The Emigrant Trail Part 3

Then he thrust his hand through the old servant's arm and they walked toward the wagon, their heads together, laughing like a pair of boys.

A few minutes later the camp had sunk to silence. The doctor was stowed away in the wagon and Miss Gillespie had drawn the tent flaps round the mystery of her retirement. David and Leff, too tired to pitch theirs, were dropping to sleep by the fire, when the girl's voice, low, but penetrating, roused them.

"Daddy John," it hissed in the tone children employ in their games of hide-and-seek, "Daddy John, are you awake?"

The old man, who had been stretched before the fire, rose to a sitting posture, wakeful and alert.

"Yes, Missy, what's the matter? Can't you sleep?"

"It's not that, but it's so hard to fix anything. There's no light."

Here it became evident to the watchers that Miss Gillespie's head was thrust out through the tent opening, the canvas held together below her chin. Against the pale background, it was like the vision of a decapitated head hung on a white wall.

"What is it you want to fix?" queried the old man.

"My hair," she hissed back. "I want to put it up in papers, and I can't see."

Then the secret of Daddy John's power was revealed. He who had so remorselessly driven her to bed now showed no surprise or disapprobation at her frivolity. It was as if her wish to beautify herself received his recognition as an accepted vagary of human nature.

"Just wait a minute," he said, scrambling out of his blanket, "and I'll get you a light."

The young men could not but look on all agape with curiosity to see what the resourceful old man intended getting. Could the elaborately complete Gillespie outfit include candles? Daddy John soon ended their uncertainty. He drew from the fire a thick brand, brilliantly aflame, and carried it to the tent. Miss Gillespie's immovable head eyed it with some uneasiness.

"I've nothing to put it in," she objected, "and I can't hold it while I'm doing up my hair."

"I will," said the old man. "Get in the tent now and get your papers ready."

The head withdrew, its retirement to be immediately followed by her voice slightly m.u.f.fled by the intervening canvas:

"Now I'm ready."

Daddy John cautiously parted the opening, inserted the torch, and stood outside, the canvas flaps carefully closed round his hand. With the intrusion of the flaming brand the tent suddenly became a rosy transparency. The young' girl's figure moved in the midst of the glow, a shape of nebulous darkness, its outlines lost in the mist of enfolding draperies.

Leff, softly lifting himself on his elbows, gazed fascinated upon this discreet vision. Then looking at David he saw that he had turned over and was lying with his face on his arms. Leff leaned from the blankets and kicked him, a gentle but meaning kick on the leg.

To his surprise David lifted a wakeful face, the brow furrowed with an angry frown.

"Can't you go to sleep," he muttered crossly. "Let that girl curl her hair, and go to sleep like a man."

He dropped his face once more on his arms. Leff felt unjustly snubbed, but that did not prevent him from watching the faintly defined aura of shadow which he knew to be the dark young woman he was too shy to look at when he met her face to face. He continued watching till the brand died down to a spark and Daddy John withdrew it and went back to his fire.

CHAPTER IV

In their division of labor David and Leff had decided that one was to drive the wagon in the morning, the other in the afternoon. This morning it was David's turn, and as he "rolled out" at the head of the column he wondered if Leff would now ride beside Miss Gillespie and lend attentive ear to her family chronicles. But Leff was evidently not for dallying by the side of beauty. He galloped off alone, vanishing through the thin mists that hung like a fairy's draperies among the trees. The Gillespies rode at the end of the train. Even if he could not see them David felt their nearness, and it added to the contentment that always came upon him from a fair prospect lying under a smiling sky. At harmony with the moment and the larger life outside it, he leaned back against the canvas hood and let a dreamy gaze roam over the serene and opulent landscape.

Nature had always soothed and uplifted him, been like an opiate to anger or pain. As a boy his troubles had lost their sting in the consoling largeness of the open, under the shade of trees, within sight of the bowing wheat fields with the wind making patterns on the seeded grain. Now his thoughts, drifting aimless as thistle fluff, went back to those childish days of country freedom, when he had spent his vacations at his uncle's farm. He used to go with his widowed mother, a forlorn, soured woman who rarely smiled. He remembered his irritated wonder as she sat complaining in the ox cart, while he sent his eager glance ahead over the sprouting acres to where the log farmhouse--the haven of fulfilled dreams--stretched in its squat ugliness. He could feel again the inward lift, the flying out of his spirit in a rush of welcoming ecstasy, as he saw the woods hanging misty on the horizon and the clay bluffs, below which the slow, quiet river uncoiled its yellow length.

The days at the farm had been the happiest of his life--wonderful days of fishing and swimming, of sitting in gnarled tree boughs so still the nesting birds lost their fear and came back to their eggs. For hours he had lain in patches of shade watching the cloud shadows on the fields, and the great up-pilings when storms were coming, rising black-bosomed against the blue. There had been some dark moments to throw out these brighter ones--when chickens were killed and he had tried to stand by and look swaggeringly unconcerned as a boy should, while he sickened internally and shut his lips over pleadings for mercy. And there was an awful day when pigs were slaughtered, and no one knew that he stole away to the elder thickets by the river, burrowed deep into them, and stopped his ears against the shrill, agonized cries. He knew such weakness was shameful and hid it with a child's subtlety. At supper he told skillful lies to account for his pale cheeks and lost appet.i.te.

His uncle, a kindly generous man, without children of his own, had been fond of him and sympathized with his wish for an education. It was he who had made it possible for the boy to go to a good school at Springfield and afterwards to study law. How hard he had worked in those school years, and what realms of wonder had been opened to him through books, the first books he had known, reverently handled, pa.s.sionately read, that led him into unknown worlds, pointed the way to ideals that could be realized! With the law books he was not in so good an accord. But it was his chosen profession, and he approached it with zeal and high enthusiasm, a young apostle who would sell his services only for the right.

Now he smiled, looking back at his disillusion. The young apostle was jostled out of sight in the bustle of the growing town. There was no room in it for idealists who were diffident and sensitive and stood on the outside of its self-absorbed activity bewildered by the noises of life. The stream of events was very different from the pages of books.

David saw men and women struggling toward strange goals, fighting for soiled and sordid prizes, and felt as he had done on the farm when the pigs were killed. And as he had fled from that ugly scene to the solacing quiet of Nature, he turned from the tumult of the little town to the West, upon whose edge he stood.

It called him like a voice in the night. The spell of its borderless solitudes, its vast horizons, its benign silences, grew stronger as he felt himself powerless and baffled among the fighting energies of men.

He dreamed of a life there, moving in un.o.bstructed harmony. A man could begin in a fresh, clean world, and be what he wanted, be a young apostle in his own way. His boy friend who had gone to Oregon fired his imagination with stories of Marcus Whitman and his brother missionaries. David did not want to be a missionary, but he wanted, with a young man's solemn seriousness, to make his life of profit to mankind, to do the great thing without self-interest. So he had yearned and chafed while he read law and waited for clients and been as a man should to his mother, until in the summer of 1847 both his mother and his uncle had died, the latter leaving him a little fortune of four thousand dollars. Then the Emigrant Trail lay straight before him, stretching to California.

The reins lay loose on the backs of Bess and Ben and the driver's gaze was fixed on the line of trees that marked the course of an unseen river. The dream was realized, he was on the trail. He lifted his eyes to the sky where ma.s.sed clouds slowly sailed and birds flew, shaking notes of song down upon him. Joe was dead, but the world was still beautiful, with the sun on the leaves and the wind on the gra.s.s, with the kindliness of honest men and the gracious presence of women.

Dr. Gillespie was the first dweller in that unknown world east of the Alleghenies whom David had met. For this reason alone it would be a privilege to travel with him. How great the privilege was, the young man did not know till he rode by the doctor's side that afternoon and they talked together on the burning questions of the day; or the doctor talked and David hungrily listened to the voice of education and experience.

The war with Mexico was one of the first subjects. The doctor regarded it as a discreditable performance, unworthy a great and generous nation. The Mormon question followed, and on this he had much curious information. Living in the interior of New York State, he had heard Joseph Smith's history from its beginning, when he posed as "a money digger" and a seer who could read the future through "a peek stone."

The recent polygamous teachings of the prophet were a matter to mention with lowered voice. Miss Gillespie, riding on the other side, was not supposed to hear, and certainly appeared to take no interest in Mexico, or Texas, or Joseph Smith and his unholy doctrines.

She made no attempt to enter into the conversation, and it seemed to David, who now and then stole a shy look at her to see if she was impressed by his intelligent comments, that she did not listen. Once or twice, when the talk was at its acutest point of interest, she struck her horse and left them, dashing on ahead at a gallop. At another time she dropped behind, and his ear, trained in her direction, heard her voice in alternation with Daddy John's. When she joined them after this withdrawal she was bright eyed and excited.

"Father," she called as she came up at a sharp trot, "Daddy John says the prairie's not far beyond. He says we'll see it soon--the prairie that I've been thinking of all winter!"

Her enthusiasm leaped to David and he forgot the Mexican boundaries and the polygamous Mormons, and felt like a discoverer on the prow of a ship whose keel cuts unknown seas. For the prairie was still a word of wonder. It called up visions of huge unpeopled s.p.a.ces, of the flare of far flung sunsets, of the plain blackening with the buffalo, of the smoke wreath rising from the painted tepee, and the Indian, bronzed and splendid, beneath his feathered crest.

"It's there," she cried, pointing with her whip. "I can't wait. I'm going on."

David longed to go with her, but the doctor was deep in the extension of slavery and of all the subjects this burned deepest. The prairie was interesting but not when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was on the carpet. Watching the girl's receding shape, David listened respectfully and heard of the dangers and difficulties that were sure to follow on the acquisition of the great strip of Mexican territory.

All afternoon they had been pa.s.sing through woods, the remnant of that mighty forest which had once stretched from the Missouri to the Alleghenies. Now its compact growth had become scattered and the sky, flaming toward sunset, shone between the tree trunks. The road ascended a slight hill and at the top of this Miss Gillespie appeared and beckoned to them. As they drew near she turned and made a sweeping gesture toward the prospect. The open prairie lay before them.

No one spoke. In mute wonderment they gazed at a country that was like a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or gathered in cl.u.s.ters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other pools. They shone, a line of glistening disks, imbedded in the green.

s.p.a.ce that seemed to stretch to the edges of the world, the verdure of Eden, the silence of the unpolluted, unconquered earth were here.

So must it have looked when the beaked Viking ships nosed along the fretted sh.o.r.es of Rhode Island, when Columbus took the sea in his high-p.o.o.ped caravals, when the Pilgrims saw the rocks and naked boughs of the New England coast. So it had been for centuries, roamed by wild men who had perished from its face and left no trace, their habitation as a shadow in the sun, their work as dew upon the gra.s.s, their lives as the lives of the mayfly against its immemorial antiquity.

The young man felt his spirit mount in a rush of exaltation like a prayer. Some fine and exquisite thing in himself leaped out in wild response. The vision and the dream were for a moment his. And in that moment life, all possible, all perfect, stretched before him, to end in a triumphant glory like the sunset.

The doctor took off his hat.

"The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d. All the earth doth magnify his name," he said in a low voice.

CHAPTER V

A broken line of moving dots, the little company trailed a slow way across this ocean of green. Nothing on its face was more insignificant than they. The birds in the trees and the bees in the flowers had a more important place in its economy. One afternoon David riding in the rear crested a ridge and saw them a mile in advance, the road stretching before and behind them in a curving thread. The tops of the wagons were like the backs of creeping insects, the mounted figures, specks of life that raised a slight tarnish of dust on the golden clearness. He wondered at their lack of consequence, unregarded particles of matter toiling across the face of the world.

This was what they suggested viewed largely from the distance. Close at hand--one of them--and it was a very different matter. They enjoyed it. If they were losing their significance as man in the aggregate, the tamer, and master, they were gaining a new importance as distinct and separate units. Convention no longer pressed on them. What law there was they carried with them, bore it before them into the wilderness like the Ark of the Covenant. But n.o.body wanted to be unlawful. There was no temptation to be so. Envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness had been left behind in the cities. They were a very cheerful company, suffering a little from fatigue, and with now and then a faint brush of bad temper to put leaven into the dough.