The Lost Wagon Part 27

Grandpa Seeley had told him as much as any man could tell another about going to Oregon. But no man could really know unless he tried the journey himself; how could Grandpa Seeley have forecast the rain and the sea of mud? Joe stirred uneasily. He had, in a very real sense, appointed himself the guardian of seven lives and he knew very well that those lives were now in danger. Their supplies were dangerously low and it was still an undetermined distance to Laramie. In that moment Joe wished mightily that they had never come, and he knew that, if he could, he would turn back. Now they might better go on. Laramie was certainly closer than Independence or Kearney and there was nothing for Joe at Kearney. The die was cast. They had made their choice.

The curtain rustled and Emma's hand came through, searching in the dark for her husband. Tenderly, Joe took the proffered hand, and she whispered,

"Joe, it will be all right."

He whispered back, "Yes, darling."

There was silence while their hands remained clasped. Joe thought, with anguish, of all his wife had endured. No part of it had been easy for her, but nothing else was as bad as the mud. It clung to everything, found its way into every part of the wagon, and even into the food.

Normally a tidy housewife, the unconquerable mud revolted Emma's very soul.

Expressing a hope that was nothing more than a hope, he whispered with an effort at certainty, "Things are going to get better soon, Emma."

For answer there was only the comforting pressure of her hand.

Wind rustled the canvas cover, and Joe still stared into darkness. They were only on the first lap of their journey, with a very long way to go.

Certainly, before they ever reached Oregon, there would be more hardship and danger. Joe's hand still in hers, Emma fell asleep.

In the middle of the next morning, the laboring mules finally pulled the wagon onto dry ground. Joe heaved a tremendous sigh of relief, and the mules bobbed happy heads up and down and trotted. Emma turned gleeful, excited eyes on her husband. Back in the wagon, for the first time in a week, Alfred voiced childish glee.

"Is this Oregon?" he asked.

"Not quite, Ally." Joe felt like laughing.

"Let's have us a game," little Joe urged.

Just before they entered the mud, Carlyle had discovered a bed of small round pebbles. They were some sort of quartz, Joe didn't know just what because he had never seen them before, and when held to the light they were translucent. The youngsters had devised a fascinating game wherein, unseen by the rest, one hid a few pebbles. Then all the rest had to guess how many there were, and the one who came nearest held the pebbles next time.

Alfred asked, "How many stones I got?"

"Six," baby Emma guessed.

"Four," little Joe said soberly.

"Five," Carlyle hazarded.

"Nope." Alfred was shaking with suppressed mirth.

"How many do you have?" Barbara asked.

"Not any!"

Alfred burst into laughter and little Joe protested seriously, "That is not the way to play this game!"

Emma looked brightly at Joe and he smiled back. They were still a lost dot on a vast prairie and their situation had not changed materially from last night's. But they were out of the mud. They had met and defeated a slimy, vicious enemy that had done its best to drag them down, and their spirits lifted accordingly.

Emma breathed, "This is wonderful!"

"Like riding on feathers," Joe agreed and he called back to his daughter, "How do you like this, Bobby?"

"Oh, it's grand!" Her voice was gay, but there was a strange undertone in it that Joe could not understand. He looked quizzically at Emma. She lowered her voice.

"Barbara isn't really in the wagon, Joe. She's gone to Oregon ahead of us."

"Oh," he said, only half understanding.

She said softly, "Our little girl has grown up, Joe. But she isn't so grown-up that she can't dream, and I hope she never will be. What were you thinking of when you were her age?"

"You," he said promptly.

She became a little coy. "You hadn't even met me!"

"Just the same I was thinking about you. Doggone it, Emma, I didn't have a very good life before I met you. Oh, I don't mean it that way at all.

I had everything most other people did, but it just seemed that I was lost. There was n.o.body at all I could tell things to, or share with, and the first day I saw you I knew I could never leave."

She said, "Oh, but you _did_ leave, running out of that store like a streak, with the maple syrup jug in your hand!"

They laughed heartily, for the sheer joy of laughing, and back in the wagon the children laughed too. But they had not kept their voices low enough. Barbara had heard, and she knelt staring dreamily out of the open flaps. All behind her was forever behind, and she knew that.

What--and who--would lie ahead? Emma, who knew her daughter, was right.

Barbara's spirit had winged past the slow-moving mules and taken her to Oregon long before the rest would ever get there.

Despite the mud, Tad had not forsworn his announced intention of walking every inch of the way to Oregon. He hadn't had a bad time because of his weight; places where the wagon bogged down, he could skip over. Where the Trail was too muddy, Tad sought the knolls and rises on one side or the other and often these were short cuts. Now, the faithful Mike close beside him, he was waving from a knoll about a hundred yards ahead and his voice carried back.

"Hey, Pa!"

"Yes?"

"Come on! Look!"

"I'm coming! Hang on to your shirt!"

He drove to the foot of the knoll, looked in the direction Tad indicated, and knit his brows in wonder. Three hundred yards farther on, almost squarely in the center of the Trail, was another wagon. It was oddly still and only half real, a ghost that haunted the Trail. Its once taut canvas cover sagged, and the back flaps gaped emptily. Emma turned puzzled eyes on Joe.

"What do you think it is?"

"I don't know. Let's drive down and see."

As he drew nearer he knew that, though doubtless this wagon had once had a driver, it contained no people at all now. Tad, racing toward it, stopped uncertainly and waited while Mike bristled beside him. The youngster had been halted by sight of the oxen that had once drawn this wagon, but that now lay dead in their yokes. Joe stopped the mules, handed the reins to Emma, and walked slowly toward the wagon. His courage restored by his father's presence, Tad kept pace with him. Joe looked at the oxen, dead too long to have any hope of discovering what had killed them. He swung up to look into the wagon and, as he had expected, found it empty.

"What do you think happened?" Tad asked in awed tones.

"I don't know."

"Indians?"

"Could be."

"Shucks!"