The Emigrant Trail Part 6

CHAPTER VII

The Vermilion was swollen. With a bluff on one side and a wide bottom on the other it ran a prosperous, busy stream, brown and ripple-ridged.

The trail lay like a line of tape along the high land, then down the slope, and across the bottom to the river. Here it seemed to slip under the current and come up on the other side where it climbed a steep bank, and thence went on, thin and pale, rising and dropping to the ridges till the tape became a thread.

They had been waiting a day for the water to fall. Camped in the bottom under a scattering of trees with the animals grazing on the juicy river gra.s.s and the song of the stream in their ears, it had been a welcome break in the monotony of the march. There was always a choice of occupation in these breathing spells. On the first afternoon everybody had sat on the gra.s.s at the tent doors mending. To-day the men had revolted and wandered off but Susan continued industriously intent over patches and darns. She sat on a log, her spools and scissors beside her, billows of homespun and calico about her feet.

As she sewed she sung in a low undervoice, not looking up. Beyond her in the shade Daddy John mended a piece of harness. Daddy John was not a garrulous person and when she paused in her sewing to speak to him, he answered with a monosyllable. It was one of the old man's self-appointed duties to watch over her when the others were absent.

If he did not talk much to his "Missy" he kept a vigilant eye upon her, and to-day he squatted in the shade beside her because the doctor and David had gone after antelope and Leff was off somewhere on an excursion of his own.

Susan, sewing, her face grave above her work, was not as pretty as Susan smiling. She drew her eyebrows, thick and black, low over her eyes with her habitual concentration in the occupation of the moment, and her lips, pressed together, pouted, but not the disarming baby pout which, when she was angry, made one forget the sullenness of her brows.

Her looks however, were of that fortunate kind which lose nothing from the open air and large backgrounds. Dress added but little to such attractions as she had. Fineness and elegance were not hers, but her healthy, ripe brownness fitted into this sylvan setting where the city beauty would have soon become a pale and draggled thing.

The robust blood of her French Canadian forebears was quickening to the call of the trail. Was it the spirit of her adventurous ancestors that made her feel a kinship with the wild, an indifference to its privations, a joy in its rude liberty? She was thinner, but stronger and more vigorous than when the train had started. She talked less and yet her whole being seemed more vibrantly alive, her glance to have gained the gleaming quietness of those whose eyes scan vague horizons.

She who had been heavy on her feet now stepped with a light noiselessness, and her body showed its full woman's outlines straightened and lengthened to the litheness of a boy. Her father noticed that the Gallic strain in her seemed to be crowding out the other. In Rochester, under city roofs, she had been at least half his.

On the trail, with the arch of the sky above and the illimitable earth around her, she was throwing back to her mother's people.

Susan herself had no interest in these atavistic developments. She was a healthy, uncomplicated, young animal, and she was enjoying herself as she had never done before. Behind her the life of Rochester stretched in a tranquil perspective of dull and colorless routine. Nothing had ever happened. From her seventh year her father and Daddy John had brought her up, made her the pet and plaything of their lonely lives, rejoiced in her, wondered at her, delighted in the imperious ways she had learned from their spoiling. There had been teachers to educate her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much.

Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs in some of the fine restaurants in New York City.

But what were the sober pleasures of housekeeping and cooking beside the rough, deep-living exhilaration of gypsy life on the plains! She looked back pityingly at those days of stagnant peace, compared the entertainment to be extracted from embroidering a petticoat frill to the exultant joy of a ride in the morning over the green swells. Who would sip tea in the close curtained primness of the parlor when they could crouch by the camp fire and eat a corn cake baked on the ashes or drink brown coffee from a tin cup? And her buffalo robe on the ground, the blanket tucked round her shoulder, the rustling of furtive animal life in the gra.s.s outside the tent wall--was there any comparison between its comfort and that of her narrow white bed at home, between the clean sheets of which she had snuggled so luxuriously?

There were other matters of charm and interest in the wilderness, matters that Susan did not speak about--hardly admitted to herself, for she was a modest maid. She had never yet had a lover; no man had ever kissed her or held her hand longer than a cool, impersonal respect dictated. In Rochester no one had turned to look at the doctor's daughter as she walked by, for, in truth, there were many girls much prettier and more piquant than Susan Gillespie. But, nevertheless, she had had her dreams about the lover that some day was to come and carry her off under a wreath of orange blossoms and a white veil. She did not aspire to a struggling h.o.a.rd of suitors, but she thought it would be only fair and entirely within the realm of the possible if she had two; most girls had two.

Now she felt the secret elation that follows on the dream realized.

She did not tell herself that David and Leff were in love with her.

She would have regarded all speculations on such a sacred subject as low and unmaidenly. But the consciousness of it permeated her being with a gratified sense of her worth as a woman. It made her feel her value. Like all girls of her primitive kind she estimated herself not by her own measure, but by the measure of a man's love for her. Now that men admired her she felt that she was taking her place as a unit of importance. Her sense of achievement in this advent of the desiring male was not alone pleased vanity, it went back through the ages to the time when woman won her food and clothing, her right to exist, through the power of her s.e.x, when she whose attraction was strongest had the best corner by the fire, the choicest t.i.tbit from the hunt, and the strongest man to fight off rivals and keep her for himself.

Her perceptions, never before exercised on these subjects, were singularly keen. Neither of the young men had spoken a word of love to her, yet she intuitively knew that they were both under her spell. The young girl so stupid at her books, who could never learn arithmetic and found history a bore, had a deeper intelligence in the reading of the human heart than anyone of the party. More than the doctor who was a man of education, more than David who thought so much and loved to read, more than Leff who, if his brain was not sharp, might be supposed to have acc.u.mulated some slight store of experience, more than Daddy John who was old and had the h.o.a.r of worldly knowledge upon him.

Compared to her they were as novices to a nun who has made an excursion into the world and taken a bite from the apple Eve threw away.

She had no especial liking for Leff. It amused her to torment him, to look at him with an artless, inquiring stare when he was overwhelmed by confusion and did not know what to say. When she felt that he had endured sufficiently she would become merciful, drop her eyes, and end what was to her an encounter that added a new zest to her sense of growing power.

With David it was different. Here, too, she felt her mastery, but the slave was of another fiber. He acknowledged her rule, but he was neither clumsy nor dumb before her. She respected his intelligence and felt a secret jealousy of it, as of a part of him which must always be beyond her influence. His devotion was a very dear and gracious thing and she was proud that he should care for her. Love had not awakened in her, but sometimes when she was with him, her admiration softened to a warm, invading gentleness, a sense of weakness glad of itself, happy to acknowledge his greater strength. Had David's intuitions been as true as hers he would have known when these moments came and spoken the words. But on such matters he had no intuitions, was a mere, unenlightened male trying to win a woman by standing at a distance and kneeling in timid worship.

Now sitting, sewing on the log, Susan heard a step on the gravel, and without looking up gave it a moment's attention and knew it was Leff's.

She began to sing softly, with an air of abstraction. The steps drew near her, she noted that they lagged as they approached, finally stopped. She gave her work a last, lingering glance and raised her eyes slowly as if politeness warred with disinclination, Leff was standing before her, scowling at her as at an object of especial enmity. He carried a small tin pail full of wild strawberries. She saw it at once, but forebore looking at it, keeping her eyes on his face, up which the red color ran.

"Oh, Leff," she said with careless amiability, "so you've got back."

Leff grunted an agreeing monosyllable and moved the strawberries to a position where they intruded into the conversation like a punctuation mark in the middle of a sentence. Her glance dropped to the pail, and she looked at it saying nothing, amused to thus tease him and covertly note his hopeless and impotent writhings.

He thrust the pail almost against her knee and she was forced to say:

"What fine strawberries, a whole pail full. Can I have one?"

He nodded and she made a careful choice, giving the pail a little shake to stir its contents. Leff glared at the top of her head where her hair was twisted into a rough knot.

"Thank you," she said. "I've found a beauty. You must have been all afternoon getting so many," and she put the strawberry in her mouth and picked up her sewing as though that ended the matter.

Leff stood shifting from foot to foot, hoping that she might extend a helping hand.

"The river's falling," he said at length. "It's gone down two feet.

We can cross this evening."

"Then I must hurry and finish my mending."

She evidently was not going to extend so much as the tip of a finger.

In his bashful misery his mind worked suddenly and unexpectedly.

"I've got to go and get the horses," he said, and, setting the pail on the log beside her, turned and ran.

But Susan was prepared for this move. It was what she expected.

"Oh, Leff," she called, lazily. "Come back, you've forgotten your strawberries."

And he had to come back, furious and helpless, he had to come back. He had not courage for a word, did not dare even to meet her gaze lifted mildly to his. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the pail and lurched off and Susan returned to her sewing, smiling to herself.

"He wanted you to take the berries," said Daddy John, who had been watching.

"Did he?" she queried with the raised brows of innocent surprise. "Why didn't he say so?"

"Too bashful!"

"He couldn't expect me to take them unless he offered them."

"I should think you'd have guessed it."

She laughed at this, dropping her sewing and looking at the old man with eyes almost shut.

"Oh, Daddy John," she gurgled. "How clever you are!"

An hour later they began the crossing. The ford of the Vermilion was one of the most difficult between the Kaw and the Platte Valley. After threading the swift, brown current, the trail zigzagged up a clay bank, channeled into deep ruts by the spring's fleet of prairie schooners.

It would be a hard pull to get the doctor's wagon up and David rode over with Bess and Ben to double up with the mules. It was late afternoon and the bottom lay below the sunshine steeped in a still transparent light, where every tint had its own pure value. The air was growing cool after a noon of blistering heat and from an unseen backwater frogs had already begun a hoa.r.s.e, tentative chanting.

The big wagon had already crossed when David on Bess, with Ben at the end of a trail rope, started into the stream. Susan watched him go, his tall, high-shouldered figure astride the mare's broad back, one arm flung outward with the rope dipping to the current. As the water rose round his feet, he gave a wild, jubilant shout and went forward, plowing deeper with every step, his cries swelling over the river's low song.

Susan, left on the near bank to wait till the wagons were drawn up, lifted herself into the crotch of a cottonwood tree. The pastoral simplicity of the scene, the men and animals moving through the silver-threaded water with the wagons waiting and after the work the camp to be pitched, exhilarated her with a conviction of true living, of existence flowing naturally as the stream. And for the moment David seemed the great figure in hers. With a thrill at her heart she watched him receding through the open wash of air and water, shouting in the jubilance of his manhood. The mischievous pleasure of her coquetries was forgotten, and in a rush of glad confidence she felt a woman's pride in him. This was the way she should see the man who was to win her, not in stuffy rooms, not dressed in stiff, ungainly clothes, not saying unmeaning things to fill the time. This tale of laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this pa.s.sage across a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering cry that flew across the river to David like the call of an animal to its mate.

She watched them yoking on Bess and Ben and men and animals bracing their energies for the start. David drove the horses, walking beside them, the reins held loose in hands that made upward, urging gestures as the team breasted the ascent. It was a savage pull. The valiant little mules bent their necks, the horses straining, iron muscled, hoofs grinding down to the solid clay. The first charge carried them half way up, then there was a moment of slackened effort, a relaxing, recuperative breath, and the wagon came to a standstill. Leff ran for the back, shouting a warning. The branch he thrust under the wheel was ground to splinters and the animals grew rigid in their effort to resist the backward drag.

Leff gripped the wheel, cursing, his hands knotted round the spokes, his back taut and muscle-ridged under the thin shirt. The cracked voice of Daddy John came from beyond the canvas hood and David's urgent cries filled the air. The mules, necks outstretched, almost squatting in the agony of their endeavor, held their ground, but could do no more. Bess and Ben began to plunge in a welter of slapping harness as the wheels ground slowly downward.

Susan watched, her neck craned, her eyes staring. Her sentimental thoughts had vanished. She was one with the struggling men and beasts, lending her vigor to theirs. Her eyes were on David, waiting to see him dominate them like a general carrying his troops to victory. She could see him, arms outstretched, haranguing his horses as if they were human beings, but not using the whip. A burst of astonishing profanity came from Leff and she heard him cry:

"Lay it on to 'em, David. What's the matter with you? Beat 'em like h.e.l.l."

The mule drivers used a long-lashed whip which could raise a welt on the thickest hide. David flung the lash afar and brought it down on Ben's back. The horse leaped as if he had been burned, jerking ahead of his mate, and rearing in a madness of unaccustomed pain. With a pa.s.sionate gesture David threw the whip down.

Susan saw that it was not accidental. She gave a sound of angry astonishment and stood up in the crotch of the tree.