The Emigrant Trail Part 20

"And look," came the voice again, "there are the emigrants."

A long column of wagons had crested the summit and was rolling down the slope. They were in single file, hood behind hood, the drivers, bearded as cave men, walking by the oxen. The line moved steadily, without sound or hurry, as if directed by a single intelligence possessed of a single idea. It was not a congeries of separated particles, but a connected whole. As it wound down the face of the hill, it suggested a vast Silurian monster, each wagon top a vertebra, crawling forward with definite purpose.

"That's the way they're coming," said the voice of the strange man.

"Slow but steady, an endless line of them."

"Who?" said Susan, answering him for the first time.

"The white men. They're creeping along out of their country into this, pushing the frontier forward every year, and going on ahead of it with their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scattered and broken, going every way like a lot of gla.s.s beads rolling down the hill. This comes slow, but it's steady and sure as fate."

She thought for a moment, watching the emigrants, and then said:

"It moves like soldiers."

"Conquerors. That's what they are. They're going to roll over everything--crush them out."

"Over the Indians?"

"That's it. Drive 'em away into the cracks of the mountains, wipe them out the way the trappers are wiping out the beaver."

"Cruel!" she said hotly. "I don't believe it."

"Cruel?" he gave her a look of half-contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt. "Maybe so, but why should you blame them for that? Aren't you cruel when you kill an antelope or a deer for supper? They're not doing you any harm, but you just happen to be hungry. Well, those fellers are hungry--land hungry--and they've come for the Indian's land. The whole world's cruel. You know it, but you don't like to think so, so you say it isn't. You're just lying because you're afraid of the truth."

She looked angrily at him and met the gray eyes. In the center of each iris was a dot of pupil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to Susan like the heads of black pins. "That's exactly what he'd say,"

she thought; "he's no better than a savage." What she said was:

"I don't agree with you at all."

"I don't expect you to," he answered, and making an ironical bow turned on his heel and swung off.

The next morning, in the pallor of the dawn, they started, rolling out into a gray country with the keen-edged cold of early day in the air, and Laramie Peak, gold tipped, before them. As the sky brightened and the prospect began to take on warmer hues, they looked ahead toward the profiles of the mountains and thought of the journey to come. At this hour of low vitality it seemed enormous, and they paced forward a silent, lifeless caravan, the hoof beats sounding hollow on the beaten track.

Then from behind them came a sound of singing, a man's voice caroling in the dawn. Both girls wheeled and saw Zavier Leroux ambling after them on his rough-haired pony, the pack horse behind. He waved his hand and shouted across the silence:

"I come to go with you as far as South Pa.s.s," and then he broke out again into his singing. It was the song Courant had sung, and as he heard it he lifted up his voice at the head of the train, and the two strains blending, the old French chanson swept out over the barren land:

"A la claire fontaine!

M'en allant promener J'ai trouve l'eau si belle Que je me suis baigne!"

Susan waved a beckoning hand to the voyageur, then turned to Lucy and said joyously:

"What fun to have Zavier! He'll keep us laughing all the time. Aren't you glad he's coming?"

Lucy gave an unenthusiastic "Yes." After the first glance backward she had bent over her horse smoothing its mane her face suddenly dyed with a flood of red.

CHAPTER II

Everybody was glad Zavier had come. He brought a spirit of good cheer into the party which had begun to feel the pressure of the long march behind them, and the still heavier burden that was to come. His gayety was irrepressible, his high spirits unflagging. When the others rode silent in the lifeless hours of the afternoon or drooped in the midday heats, Zavier, a dust-clouded outline on his s.h.a.ggy pony, lifted up his voice in song. Then the chanted melody of French verses issued from the dust cloud, rising above the rattling of the beaver traps and the creaking of the slow wheels.

He had one especial favorite that he was wont to sing when he rode between the two girls. It recounted the adventures of _trois cavalieres_, and had so many verses that Zavier a.s.sured them neither he nor any other man had ever arrived at the end of them. Should he go to California with them and sing a verse each day, he thought there would still be some left over to give away when he got there. Susan learned the first two stanzas, and Lucy picked up the air and a few words.

When the shadows began to slant and the crisp breath of the mountains came cool on their faces, they sang, first Zavier and Susan, then Lucy joining in in a faint, uncertain treble, and finally from the front of the train the strange man, not turning his head, sitting straight and square, and booming out the burden in his deep baritone:

"Dans mon chemin j'ai recontre Trois cavalieres bien montees, L'on, ton laridon danee L'on, ton laridon dai.

"Trois cavalieres bien montees L'une a cheval, l'autre a pied L'on, ton, laridon danee L'on ton laridon dai."

Zavier furnished another diversion in the monotony of the days, injected into the weary routine, a coloring drop of romance, for, as he himself would have said, he was _diablement epris_ with Lucy. This was regarded as one of the best of Zavier's jokes. He himself laughed at it, and his extravagant compliments and gallantries were well within the pale of the burlesque. Lucy laughed at them, too. The only one that took the matter seriously was Bella. She was not entirely pleased.

"Talk about it's being just a joke," she said to Susan in the bedtime hour of confidences. "You can joke too much about some things.

Zavier's a man just the same as the others, and Lucy's a nice-looking girl when she gets rested up and the freckles go off. But he's an Indian if he does speak French, and make good money with his beaver trapping."

"He's not _all_ Indian," Susan said soothingly. "He's half white.

There are only a few Indian things about him, his dark skin and something high and flat about his cheek bones and the way he turns in his toes when he walks."

"Indian enough," Bella fumed. "And n.o.body knows anything about his father. We're respectable people and don't want a man with no name hanging round. I've no doubt he was born in a lodge or under a pine tree. What right's that kind of man to come ogling after a decent white girl whose father and mother were married in the Presbyterian Church?"

Susan did not take it so much to heart. What was the good when Lucy obviously didn't care? As for Zavier, she felt sorry for him, for those keen observing faculties of hers had told her that the voyageur's raillery hid a real feeling. Poor Zavier was in love. Susan was pensive in the contemplation of his hopeless pa.s.sion. He was to leave the train near South Pa.s.s and go back into the mountains, and there, alone, camp on the streams that drained the Powder River country. In all probability he would never see one of them again. His trapping did not take him West to the great deserts, and he hated the civilization where man became a luxurious animal of many needs. Like the buffalo and the red man he was restricted to the wild lands that sloped away on either side of the continent's mighty spine. His case was sad, and Susan held forth on the subject to Lucy, whom she thought callous and unkind.

"It's terrible to think you'll never see him again," she said, looking for signs of compa.s.sion. "Don't you feel sorry?"

Lucy looked down. She had been complaining to her friend of Zavier's follies of devotion.

"There are lots of other men in the world," she said indifferently.

Susan fired up. If not yet the authorized owner of a man, she felt her responsibilities as a coming proprietor. The woman's pa.s.sion for interference in matters of sentiment was developing in her.

"Lucy, you're the most hard-hearted girl! Poor Zavier, who's going off into the mountains and may be killed by the Indians. Don't you feel any pity for him? And he's in love with you--truly in love. I've watched him and I know."

She could not refrain from letting a hint of superior wisdom, of an advantage over the unengaged Lucy, give solemnity to her tone.

Lucy's face flushed.

"He's half an Indian," she said with an edge on her voice. "Doesn't everyone in the train keep saying that every ten minutes? Do you want me to fall in love with a man like that?"

"Why no, of course not. You couldn't. That's the sad part of it. He seems as much like other men as those trappers in the fort who were all white. Just because he had a Crow mother it seems unjust that he should be so sort of on the outside of everything. But of course you couldn't marry him. n.o.body ever heard of a girl marrying a half-breed."

Lucy bent over the piece of deer meat that she was cutting apart. They were preparing supper at the flaring end of a hot day, when the wagons had crawled through a loose alkaline soil and over myriads of crickets that crushed sickeningly under the wheels. Both girls were tired, their throats parched, their hair as dry as hemp, and Lucy was irritable, her face unsmiling, her movement quick and nervous.

"What's it matter what a man's parents are if he's kind to you?" she said, cutting viciously into the meat. "It's a lot to have some one fill the kettles for you and help you get the firewood, and when you're tired tell you to go back in the wagon and go to sleep. n.o.body does that for me but Zavier."

It was the first time she had shown any appreciation of her swain's attentions. She expressed the normal, feminine point of view that her friend had been looking for, and as soon as she heard it Susan adroitly vaulted to the other side: