The Emigrant Trail Part 17

David looked about for the stones. The "we" consoled him a little, but he felt as if he were excluded into outer darkness, and at a moment when she should have turned to him for the aid he yearned to give. He could not get over the suddenness of it, and watched them forlornly, gazing enviously at their conferences over the medicine chest, once straightening himself from his search for stones to call longingly:

"Can't I do something for you over there?"

"Have you the stones?" she answered without raising her head, and he went back to his task.

In distress she had turned from the outside world, broken every lien of interest with it, and gone back to her own. The little circle in which her life had always moved snapped tight upon her, leaving the lover outside, as completely shut out from her and her concerns as if he had been a stranger camped by her fire.

CHAPTER VIII

The doctor was ill. The next day he lay in the wagon, his chest oppressed, fever burning him to the dryness of an autumn leaf. To the heads that looked upon him through the circular opening with a succession of queries as to his ailment, he invariably answered that it was nothing, a bronchial cold, sent to him as a punishment for disobeying his daughter. But the young men remembered that the journey had been undertaken for his health, and Daddy John, in the confidential hour of the evening smoke, told them that the year before an attack of congestion of the lungs had been almost fatal.

Even if they had not known this, Susan's demeanor would have told them it was a serious matter. She was evidently wracked by anxiety which transformed her into a being so distant, and at times so cross, that only Daddy John had the temerity to maintain his usual att.i.tude toward her. She would hardly speak to Leff, and to David, the slighting coldness that she had shown in the beginning continued, holding him at arm's length, freezing him into stammering confusion. When he tried to offer her help or cheer her she made him feel like a foolish and tactless intruder, forcing his way into the place that was hers alone.

He did not know whether she was prompted by a cruel perversity, or held in an absorption so intense she had no warmth of interest left for anybody. He tried to explain her conduct, but he could only feel its effect, wonder if she had grown to dislike him, review the last week in a search for a cause. In the daytime he hung about the doctor's wagon, miserably anxious for a word from her. He was grateful if she asked him to hunt for medicine in the small, wooden chest, or to spread the blankets to air on the tops of the lupine bushes.

And while she thus relegated him to the outer places where strangers hovered, a sweetness, so gentle, so caressing, so all pervading that it made of her a new and lovely creature, marked her manner to the sick man. There had always been love in her bearing to her father, but this new tenderness was as though some hidden well of it, sunk deep in the recesses of her being, had suddenly overflowed. David saw the hardness of the face she turned toward him trans.m.u.te into a brooding pa.s.sion of affection as she bent over the doctor's bed. The fingers he did not dare to touch lifted the sick man's hand to her cheek and held it there while she smiled down at him, her eyes softening with a light that stirred the lover's soul. The mystery of this feminine complexity awed him. Would she ever look at him like that? What could he do to make her? He knew of no other way than by serving her, trying un.o.btrusively to lighten her burden, effacing himself, as that seemed to be what she wanted. And in the night as he lay near the wagon, ready to start at her call, he thought with exalted hope that some day he might win such a look for himself.

The doctor was for going on. There was no necessity to stay in camp because one man happened to wheeze and cough, he said, and anyway, he could do that just as well when they were moving. So they started out and crossed the plateau to where the road dropped into the cleft of Ash Hollow. Here they stopped and held a conference. The doctor was worse. The interior of the wagon, the sun beating on the canvas roof, was like a furnace, where he lay sweltering, tossed this way and that by the jolting wheels. Their dust moved with them, breezes lifting it and carrying it careening back to them where it mingled with new dust, hanging dense like a segment of fog in the scene's raw brilliancy.

Ash Hollow looked a darkling descent, the thin pulsations of the little leaves of ash trees flickering along its sides. The road bent downward in sharp zigzags, and somewhere below the North Fork ran. The plain was free, blue clothed and blue vaulted, with "the wonderful winds of G.o.d" flowing between. The conference resulted in a unanimous decision to halt where they were, and stay in camp till the doctor improved, moving him from the wagon to a tent.

For four days he lay parched with fever, each breath drawn with a stifled inner rustling, numerous fine wrinkles traced in a network on his dried cheeks. Then good care, the open air, and the medicine chest prevailed. He improved, and Susan turned her face again to the world and smiled. Such was the changefulness of her mood that her smiles were as radiant and generously bestowed as her previous demeanor had been repelling. Even Leff got some of them, and they fell on David prodigal and warming as the sunshine. Words to match went with them.

On the morning of the day when the doctor's temperature fell and he could breathe with ease, she said to her betrothed:

"Oh, David, you've been so good, you've made me so fond of you."

It was the nearest she had yet come to the language of lovers. It made him dizzy; the wonderful look was in his mind.

"You wouldn't let me be good," was all he could stammer. "You didn't seem as if you wanted me at all."

"Stupid!" she retorted with a glance of beaming reproach, "I'm always like that when my father's sick."

It was noon of the fifth day that a white spot on the plain told them the New York Company was in sight. The afternoon was yet young when the dust of the moving column tarnished the blue-streaked distance.

Then the first wagons came into view, creeping along the winding ribbon of road. As soon as the advance guard of hors.e.m.e.n saw the camp, pieces of it broke away and were deflected toward the little group of tents from which a tiny spiral of smoke went up in an uncoiling, milky skein.

Susan had many questions to answer, and had some ado to keep the inquirers away from the doctor, who was still too weak to be disturbed.

She was sharp and not very friendly in her efforts to preserve him from their sympathizing curiosity.

Part of the train had gone by when she heard from a woman who rode up on a foot-sore nag that the McMurdo's were some distance behind. A bull boat in which the children were crossing the river had upset, and Mrs. McMurdo had been frightened and "took faint." The children were all right--only a wetting--but it was a bad time for their mother to get such a scare.

"I'm not with the women who think it's all right to take such risks.

Stay at home _then_," she said, giving Susan a sage nod out of the depths of her sunbonnet.

The news made the young girl uneasy. A new reticence, the "grown-up"

sense of the wisdom of silence that she had learned on the trail, made her keep her own council. Also, there was no one to tell but her father, and he was the last person who ought to know. The call of unaided suffering would have brought him as quickly from his buffalo skins in the tent as from his bed in the old home in Rochester. Susan resolved to keep it from him, if she had to stand guard over him and fight them off. Her philosophy was primitive--her own first, and if, to save her own, others must be sacrificed, then she would aid in the sacrifice and weep over its victims, weep, but not yield.

When the train had disappeared into the shadows of Ash Hollow, curses, shouts, and the cracking of whips rising stormily over its descent, the white dot of the McMurdo's wagon was moving over the blue and green distance. As it drew near they could see that Glen walked beside the oxen, and the small figure of Bob ran by the wheel. Neither of the women were to be seen. "Lazy and riding," Daddy John commented, spying at them with his far-sighted old eyes. "Tired out and gone to sleep,"

David suggested. Susan's heart sank and she said nothing. It looked as if something was the matter, and she nerved herself for a struggle.

When Glen saw them, his shout came through the clear air, keen-edged as a bird's cry. They answered, and he raised a hand in a gesture that might have been a beckoning or merely a hail. David leaped on a horse and went galloping through the bending heads of the lupines to meet them. Susan watched him draw up at Glen's side, lean from his saddle for a moment's parley, then turn back. The gravity of his face increased her dread. He dismounted, looking with scared eyes from one to the other. Mrs. McMurdo was sick. Glen was glad--he couldn't say how glad--that it was their camp. He'd camp there with them. His wife wasn't able to go on.

Susan edged up to him, caught his eye and said stealthily:

"Don't tell my father."

He hesitated.

"They--they--seemed to want him."

"I'll see to that," she answered. "Don't you let him know that anything's the matter, or I'll never forgive you."

It was a command, and the glance that went with it accented its authority.

The prairie schooner was now close at hand, and they straggled forward to meet it, one behind the other, through the brushing of the knee-high bushes. The child recognizing them ran screaming toward them, his hands out-stretched, crying out their names. Lucy appeared at the front of the wagon, climbed on the tongue and jumped down. She was pale, the freckles on her fair skin showing like a spattering of brown paint, her flaming hair slipped in a tousled coil to one side of her head.

"It's you!" she cried. "Glen didn't know whose camp it was till he saw David. Oh, I'm so glad!" and she ran to Susan, clutched her arm and said in a hurried lower key, "Bella's sick. She feels terribly bad, out here in this place with nothing. Isn't it dreadful?"

"I'll speak to her," said Susan. "You stay here."

The oxen, now at the outskirts of the camp, had come to a standstill.

Susan stepping on the wheel drew herself up to the driver's seat.

Bella sat within on a pile of sacks, her elbows on her knees, her forehead in her hands. By her side, leaning against her, stood the little girl, blooming and thoughtful, her thumb in her mouth. She withdrew it and stared fixedly at Susan, then smiled a slow, shy smile, full of meaning, as if her mind held a mischievous secret. At Susan's greeting the mother lifted her head.

"Oh, Susan, isn't it a mercy we've found you?" she exclaimed. "We saw the camp hours ago, but we didn't know it was yours. It's as if G.o.d had delayed you. Yes, my dear, it's come. But I'm not going to be afraid. With your father it'll be all right."

The young girl said a few consolatory words and jumped down from the wheel. She was torn both ways. Bella's plight was piteous, but to make her father rise in his present state of health and attend such a case, hours long, in the chill, night breath of the open--it might kill him! She turned toward the camp, vaguely conscious of the men standing in awkward att.i.tudes and looking thoroughly uncomfortable as though they felt a vicarious sense of guilt--that the entire male s.e.x had something to answer for in Bella's tragic predicament. Behind them stood the doctor's tent, and as her eyes fell on it she saw Lucy's body standing in the opening, the head and shoulders hidden within the inclosure. Lucy was speaking with the doctor.

Susan gave a sharp exclamation and stopped. It was too late to interfere. Lucy withdrew her head and came running back, crying triumphantly:

"Your father's coming. He says he's not sick at all. He's putting on his coat."

Following close on her words came the doctor, emerging slowly, for he was weak and unsteady. In the garish light of the afternoon he looked singularly white and bleached, like a man whose warm, red-veined life is dried into a sere grayness of blood and tissue. He was out of harmony with the glad living colors around him, ghostlike amid the brightness of the flowering earth and the deep-dyed heaven. He met his daughter's eyes and smiled.

"Your prisoner has escaped you, Missy."

She tried to control herself, to beat down the surge of anger that shook her. Meeting him she implored with low-toned urgence:

"Father, you can't do it. Go back. You're too sick."

He pushed her gently away, his smile gone.

"Go back, Missy? The woman is suffering, dear."

"I know it, and I don't care. You're suffering, you're sick. She should have known better than to come. It's her fault, not ours.

Because she was so foolhardy is no reason why you should be victimized."

His gravity was crossed by a look of cold, displeased surprise, a look she had not seen directed upon her since once in her childhood when she had told him a lie.