The Emigrant Trail Part 2

"After my mother's death my father left New York. He couldn't bear to live there any more. He'd been so happy. So he moved away, though he had a fine practice."

The listener gave forth a murmur of sympathetic understanding.

Devotion to a beautiful woman was matter of immediate appeal to him.

His respect for the doctor rose in proportion, especially when the devotion was weighed in the balance against a fine practice. Looking at the girl's profile with prim black curls against the cheek, he saw the French-Canadian mother, and said not gallantly, but rather timidly:

"And you're like your mother, I suppose? You're dark like a French woman."

She answered this with a brusque denial. Extracting compliments from the talk of a shy young Westerner was evidently not her strong point.

"Oh, no! not at all. My mother was pale and tall, with very large black eyes. I am short and dark and my eyes are only just big enough to see out of. She was delicate and I am very strong. My father says I've never been sick since I got my first teeth."

She looked at him and laughed, and he realized it was the first time he had seen her do it. It brightened her face delightfully, making the eyes she had spoken of so disparagingly narrow into dancing slits.

When she laughed men who had not lost the nicety of their standards by a sojourn on the frontier would have called her a pretty girl.

"My mother was of the French _n.o.blesse_," she said, a dark eye upon him to see how he would take this dignified piece of information. "She was a descendant of the Baron de Poutrincourt, who founded Port Royal."

David was as impressed as anyone could have desired. He did not know what the French _n.o.blesse_ was, but by its sound he judged it to be some high and honorable estate. He was equally ignorant of the ident.i.ty of the Baron de Poutrincourt, but the name alone was impressive, especially as Miss Gillespie p.r.o.nounced it.

"That's fine, isn't it?" he said, as being the only comment he could think of which at once showed admiration and concealed ignorance.

The young woman seemed to find it adequate and went on with her family history. Five years ago in Washington her father had seen his old friend, Marcus Whitman, and since then had been restless with the longing to move West. His health demanded the change. His labors as a physician had exhausted him. His daughter spoke feelingly of the impossibility of restraining his charitable zeal. He attended the poor for nothing. He rose at any hour and went forth in any weather in response to the call of suffering.

"That's what he says a doctor's duties are," she said. "It isn't a profession to make money with, it's a profession for helping people and curing them. You yourself don't count, it's only what you do that does. Why, my father had a very large practice, but he made only just enough to keep us."

Of all she had said this seemed to the listener the best worth hearing.

The doctor now mounted to the top of the highest pedestal David's admiration could supply. Here was one of the compensations with which life keeps the balances even. Joe had died and left him friendless, and while the ache was still sharp, this stranger and his daughter had come to soothe his pain, perhaps, in the course of time, to conjure it quite away.

Early in the preceding winter the doctor had been forced to decide on the step he had been long contemplating. An attack of congestion of the lungs developed consumption in his weakened const.i.tution. A warm climate and an open-air life were prescribed. And how better combine them than by emigrating to California?

"And so," said the doctor's daughter, "father made up his mind to go and sold out his practice. People thought he was crazy to start on such a trip when he was sick, but he knows more than they do. Besides, it's not going to be such hard work for him. Daddy John, the old man who drives the mules, knows all about this Western country. He was here a long time ago when Indiana and Illinois were wild and full of Indians. He got wounded out here fighting and thought he was going to die, and came back to New York. My father found him there, poor and lonely and sick, and took care of him and cured him. He's been with us ever since, more than twenty years, and he manages everything and takes care of everything. He and father'll tell you I rule them, but that's just teasing. It's really Daddy John who rules."

The mules were just behind them, and she looked back at the old man and called in her clear voice:

"I'm talking about you, Daddy John. I'm telling all about your wickedness."

Daddy John's answer came back, slow and amused:

"Wait till I get the young feller alone and I'll do some talking."

Laughing, she settled herself in her saddle and dropped her voice for David's ear:

"I think Daddy John was quite pleased we missed the New York train. It was a big company, and he couldn't have managed everything the way he can now. But we'll soon catch it up and then"--she lifted her eyebrows and smiled with charming malice at the thought of Daddy John's coming subjugation. "We ought to overtake it in three or four weeks they said in Independence."

Her companion made no answer. The cheerful conversation had suddenly taken a depressing turn. Under the spell of Miss Gillespie's loquacity and black eyes he had quite forgotten that he was only a temporary escort, to be superseded by an entire ox train, of which even now they were in pursuit. David was a dreamer, and while the young woman talked, he had seen them both in diminishing perspective, pa.s.sing sociably across the plains, over the mountains, into the desert, to where California edged with a prismatic gleam the verge of the world.

They were to go riding, and talking on, their acquaintance ripening gradually and delightfully, while the enormous panorama of the continent unrolled behind them. And it might end in three or four weeks! The Emigrant Trail looked overwhelmingly long when he could only see himself and Leff riding over it, and California lost its color and grew as gray as a line of sea fog.

That evening's camp was pitched in a clearing near the road. The woods pressed about them, whispering and curious, thrown out and then blotted as the fires leaped or died. It was the first night's bivouac, and much noise and bustle went to its accomplishment. The young men covertly watched the Gillespie Camp. How would this ornamental party cope with such unfamiliar labors? With its combination of a feminine element which must be helpless by virtue of a rare and dainty fineness and a masculine element which could hardly be otherwise because of ill health, it would seem that all the work must devolve upon the old man.

Nothing, however, was further from the fact. The Gillespies rose to the occasion with the same dauntless buoyancy that they had shown in ever attempting the undertaking, and then blithely defying public opinion with a servant and a cow. The sense of their unfitness which had made the young men uneasy now gave way to secret wonder as the doctor pitched the tent like a backwoodsman, and his daughter showed a skilled acquaintance with campers' biscuit making.

She did it so well, so without hurry and with knowledge, that it was worth while watching her, if David's own cooking could have spared him.

He did find time once to offer her a.s.sistance and that she refused, politely but curtly. With sleeves rolled to the elbow, her hat off, showing a roll of hair on the crown of her head separated by a neat parting from the curls that hung against her cheeks, she was absorbed in the business in hand. Evidently she was one of those persons to whom the matter of the moment is the only matter. When her biscuits were done, puffy and brown, she volunteered a preoccupied explanation:

"I've been learning to do this all winter, and I'm going to do it right."

And even then it was less an excuse for her abruptness than the announcement of a compact with herself, steadfast, almost grim.

After supper they sat by the fire, silent with fatigue, the scent of the men's tobacco on the air, the girl, with her hands clasping her knees, looking into the flames. In the shadows behind the old servant moved about. They could hear him crooning to the mules, and then catch a glimpse of his gnomelike figure bearing blankets from the wagon to the tent. There came a point where his labors seemed ended, but his activity had merely changed its direction. He came forward and said to the girl,

"Missy, your bed's ready. You'd better be going."

She gave a groan and a movement of protest under which was the hopeless acquiescence of the conquered:

"Not yet, Daddy John. I'm so comfortable sitting here."

"There's two thousand miles before you. Mustn't get tired this early.

Come now, get up."

His manner held less of urgence than of quiet command. He was not dictatorial, but he was determined. The girl looked at him, sighed, rose to her knees, and then made a last appeal to her father:

"Father, _do_ take my part. Daddy John's too interfering for words!"

But her father would only laugh at her discomfiture.

"All right," she said as she bent down to kiss him. "It'll be your turn in just about five minutes."

It was an accurate prophecy. The tent flaps had hardly closed on her when Daddy John attacked his employer.

"Goin' now?" he said, sternly.

The doctor knew his fate, and like his daughter offered a spiritless and intimidated resistance.

"Just let me finish this pipe," he pleaded.

Daddy John was inexorable:

"It's no way to get cured settin' round the fire puffin' on a pipe."

"Ten minutes longer?"

"We'll roll out to-morrer at seven."

"Daddy John, go to bed!"

"I got to see you both tucked in for the night before I do. Can't trust either of you."

The doctor, beaten, knocked the ashes out of his pipe and rose with resignation.

"This is the family skeleton," he said to the young men who watched the performance with curiosity. "We're ground under the heel of Daddy John."