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

she revealed herself as much preoccupied with all matters of sentiment, and it was only natural that a love story of her own should be confessed. It was back in Cooperstown, and he had been an apprentice of Glen's. She hadn't cared for him at all, judging by excerpts from the scenes of his courtship he had been treated with unmitigated harshness. But her words and tones--still entirely scornful with half a continent between her and the adorer--gave evidence of a regret, of self-accusing, uneasy doubt, as of one who looks back on lost opportunities. The listener's ear was caught by it, indicating a state of mind so different from her own.

"Then you did like him?"

"I didn't like him at all. I couldn't bear him."

"But you seem sorry you didn't marry him."

"Well-- No, I'm not sorry. But"--it was the hour for truth, the still indifference of the night made a lie seem too trivial for the effort of telling--"I don't know out here in the wilds whether I'll ever get anyone else."


CHAPTER VII


By noon the next day the doctor's train had left the New York Company far behind. Looking back they could see it in gradual stages of diminishment--a white serpent with a bristling head of scattered horsemen, then a white worm, its head a collection of dark particles, then a white thread with a head too insignificant to be deciphered. Finally it was gone, absorbed into the detailless distance where the river coiled through the green.

Twenty-four hours later they reached the Forks of the Platte. Here the trail crossed the South Fork, slanted over the plateau that lay between the two branches, and gained the North Fork. Up this it passed, looping round the creviced backs of mighty bluffs, and bearing northwestward to Fort Laramie. The easy faring of the grassed bottom was over. The turn to the North Fork was the turn to the mountains. The slow stream with its fleet of islands would lose its dreamy deliberateness and become a narrowed rushing current, sweeping round the bases of sandstone walls as the pioneers followed it up and on toward the whitened crests of the Wind River Mountains, where the snows never melted and the lakes lay in the hollows green as jade.

It was afternoon when they reached the ford. The hills had sunk away to low up-sweepings of gray soil, no longer hiding the plain which lay yellow against a cobalt sky. As the wagons rolled up on creaking wheels the distance began to darken with the buffalo. The prospect was like a bright-colored map over which a black liquid has been spilled, here in drops, there in creeping streams. Long files flowed from the rifts between the dwarfed bluffs, unbroken herds swept in a wave over the low barrier, advanced to the river, crusted its surface, passed across, and surged up the opposite bank. Finally all sides showed the moving mass, blackening the plateau, lining the water's edge in an endless undulation of backs and heads, foaming down the faces of the sand slopes. Where the train moved they divided giving it right of way, streaming by, bulls, cows, and calves intent on their own business, the earth tremulous under their tread. Through breaks in their ranks the blue and purple of the hills shone startlingly vivid and beyond the prairie lay like a fawn-colored sea across which dark shadows trailed.

The ford was nearly a mile wide, a shallow current, in some places only a glaze, but with shifting sands stirring beneath it. Through the thin, glass-like spread of water the backs of sand bars emerged, smooth as the bodies of recumbent monsters. On the far side the plateau stretched, lilac with the lupine flowers, the broken rear line of the herd receding across it.

The doctor, feeling the way, was to ride in the lead, his wagon following with Susan and Daddy John on the driver's seat. It seemed an easy matter, the water chuckling round the wheels, the mules not wet above the knees. Half way across, grown unduly confident, the doctor turned in his saddle to address his daughter when his horse walked into a quicksand and unseated him. It took them half an hour to drag it out, Susan imploring that her father come back to the wagon and change his clothes. He only laughed at her which made her angry. With frowning brows she saw him mount again, and a dripping, white-haired figure, set out debonairly for the opposite bank.

The sun was low, the night chill coming on when they reached it. Their wet clothes were cold upon them and the camp pitching was hurried. Susan bending over her fire, blowing at it with expanded cheeks and, between her puffs, scolding at her father, first, for having got wet, then for having stayed wet, and now for being still wet, was to David just as charming as any of the other and milder apotheoses of the Susan he had come to know so well. It merely added a new tang, a fresh spice of variety, to a personality a less ravished observer might have thought unattractively masterful for a woman.

Her fire kindled, the camp in shape, she lay down by the little blaze with her head under a lupine plant. Her wrath had simmered to appeasement by the retirement of the doctor into his wagon, and David, glimpsing at her, saw that her eyes, a thread of observation between black-fringed lids, dwelt musingly on the sky. She looked as if she might be dreaming a maiden's dream of love. He hazarded a tentative remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her lips. He watched her as he could when she was not looking at him. A loosened strand of her hair lay among the lupine roots, one of her hands rested, brown and upcurled, on a tiny weed its weight had broken. She turned her head with a nestling movement, drew a deep, soft breath and her eyelids drooped.

"David," she said in a drowsy voice, "I'm going to sleep. Wake me at supper time."

He became rigidly quiet. When she had sunk deep into sleep, only her breast moving with the ebb and flow of her quiet breath, he crept nearer and drew a blanket over her, careful not to touch her. He looked at the unconscious face for a moment, then softly dropped the blanket and stole back to his place ready to turn at the first foot fall and lift a silencing hand.

It was one of the beautiful moments that had come to him in his wooing. He sat in still reverie, feeling the dear responsibilities of his ownership. That she might sleep, sweet and soft, he would work as no man ever worked before. To guard, to comfort, to protect her--that would be his life. He turned and looked at her, his sensitive face softening like a woman's watching the sleep of her child. Susan, all unconscious, with her rich young body showing in faint curves under the defining blanket, and her hair lying loose among the roots of the lupine bush, was so devoid of that imperious quality that marked her when awake, was so completely a tender feminine thing, with peaceful eyelids and innocent lips, that it seemed a desecration to look upon her in such a moment of abandonment. Love might transform her into this--in her waking hours when her body and heart had yielded themselves to their master.

David turned away. The sacred thought that some day he would be the owner of this complex creation of flesh and spirit, so rich, so fine, with depths unknown to his groping intelligence, made a rush of supplication, a prayer to be worthy, rise in his heart. He looked at the sunset through half-shut eyes, sending his desire up to that unknown God, who, in these wild solitudes, seemed leaning down to listen:

"Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."

The sun, falling to the horizon like a spinning copper disk, was as a sign of promise and help. The beauty of the hour stretched into the future. His glance, shifting to the distance, saw the scattered dots of the disappearing buffalo, the shadows sloping across the sand hills, and the long expanse of lupines blotting into a thick foam of lilac blue.

Susan stirred, and he woke from his musings with a start. She sat up, the blanket falling from her shoulders, and looking at him with sleep-filled eyes, smiled the sweet, meaningless smile of a half-awakened child. Her consciousness had not yet fully returned, and her glance, curiously clear and liquid, rested on his without intelligence. The woman in her was never more apparent, her seduction never more potent. Her will dormant, her bounding energies at low ebb, she looked a thing to nestle, soft and yielding, against a man's heart.

"Have I slept long?" she said stretching, and then, "Isn't it cold."

"Come near the fire," he answered. "I've built it up while you were asleep."

She came, trailing the blanket in a languid hand, and sat beside him. He drew it up about her shoulders and looked into her face. Meeting his eyes she broke into low laughter, and leaning nearer to him murmured in words only half articulated:

"Oh, David, I'm so sleepy."

He took her hand, and it stayed unresisting against his palm. She laughed again, and then yawned, lifting her shoulders with a supple movement that shook off the blanket.

"It takes such a long time to wake up," she murmured apologetically.

David made no answer, and for a space they sat silent looking at the sunset. As the mists of sleep dispersed she became aware of his hand pressure, and the contentment that marked her awakening was marred. But she felt in a kindly mood and did not withdraw her hand. Instead, she wanted to please him, to be as she thought he would like her to be, so she made a gallant effort and said:

"What a wonderful sunset--all yellow to the middle of the sky."

He nodded, looking at the flaming west. She went on:

"And there are little bits of gold cloud floating over it, like the melted lead that you pour through a key on all Hallowe'en."

He again made no answer, and leaning nearer to spy into his face, she asked naively:

"Don't you think it beautiful?"

He turned upon her sharply, and she drew back discomposed by his look.

"Let me kiss you," he said, his voice a little husky.

He was her betrothed and had never kissed her but once in the moonlight. It was his right, and after all, conquering the inevitable repugnance, it did not take long. Caught thus in a yielding mood she resolved to submit. She had a comforting sense that it was a rite to which in time one became accustomed. With a determination to perform her part graciously she lowered her eyelids and presented a dusky cheek. As his shoulder touched hers she felt that he trembled and was instantly seized with the antipathy that his emotion woke in her. But it was too late to withdraw. His