The Emigrant Trail by Geraldine Bonner (most read books TXT) 📕

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 snatched 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 hoarse, 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 passage 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 hell."

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 passionate 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.

"David!" she screamed, but he did not hear, and then louder: "Daddy John, quick, the whip, he's dropped it."

The old man came running round the back of the wagon, quick and eager as a gnome. He snatched up the whip and let the lash curl outward with a hissing rush. It flashed like the flickering dart of a snake's tongue, struck, and the horses sprang forward. It curled again, hung suspended for the fraction of a moment, then licked along the sweating flanks, and horses and mules, bowed in a supreme effort, wrenched the wagon upward. Susan slid from her perch, feeling a sudden apathy, not only as from a tension snapped, but as the result of a backwash of disillusion. David was no longer the proud conqueror, the driver of man and brute. The tide of pride had ebbed.

Later, when the camp was pitched and she was building the fire, he came to offer her some wood which was scarce on this side of the river. He knelt to help her, and, his face close to hers, she said in a low voice:

"Why did you throw the whip down?"

He reddened consciously and looked quickly at her, a look that was apprehensive as if ready to meet an accusation.

"I saw you do it," she said, expecting a denial.

"Yes, I did it," he answered. "I wasn't going to say I didn't."

"Why did you?" she repeated.

"I can't beat a dumb brute when it's doing its best," he said, looking away from her, shy and ashamed.

"But the wagon would have gone down to the bottom of the hill. It was going."

"What would that have mattered? We could have taken some of the things out and carried them up afterwards. When a horse does his best for you, what's the sense of beating the life out of him when the load's too heavy. I can't do that."

"Was that why you threw it down?"

He nodded.

"You'd rather have carried the things up?"

"Yes."

She laid the sticks one on the other without replying and he said with a touch of pleading in his tone:

"You understand that, don't you?"

She answered quickly:

"Oh, of course, perfectly."

But nevertheless she did not quite. Daddy John's action was the one she really did understand, and she even understood why Leff swore so violently.


CHAPTER VIII


It was Sunday again and they lay encamped near the Little Blue. The country was changing, the trees growing thin and scattered and sandy areas were cropping up through the trail. At night they unfolded the maps and holding them to the firelight measured the distance to the valley of the Platte. Once there the first stage of the journey would be over. When they started from Independence the Platte had shone to the eyes of their imaginations as a threadlike streak almost as far away as California. Now they would soon be there. At sunset they stood on eminences and pointed in its direction, let their mental vision conjure up Grand Island and sweep forward to the buffalo-darkened plains and the river sunk in its league-wide bottom, even peered still further and saw Fort Laramie, a faint, white dot against the cloudy peaks of mountains.

The afternoon was hot and the camp drowsed. Susan moving away from it was the one point of animation in the encircling quietude. She was not in spirit with its lethargy, stepping rapidly in a stirring of light skirts, her hat held by one string, fanning back and forth from her hanging hand. Her goal was a spring hidden in a small arroyo that made a twisted crease in the land's level face. It was a little dell in which the beauty they were leaving had taken a last stand, decked the ground with a pied growth of flowers, spread a checkered roof of boughs against the sun. From a shelf on one side the