The Emigrant Trail Part 52

The summer marched upon them, with the men doing giant labor on the banks and the women under the pine at work beside their children. The peace of the valley was broken by the influx of the Forty-niners, who stormed its solitudes, and changed the broken trail to a crowded highway echoing with the noises of life. The river yielded up its treasure to their eager hands, fortunes were made, and friendships begun that were to make the history of the new state. These bronzed and bearded men, these strong-thewed women, were waking from her sleep the virgin California.

Sometimes in the crowded hours Susan dropped her work and, with her baby in her arms, walked along the teeming river trail or back into the shadows of the forest. All about her was the stir of a fecund earth, growth, expansion, promise. From beneath the pines she looked up and saw the aspiration of their proud up-springing. At her feet the ground was bright with flower faces completing themselves in the sunshine.

Wherever her glance fell there was a busyness of development, a progression toward fulfillment, a combined, harmonious striving in which each separate particle had its purpose and its meaning. The sh.e.l.l of her old self-engrossment cracked, and the call of a wider life came to her. It pierced clear and arresting through the fairy flutings of "the horns of elfland" that were all she had heretofore heard.

The desire to live as an experiment in happiness, to extract from life all there was for her own enjoying, left her. Slowly she began to see it as a vast concerted enterprise in which she was called to play her part. The days when the world was made for her pleasure were over.

The days had begun when she saw her obligation, not alone to the man and child who were part of her, but out and beyond these to the diminishing circles of existences that had never touched hers. Her love that had met so generous a response, full measure, pressed down and running over, must be paid out without the stipulation of recompense. Her vision widened, dimly descried horizons limitless as the prairies, saw faintly how this unasked giving would transform a gray and narrow world as the desert's sunsets had done.

So gradually the struggling soul came into being and possessed the fragile tissue that had once been a girl and was now a woman.

They left the river on a morning in September, the sacks of dust making the trunk heavy. The old wagon was ready, the mess chest strapped to the back, Julia in her place. Bella and the children were to follow as soon as the rains began, so the parting was not sad. The valley steeped in crystal shadow, the hills dark against the flush of dawn, held Susan's glance for a lingering minute as she thought of the days in the tent under the pine. She looked at her husband and met his eyes in which she saw the same memory. Then the child, rosy with life, leaped in her arms, bending to s.n.a.t.c.h with dimpled hands at its playmates, chuckling baby sounds as they pressed close to give him their kisses.

Daddy John, mounting to his seat, cried:

"There's the sun coming up to wish us G.o.d-speed."

She turned and saw it rising huge and red over the hill's shoulder, and held up her son to see. The great ball caught his eyes and he stared in tranced delight. Then he leaped against the restraint of her arm, kicking on her breast with his heels, stretching a grasping hand toward the crimson ball, a bright and shining toy to play with.

Its light fell red on the three faces--the child's waiting for life to mold its unformed softness, the woman's stamped with the gravity of deep experience, the man's stern with concentrated purpose. They watched in silence till the baby gave a cry, a thin, sweet sound of wondering joy that called them back to it. Again they looked at one another, but this time their eyes held no memories. The thoughts of both reached forward to the coming years, and they saw themselves shaping from this offspring of their lawless pa.s.sion what should be a man, a molder of the new Empire, a builder of the Promised Land.

FINIS