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

his aid. He followed her slowly, sore and angry, his eyes on her figure which flitted in advance clean-cut against the pale, enormous sky.

He had just caught up with her when from a hollow near the roadside Leff came into view. He had been after antelope and carried his rifle and a hunting knife in his belt. During the chase he had come upon a deserted Pawnee settlement in a depression of the prairie. Susan was instantly interested and wanted to see it and David stood by, listening in sulky silence while Leff pointed out the way. The sun was sinking and they faced it, the young man's indicating finger moving back and forth across the vagaries of the route. The prairie was cut by long undulations, naked of verdure, save a spot in the foreground where, beside a round greenish pool, a single tree lifted thinly clad boughs. Something of bleakness had crept into the prospect, its gay greenness was giving place to an austere pallor of tint, a dry economy of vegetation. The summits of the swells were bare, the streams shrunk in sandy channels. It was like a face from which youth is withdrawing.

The Indian encampment lay in a hollow, the small wattled huts gathered on both sides of a runlet that oozed from the slope and slipped between a line of stepping stones. The hollow was deep for the level country, the grassed sides sweeping abruptly to the higher reaches above. They walked through it, examining the neatly made huts and speculating on the length of time the Indians had left. David remembered that the day before, the trail had been crossed by the tracks of a village in transit, long lines graven in the dust by the dragging poles of the _travaux_. He felt uneasy. The Indians might not be far and they themselves were at least a mile from the camp, and but one of them armed. The others laughed and Susan brought the blood into his face by asking him if he was afraid.

He turned from her, frankly angry and then stood rigid with fixed glance. On the summit of the opposite slope, black against the yellow west, were a group of mounted figures. They were massed together in a solid darkness, but the outlines of the heads were clear, heads across which bristled an upright crest of hair like the comb of a rooster.

For a long, silent moment the two parties remained immovable, eying each other across the hollow. Then David edged closer to the girl. He felt his heart thumping, but his first throttling grip of fear loosened as his mind realized their helplessness. Leff was the only one with arms. They must get in front of Susan and tell her to run and the camp was a mile off! He felt for her hand and heard her whisper:

"Indians--there are six of them."

As she spoke the opposite group broke and figures detached themselves. Three, hunched in shapeless sack-forms, were squaws. They made no movement, resting immobile as statues, the sunset shining between the legs of their ponies. The men spoke together, their heads turning from the trio below to one another. David gripped the hand he held and leaned forward to ask Leff for his knife.

"Don't be frightened," he said to Susan. "It's all right."

"I'm not frightened," she answered quietly.

"Your knife," he said to Leff and then stopped, staring. Leff very slowly, step pressing stealthily behind step, was creeping backward up the slope. His face was chalk white, his eyes fixed on the Indians. In his hand he held his rifle ready, and the long knife gleamed in his belt. For a moment David had no voice wherewith to arrest him, but Susan had.

"Where are you going?" she said loudly.

It stopped him like a blow. His terrified eyes shifted to her face.

"I wasn't going," he faltered.

"Come back," she said. "You have the rifle and the knife."

He wavered, his loosened lips shaking.

"Back here to us," she commanded, "and give David the rifle."

He crept downward to them, his glance always on the Indians. They had begun to move forward, leaving the squaws on the ridge. Their approach was prowlingly sinister, the ponies stepping gingerly down the slope, the snapping of twigs beneath their hoofs clear in the waiting silence. As they dipped below the blazing sunset the rider's figures developed in detail, their bodies bare and bronzed in the subdued light. Each face, held high on a craning neck, was daubed with vermilion, the high crest of hair bristling across the shaven crowns. Grimly impassive they came nearer, not speaking nor moving their eyes from the three whites. One of them, a young man, naked save for a breech clout and moccasins, was in the lead. As he approached David saw that his eyelids were painted scarlet and that a spot of silver on his breast was a medal hanging from a leathern thong.

At the bottom of the slope they reined up, standing in a group, with lifted heads staring. The trio opposite stared as fixedly. Behind Susan's back Leff had passed David the rifle. He held it in one hand, Susan by the other. He was conscious of her rigidity and also of her fearlessness. The hand he held was firm. Once, breathing a phrase of encouragement, he met her eyes, steady and unafraid. All his own fear had passed. The sense of danger was thrillingly acute, but he felt it only in its relation to her. Dropping her hand he stepped a pace forward and said loudly:

"How!"

The Indian with the medal answered him, a deep, gutteral note.

"Pawnee?" David asked.

The same man replied with a word that none of them understood.

"My camp is just here," said David, with a backward jerk of his head. "There are many men there."

There was no response to this and he stepped back and said to Susan:

"Go slowly up the hill backward and keep your eyes on them. Don't look afraid."

She immediately began to retreat with slow, short steps. Leff, gasping with fear, moved with her, his speed accelerating with each moment. David a few paces in advance followed them. The Indians watched in a tranced intentness of observation. At the top of the slope the three squaws sat as motionless as carven images. The silence was profound.

Into it, dropping through it like a plummet through space, came the report of a rifle. It was distant but clear, and as if the bullet had struck a taut string and severed it, it cut the tension sharp and life flowed back. A movement, like a resumed quiver of vitality, stirred the bronze stillness of the squaws. The Indians spoke together--a low murmur. David thought he saw indecision in their colloquy, then decision.

"They're going," he heard Susan say a little hoarse.

"Oh, God, they're going!" Leff gasped, as one reprieved of the death sentence.

Suddenly they wheeled, and a rush of wild figures, galloped up the slope. The group of squaws broke and fled with them. The light struck the bare backs, and sent splinters from the gun barrels and the noise of breaking bushes was loud under the ponies' feet.

Once again on the road David and Susan stood looking at one another. Each was pale and short of breath, and it was difficult for the young girl to force her stiffened lips into a smile. The sunset struck with fierce brilliancy across the endless plain, and against it, the Indians bending low, fled in a streak of broken color. In the other direction Leff's running figure sped toward the camp. From the distance a rifle shot again sundered the quiet. After silence had reclosed over the rift a puff of smoke rose in the air. They knew now it was Daddy John, fearing they had lost the way, showing them the location of the camp.

Spontaneously, without words, they joined hands and started to where the trail of smoke still hung, dissolving to a thread. The fleeing figure of Leff brought no comments to their lips. They did not think about him, his cowardice was as unimportant to them in their mutual engrossment as his body was to the indifferent self-sufficiency of the landscape. They knew he was hastening that he might be first in the camp to tell his own story and set himself right with the others before they came. They did not care. They did not even laugh at it. They would do that later when they had returned to the plane where life had regained its familiar aspect.

Silently, hand in hand, they walked between the low bushes and across the whitened patches of sandy soil. When the smoke was gone the pool with the lone tree guided them, the surface now covered with a glaze of gold. A deep content lay upon them. The shared peril had torn away a veil that hung between them and through which they had been dodging to catch glimpses of one another. Susan's pride in her ascendency was gone. She walked docilely beside the man who, in the great moment, had not failed. She was subdued, not by the recent peril, but by the fact that the slave had shown himself the master. David's chance had come, but the moment was too completely beautiful, the sudden sense of understanding too lovely for him to break it with words. He wanted to savor it, to take joy of its delicate sweetness. It was his voluptuousness to delight in it, not brush its bloom away with a lover's avowal. He was the idealist, moving in an unexpectedly realized dream, too exquisite for words to intrude upon. So they walked onward, looking across the long land, hand clasped in hand.


END OF PART I


PART II


The River

CHAPTER I


The Emigrant Trail struck the Platte at Grand Island. From the bluffs that walled in the river valley the pioneers could look down on the great waterway, a wide, thin current, hardly more than a glistening veil, stretched over the sandy bottom. Sometimes the veil was split by islands, its transparent tissue passing between them in sparkling strands as if it were sewn with silver threads. These separated streams slipped along so quietly, so without noise or hurry, they seemed to share in the large unconcern of the landscape. It was a still, unpeopled, spacious landscape, where there was no work and no time and the morning and the evening made the day.

Many years ago the Frenchmen had given the river its name, Platte, because of its lack of depths. There were places where a man could walk across it and not be wet above the middle; and, to make up for this, there were quicksands stirring beneath it where the same man would sink in above his waist, above his shoulders, above his head. The islands that broke its languid currents were close grown with small trees, riding low in the water like little ships freighted deep with greenery. Toward evening, looking to the West, with the dazzle of the sun on the