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

mean. If you're trying to say he's not got a big mind you're all wrong. He knows more than anybody I ever met except father. He's read hundreds and hundreds of books."

"That's it--too many books. Books is good enough but they ain't the right sort 'er meat for a feller that's got to hit out for himself in a new country. They're all right in the city where you got the butcher and the police and a kerosene lamp to read 'em by. David 'ud be a fine boy in the town just as his books is suitable in the town. But this ain't the town. And the men that are the right kind out here ain't particularly set on books. I'd 'a' chose a harder feller for you, Missy, that could have stood up to anything and didn't have no soft feelings to hamper him."

"Rubbish," she snapped. "Why don't you encourage me?"

Her tone drew his eyes, sharp as a squirrel's and charged with quick concern. Her face was partly turned away. The curve of her cheek was devoid of its usual dusky color, her fingers played on her under lip as if it were a little flute.

"What do you want to be encouraged for?" he said low, as if afraid of being overheard.

She did not move her head, but looked at the bluffs.

"I don't know," she answered, then hearing her--voice hoarse cleared her throat. "It's all--so--so--sort of new. I--I--feel--I don't know just how--I think it's homesick."

Her voice broke in a bursting sob. Her control gone, her pride fell with it. Wheeling on the seat she cast upon him a look of despairing appeal.

"Oh, Daddy John," was all she could gasp, and then bent her head so that her hat might hide the shame of her tears.

He looked at her for a nonplused moment, at her brown arms bent over her shaken bosom, at the shield of her broken hat. He was thoroughly discomfited for he had not the least idea what was the matter. Then he shifted the reins to his left hand and edging near her laid his right on her knee.

"Don't you want to marry him?" he said gently.

"It isn't that, it's something else."

"What else? You can say anything you like to me. Ain't I carried you when you were a baby?"

"I don't know what it is." Her voice came cut by sobbing breaths. "I don't understand. It's like being terribly lonesome."

The old frontiersman had no remedy ready for this complaint. He, too, did not understand.

"Don't you marry him if you don't like him," he said. "If you want to tell him so and you're afraid, I'll do it for you."

"I do like him. It's not that."

"Well, then, what's making you cry?"

"Something else, something way down deep that makes everything seem so far away and strange."

He leaned forward and spat over the wheel, then subsided against the roof prop.

"Are you well?" he said, his imagination exhausted.

"Yes, very."

Daddy John looked at the backs of the mules. The off leader was a capricious female by name Julia who required more management and coaxing than the other five put together, and whom he loved beyond them all. In his bewildered anxiety the thought passed through his mind that all creatures of the feminine gender, animal or human, were governed by laws inscrutable to the male, who might never aspire to comprehension and could only strive to please and placate.

A footfall struck on his ear and, thrusting his head beyond the canvas hood, he saw Leff loafing up from the rear.

"Saw her come in here," thought the old man, drawing his head in, "and wants to hang round and snoop."

Since the Indian episode he despised Leff. His contempt was unveiled, for the country lout who had shown himself a coward had dared to raise his eyes to the one star in Daddy John's firmament. He would not have hidden his dislike if he could. Leff was of the outer world to which he relegated all men who showed fear or lied.

He turned to Susan:

"Go back in the wagon and lie down. Here comes Leff and I don't want him to see you."

The young girl thought no better of Leff than he did. The thought of being viewed in her abandonment by the despised youth made her scramble into the back of the wagon where she lay concealed on a pile of sacks. In the forward opening where the canvas was drawn in a circle round a segment of sky, Daddy John's figure fitted like a picture in a circular frame. As a step paused at the wheel she saw him lean forward and heard his rough tones.

"Yes, she's here, asleep in the back of the wagon."

Then Leff's voice, surprised:

"Asleep? Why, it ain't an hour since we started."

"Well, can't she go to sleep in the morning if she wants? Don't you go to sleep every Sunday under the wagon?"

"Yes, but that's afternoon."

"Mebbe, but everybody's not as slow as you at getting at what they want."

This appeared to put Susan's retirement in a light that gave rise to pondering. There was a pause, then came the young man's heavy footsteps slouching back to his wagon. Daddy John settled down on the seat.

"I'm almighty glad it weren't him, Missy," he said, over his shoulder. "I'd 'a' known then why you cried."


CHAPTER V


Late the same day Leff, who had been riding on the bluffs, came down to report a large train a few miles ahead of them. It was undoubtedly the long-looked-for New York Company.

The news was as a tonic to their slackened energies. A cheering excitement ran through the train. There was stir and loud talking. Its contagion lifted Susan's spirits and with her father she rode on in advance, straining her eyes against the glare of the glittering river. Men and women, who daily crowded by them unnoted on city streets, now loomed in the perspective as objective points of avid interest. No party Susan had ever been to called forth such hopeful anticipation. To see her fellows, to talk with women over trivial things, to demand and give out the human sympathies she wanted and that had lain withering within herself, drew her from the gloom under which she had lain weeping in the back of Daddy John's wagon.

They were nearing the Forks of the Platte where the air was dryly transparent and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a congeries of broken white dots on the river's edge, they could hear the bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a woman's voice.

It was like a handclasp across space. Drawing nearer the sounds of men and life reached forward to meet them--laughter, the neighing of horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they still longed for.

The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day's labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring, the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night's bivouac. It shone bright on the darkness of the grass, a cordon of flame that some kindly magician had drawn about the resting place of the tired camp.

With the night pressing on its edges it was a tiny nucleus of life dropped down between the immemorial plains and the ancient river. Home was here in the pitched tents, a hearthstone in the flame lapping on the singed grass, humanity in the loud welcome that rose to meet the newcomers. The doctor had known but one member of the Company, its organizer, a farmer from the Mohawk Valley. But the men, dropping their ox yokes and water pails, crowded forward, laughing deep-mouthed greetings from the bush of their beards, and extending hands as hard as the road they had traveled.

The women were cooking. Like goddesses of the waste places they stood around the fires, a line of half-defined shapes. Films of smoke blew across them, obscured and revealed them, and round about them savory odors rose. Fat spit in the pans, coffee bubbled in blackened pots, and strips of buffalo meat impaled on sticks sent a dribble of flame to the heat. The light was strong on their faces, lifted in greeting, lips smiling, eyes full of friendly curiosity. But they did not move from their posts for they were women and the men and the children were waiting to be fed.

Most of them were middle-aged, or the trail had made them look middle-aged. A few were very old. Susan saw a face carved with seventy years of wrinkles mumbling in the framing folds of a shawl. Nearby, sitting on the dropped tongue of a wagon, a girl of perhaps sixteen, sat ruminant, nursing a baby. Children were everywhere, helping, fighting, rolling on the grass. Babies lay on spread blankets with older babies sitting by to watch. It was the woman's hour. The day's march was over, but the intimate domestic toil was at its height. The home makers were concentrated upon their share of the activities--cooking food, making the shelter habitable, putting their young to bed.

Separated from Susan by a pile of scarlet embers stood a young girl, a large spoon in her hand. The light shot upward along the front of her body, painting with an even red glow her breast, her chin, the under side of her nose and finally transforming into a coppery cloud the bright confusion of her hair. She smiled across the fire and said:

"I'm glad you've come. We've been watching for you ever since we struck the Platte. There aren't any girls in the train. I and my sister are the youngest except Mrs. Peebles over there," with a nod in the direction of the girl on the wagon tongue, "and she's married."

The woman beside her, who had been too busy over the bacon pan to raise her head, now straightened herself, presenting to Susan's eye a face more buxom and mature but so like that of the speaker that it was evident they were sisters. A band of gold gleamed on her wedding finger and her short skirt and loose calico jacket made no attempt to hide the fact that another baby was soon to be added to the already well-supplied train. She smiled a placid greeting and her eye, lazily sweeping Susan, showed a healthy curiosity tempered by the self-engrossed indifference of the married woman to whom the outsider, even in the heart of the wilderness, is forever the outsider.

"Lucy'll be real glad to have a