The Emigrant Trail Part 30

"Well there are other trains where the men aren't all fools, and the women----"

He stopped. The doctor's eye held him with a warning gleam.

"I don't know what's the matter with that boy," he said afterwards in the evening conference. "I can't get at him."

"Sun mad," Daddy John insisted.

Courant gave a grunt that conveyed disdain of a question of such small import.

David couldn't account for it at all.

Susan said nothing.

At Green River the Oregon Trail broke from the parent road and slanted off to the northwest. Here the Oregon companies mended their wagons and braced their yokes for the long pull across the broken teeth of mountains to Fort Hall, and from there onward to the new country of great rivers and virgin forests. A large train was starting as the doctor's wagons came down the slope. There was some talk, and a little bartering between the two companies, but time was precious, and the head of the Oregon caravan had begun to roll out when the California party were raising their tents on the river bank.

It was a sere and sterile prospect. Drab hills rolled in lazy waves toward the river where they reared themselves into bolder forms, a line of ramparts guarding the precious thread of water. The sleek, greenish current ate at the roots of lofty bluffs, striped by bands of umber and orange, and topped with out-croppings of rock as though a vanished race had crowned them with now crumbling fortresses. At their feet, sucking life from the stream, a fringe of alder and willows decked the sallow landscape with a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of green.

Here the doctor's party camped for the night, rising in the morning to find a new defection in their ranks. Leff had gone. Nailed to the mess chest was a slip of paper on which he had traced a few words announcing his happiness to be rid of them, his general dislike of one and all, and his intention to catch up the departed train and go to the Oregon country. This was just what they wanted, the desired had been accomplished without their intervention. But when they discovered that, beside his own saddle horse, he had taken David's, their gladness suffered a check. It was a bad situation, for it left the young man with but one horse, the faithful Ben. There was nothing for it but to abandon the wagon, and give David the doctor's extra mount for a pack animal.

With silent pangs the student saw his books thrown on the banks of the river while his keg of whisky, sugar and coffee were stored among the Gillespies' effects. Then they started, a much diminished train--one wagon, a girl, and three mounted men.

CHAPTER VII

It was Sunday afternoon, and the doctor and his daughter were sitting by a group of alders on the banks of the little river called Ham's Fork. On the uplands above, the shadows were lengthening, and at intervals a light air caught up swirls of dust and carried them careening away in staggering spirals.

The doctor was tired and lay stretched on the ground. He looked bloodless and wan, the grizzled beard not able to hide the thinness of his face. The healthful vigor he had found on the prairie had left him, each day's march claiming a dole from his h.o.a.rded store of strength. He knew--no one else--that he had never recovered the vitality expended at the time of Bella's illness. The call then had been too strenuous, the depleted reservoir had filled slowly, and now the demands of unremitting toil were draining it of what was left. He said nothing of this, but thought much in his feverish nights, and in the long afternoons when his knees felt weak against the horse's sides.

As the silence of each member of the little train was a veil over secret trouble, his had hidden the darkest, the most sinister.

Susan, sitting beside him, watching him with an anxious eye, noted the languor of his long, dry hands, the network of lines, etched deep on the loose skin of his cheeks. Of late she had been shut in with her own preoccupations, but never too close for the old love and the old habit to force a way through. She had seen a lessening of energy and spirit, asked about it, and received the accustomed answers that came with the quick, brisk cheeriness that now had to be whipped up. She had never seen his dauntless belief in life shaken. Faith and a debonair courage were his message. They were still there, but the effort of the unbroken spirit to maintain them against the body's weakness was suddenly revealed to her and the pathos of it caught at her throat. She leaned forward and pa.s.sed her hand over his hair, her eyes on his face in a long gaze of almost solemn tenderness.

"You're worn out," she said.

"Not a bit of it," he answered stoutly. "You're the most uncomplimentary person I know. I was just thinking what a hardy pioneer I'd become, and that's the way you dash me to the ground."

She looked at the silvery meshes through which her fingers were laced.

"It's quite white and there were lots of brown hairs left when we started."

"That's the Emigrant Trail," he smothered a sigh, and his trouble found words: "It's not for old men, Missy."

"Old!" scornfully; "you're fifty-three. That's only thirty-two years older than I am. When I'm fifty-three you'll be eighty-five. Then we'll begin to talk about your being old."

"My little Susan fifty-three!" He moved his head so that he could command her face and dwell upon its blended bloom of olive and clear rose, "With wrinkles here and here," an indicating finger helped him, "and gray hairs all round here, and thick eyebrows, and--" he dropped the hand and his smile softened to reminiscence, "It was only yesterday you were a baby, a little, fat, crowing thing all creases and dimples.

Your mother and I used to think everything about you so wonderful that we each secretly believed--and we'd tell each other so when n.o.body was round--that there _had_ been other babies in the world, but never before one like ours. I don't know but what I think that yet."

"Silly old doctor-man!" she murmured.

"And now my baby's a woman with all of life before her. From where you are it seems as if it was never going to end, but when you get where I am and begin to look back, you see that it's just a little journey over before you've got used to the road and struck your gait. We ought to have more time. The first half's just learning and the second's where we put the learning into practice. And we're busy over that when we have to go. It's too short."

"Our life's going to be long. Out in California we're going to come into a sort of second childhood, be perennials like those larkspurs I had in the garden at home."

They were silent, thinking of the garden behind the old house in Rochester with walks outlined by sh.e.l.ls and edged by long flower beds.

The girl looked back on it with a detached interest as an unregretted feature of a past existence in which she had once played her part and that was cut from the present by a chasm never to be bridged. The man held it cherishingly as one of many lovely memories that stretched from this river bank in a strange land back through the years, a link in the long chain.

"Wasn't it pretty!" she said dreamily, "with the line of hollyhocks against the red brick wall, and the big, bushy pine tree in the corner.

Everything was bright except that tree."

His eyes narrowed in wistful retrospect:

"It was as if all the shadows in the garden had concentrated there--huddled together in one place so that the rest could be full of color and sunshine. And when Daddy John and I wanted to cut it down you wouldn't let us, cried and stamped, and so, of course, we gave it up. I actually believe you had a sentiment about that tree."

"I suppose I had, though I don't know exactly what you mean by a sentiment. I loved it because I'd once had such a perfect time up there among the branches. The top had been cut off and a ring of boughs was left round the place, and it made the most comfortable seat, almost like a cradle. One day you went to New York and when you came back you brought me a box of candy. Do you remember it--burnt almonds and chocolate drops with a dog painted on the cover? Well, I wanted to get them at their very best, enjoy them as much as I could, so I climbed to the seat in the top of the pine and ate them there. I can remember distinctly how lovely it was. They tasted better than any candies I've ever had before or since, and I leaned back on the boughs, rocking and eating and looking at the clouds and feeling the wind swaying the trunk. I can shut my eyes and feel again the sense of being entirely happy, sort of limp and forgetful and _so_ contented. I don't know whether it was only the candies, or a combination of things that were just right that day and never combined the same way again.

For I tried it often afterwards, with cake and fruit tart and other candies, but it was no good. But I couldn't have the tree cut down, for there was always a hope that I might get the combination right and have that perfectly delightful time once more."

The doctor's laughter echoed between the banks, and hers fell in with it, though she had told her story with the utmost sedateness.

"Was there ever such a materialist?" he chuckled. "It all rose from a box of New York candy, and I thought it was sentiment. Twenty-one years old and the same baby, only not quite so fat."

"Well, it was the truth," she said defensively. "I suppose if I'd left the candy out it would have sounded better."

"Don't leave the candy out. It was the candy and the truth that made it all Susan's."

She picked up a stone and threw it in the river, then as she watched its splash: "Doesn't it seem long ago when we were in Rochester?"

"We left there in April and this is June."

"Yes, a short time in weeks, but some way or other it seems like ages.

When I think of it I feel as if it was at the other side of the world, and I'd grown years and years older since we left. If I go on this way I'll be fully fifty-three when we get to California."

"What's made you feel so old?"

"I don't exactly know. I don't think it's because we've gone over so much s.p.a.ce, but that has something to do with it. It seems as if the change was more in me."

"How have you changed?"

She gathered up the loose stones near her and dropped them from palm to palm, frowning a little in an effort to find words to clothe her vague thought.

"I don't know that either, or I can't express it. I liked things there that I don't care for any more. They were such babyish things and amounted to nothing, but they seemed important then. Now nothing seems important but things that are--the things that would be on a desert island. And in getting to think that way, in getting so far from what you once were, a person seems to squeeze a good many years into a few weeks." She looked sideways at him, the stones dropping from a slanting palm. "Do you understand me?"

He nodded:

"'When I was a child I thought as a child--now I have put away childish things.' Is that it?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Then you wouldn't like to go back to the old life?"