tears. It surprised her so that she stared speechlessly at him, her head thrown back, her lips parted.

He looked down, ashamed of his emotion, murmuring:

"You don't understand. It's so sacred. Some day you will."

She did not speak to him again, but she let him hold her hand because she thought she ought to and because she was sorry.

CHAPTER VI

The next morning the rain was pouring. The train rolled out without picturesque circ.u.mstance, the men cursing, the oxen, with great heads swinging under the yokes, plodding doggedly through lakes fretted with the downpour. Breakfast was a farce; n.o.body's fire would burn and the women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two provident parties had stoves fitted up in their wagons with a joint of pipe coming out through holes in the canvas. From these, wafts of smoke issued with jaunty a.s.surance, to be beaten down by the rain, which swept them fiercely out of the landscape.

There was no perspective, the distance invisible, nearer outlines blurred. The world was a uniform tint, walls of gray marching in a slant across a foreground embroidered with pools. Water ran, or dripped, or stood everywhere. The river, its surface roughened by the spit of angry drops, ran swollen among its islands, plumed shapes seen mistily through the veil. The road emerged in oases of mud from long, inundated s.p.a.ces. Down the gullies in the hills, following the beaten buffalo tracks, streams percolated through the gra.s.s of the bottom, feeling their way to the river.

Notwithstanding the weather a goodly company of mounted men rode at the head of the train. They were wet to the skin and quite indifferent to it. They had already come to regard the vagaries of the weather as matters of no import. Mosquitoes and Indians were all they feared. On such nights many of them slept in the open under a tarpaulin, and when the water grew deep about them scooped out a drainage ca.n.a.l with a hand that sleep made heavy.

When the disorder of the camping ground was still in sight, Susan, with the desire of social intercourse strong upon her, climbed into the wagon of her new friends. They were practical, thrifty people, and were as comfortable as they could be under a roof of soaked canvas in a heavily weighted prairie schooner that every now and then b.u.mped to the bottom of a chuck hole. The married sister sat on a pile of sacks disposed in a form that made a comfortable seat. A blanket was spread behind her, and thus enthroned she knitted at a stocking of gray yarn.

Seen in the daylight she was young, fresh-skinned, and not uncomely.

Placidity seemed to be the dominating note of her personality. It found physical expression in the bland parting of her hair, drawn back from her smooth brow, her large plump hands with their deliberate movements and dimples where more turbulent souls had knuckles, and her quiet eyes, which turned upon anyone who addressed her a long ruminating look before she answered. She had an air of almost oracular profundity but she was merely in the quiescent state of the woman whose faculties and strength are concentrated upon the coming child. Her sister called her Bella and the people in the train addressed her as Mrs. McMurdo.

Lucy was beside her also knitting a stocking, and the husband, Glen McMurdo, sat in the front driving, his legs in the rain, his upper half leaning back under the shelter of the roof. He looked sleepy, gave a grunt of greeting to Susan, and then lapsed against the saddle propped behind him, his hat pulled low on his forehead hiding his eyes. In this position, without moving or evincing any sign of life, he now and then appeared to be roused to the obligations of his position and shouted a drowsy "Gee Haw," at the oxen.

He did not interfere with the women and they broke into the talk of their s.e.x, how they cooked, which of their clothes had worn best, what was the right way of jerking buffalo meat. And then on to personal matters: where they came from, what they were at home, whither they were bound. The two sisters were Scotch girls, had come from Scotland twenty years ago when Lucy was a baby. Their home was Cooperstown where Glen was a carpenter. He had heard wonderful stories of California, how there were no carpenters there and people were flocking in, so he'd decided to emigrate.

"And once he'd got his mind set on it, he had to start," said his wife.

"Couldn't wait for anything but must be off then and there. That's the way men are."

"It's a hard trip for you," said Susan, wondering at Mrs. McMurdo's serenity.

"Well, I suppose it is," said Bella, as if she did not really think it was, but was too lazy to disagree. "I hope I'll last till we get to Fort Bridger."

"What's at Fort Bridger?"

"It's a big place with lots of trains coming and going and there'll probably be a doctor among them. And they say it's a good place for the animals--plenty of gra.s.s--so it'll be all right if I'm laid up for long. But I have my children very easily."

It seemed to the doctor's daughter a desperate outlook and she eyed, with a combination of pity and awe, the untroubled Bella reclining on the throne of sacks. The wagon gave a creaking lurch and Bella nearly lost count of her st.i.tches which made her frown as she was turning the heel. The lurch woke her husband who pushed back his hat, shouted "Gee Haw" at the oxen, and then said to his wife:

"You got to cut my hair, Bella. These long tags hanging down round my ears worry me."

"Yes, dear, as soon as the weather's fine. I'll borrow a bowl from Mrs. Peeble's mother so that it'll be cut evenly all the way round."

Here there was an interruption, a breathless, baby voice at the wheel, and Glen leaned down and dragged up his son Bob, wet, wriggling, and muddy. The little fellow, four years old, had on a homespun shirt and drawers, both dripping. His hair was a wet mop, hanging in rat tails to his eyes. Under its thatch his face, pink and smiling, was as fresh as a dew-washed rose. Tightly gripped in a dirty paw were two wild flowers, and it was to give these to his mother that he had come.

He staggered toward her, the wagon gave a jolt, and he fell, clasping her knees and filling the air with the sweetness of his laughter. Then holding to her arm and shoulder, he drew himself higher and pressed the flowers close against her nose.

"Is it a bu'full smell?" he inquired, watching her face with eyes of bright inquiry.