The Emigrant Trail Part 31

She scattered the stones with an impatient gesture:

"I couldn't. I'd hate it. I wouldn't squeeze back into the same shape. I'd be all cramped and crowded up. You see every day out here I've been growing wider and wider," she stretched her arms to their length, "widening out to fit these huge, enormous places."

"The new life will be wide enough for you. You'll grow like a tree, a beautiful, tall, straight tree that has plenty of room for its branches to spread and plenty of sun and air to nourish it. There'll be no crowding or cramping out there. It's good to know you'll be happy in California. In the beginning I had fears."

She picked up a stone and with its pointed edge drew lines on the dust which seemed to interest her, for she followed them with intent eyes, not answering. He waited for a moment, then said with an undernote of pleading in his voice, "You think you will be happy, dearie?"

"I--I--don't--know," she stammered. "n.o.body can tell. We're not there yet."

"I can tell." He raised himself on his elbow to watch her face. She knew that he expected to see the maiden's bashful happiness upon it, and the difference between his fond imaginings and the actual facts sickened her with an intolerable sense of deception. She could never tell him, never strike out of him his glad conviction of her contentment.

"We're going back to the Golden Age, you and I, and David. We'll live as we want, not the way other people want us to. When we get to California we'll build a house somewhere by a river and we'll plant our seeds and have vines growing over it and a garden in the front, and Daddy John will break Julia's spirit and harness her to the plow. Then when the house gets too small--houses have a way of doing that--I'll build a little cabin by the edge of the river, and you and David will have the house to yourselves where the old, white-headed doctor won't be in the way."

He smiled for the joy of his picture, and she turned her head from him, seeing the prospect through clouded eyes.

"You'll never go out of my house," she said in a low voice.

"Other spirits will come into it and fill it up."

A wish that anything might stop the slow advance to this roseate future choked her. She sat with averted face wrestling with her sick distaste, and heard him say:

"You don't know how happy you're going to be, my little Missy."

She could find no answer, and he went on: "You have everything for it, health and youth and a pure heart and David for your mate."

She had to speak now and said with urgence, trying to encourage herself, since no one else could do it for her,

"But that's all in the future, a long time from now."

"Not so very long. We ought to be in California in five or six weeks."

To have the dreaded reality suddenly brought so close, set at the limit of a few short weeks, grimly waiting at a definite point in the distance, made her repugnance break loose in alarmed words.

"Longer than that," she cried. "The desert's the hardest place, and we'll go slow, very slow, there."

"You sound as if you wanted to go slow," he answered, his smile indulgently quizzical, as completely shut away from her, in his man's ignorance, as though no bond of love and blood held them together.

"No, no, of course not," she faltered. "But I'm not at all sure we'll get through it so easily. I'm making allowance for delays. There are always delays."

"Yes, there may be delays, but we'll hope to be one of the lucky trains and get through on time."

She swallowed dryly, her heart gone down too far to be plucked up by futile contradition [Transcriber's note: contradiction?]. He mused a moment, seeking the best method of broaching a subject that had been growing in his mind for the past week. Frankness seemed the most simple, and he said:

"I've something to suggest to you. I've been thinking of it since we left the Pa.s.s. Bridger is a large post. They say there are trains there from all over the West and people of all sorts, and quite often there are missionaries."

"Missionaries?" in a faint voice.

"Yes, coming in and going out to the tribes of the Northwest. Suppose we found one there when we arrived?"

He stopped, watching her.

"Well?" her eyes slanted sideways in a fixity of attention.

"Would you marry David? Then we could all go on together."

Her breath left her and she turned a frightened face on him.

"Why?" she gasped. "What for?"

He laid his hand on hers and said quietly:

"Because, as you say, the hardest part of the journey is yet to come, and I am--well--not a strong man any more. The trip hasn't done for me what I hoped. If by some mischance--if anything should happen to me--then I'd know you'd be taken care of, protected and watched over by some one who could be trusted, whose right it was to do that."

"Oh, no. Oh, no," she cried in a piercing note of protest. "I couldn't, I couldn't."

She made as if to rise, then sank back, drawn down by his grasping hand. He thought her reluctance natural, a girl's shrinking at the sudden intrusion of marriage into the pretty comedy of courtship.

"Susan, I would like it," he pleaded.

"No," she tried to pull her hand away, as if wishing to draw every particle of self together and shut it all within her own protecting sh.e.l.l.

"Why not?"

"It's--it's--I don't want to be married out here in the wilds. I want to wait and marry as other girls do, and have a real wedding and a house to go to. I should hate it. I couldn't. It's like a squaw.

You oughtn't to ask it."

Her terror lent her an unaccustomed subtlety. She eluded the main issue, seizing on objections that did not betray her, but that were reasonable, what might have been expected by the most unsuspicious of men:

"And as for your being afraid of falling sick in these dreadful places, isn't that all the more reason why I should be free to give all my time and thought to you? If you don't feel so strong, then marrying is the last thing I'd think of doing. I'm going to be with you all the time, closer than I ever was before. No man's going to come between us.

Marry David and push you off into the background when you're not well and want me most--that's perfectly ridiculous."

She meant all she said. It was the truth, but it was the truth reinforced, given a fourfold strength by her own unwillingness. The thought that she had successfully defeated him, pushed the marriage away into an indefinite future, relieved her so that the dread usually evoked by his ill health was swept aside. She turned on him a face, once again bright, all clouds withdrawn, softened into dimpling rea.s.surance.

"What an idea!" she said. "Men have no sense."

"Very well, spoiled girl. I suppose we'll have to put it off till we get to California."

She dropped back full length on the ground, and in the expansion of her relief laid her cheek against the hand that clasped hers.

"And until we get the house built," she cried, beginning to laugh.

"And the garden laid out and planted, I suppose?"

"Of course. And the vines growing over the front porch."

"Why not over the second story? We'll have a second story by that time."

"Over the whole house, up to the chimneys."