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

giving Susan a sage nod out of the depths of her sunbonnet.

The news made the young girl uneasy. A new reticence, the "grown-up" sense of the wisdom of silence that she had learned on the trail, made her keep her own council. Also, there was no one to tell but her father, and he was the last person who ought to know. The call of unaided suffering would have brought him as quickly from his buffalo skins in the tent as from his bed in the old home in Rochester. Susan resolved to keep it from him, if she had to stand guard over him and fight them off. Her philosophy was primitive--her own first, and if, to save her own, others must be sacrificed, then she would aid in the sacrifice and weep over its victims, weep, but not yield.

When the train had disappeared into the shadows of Ash Hollow, curses, shouts, and the cracking of whips rising stormily over its descent, the white dot of the McMurdo's wagon was moving over the blue and green distance. As it drew near they could see that Glen walked beside the oxen, and the small figure of Bob ran by the wheel. Neither of the women were to be seen. "Lazy and riding," Daddy John commented, spying at them with his far-sighted old eyes. "Tired out and gone to sleep," David suggested. Susan's heart sank and she said nothing. It looked as if something was the matter, and she nerved herself for a struggle.

When Glen saw them, his shout came through the clear air, keen-edged as a bird's cry. They answered, and he raised a hand in a gesture that might have been a beckoning or merely a hail. David leaped on a horse and went galloping through the bending heads of the lupines to meet them. Susan watched him draw up at Glen's side, lean from his saddle for a moment's parley, then turn back. The gravity of his face increased her dread. He dismounted, looking with scared eyes from one to the other. Mrs. McMurdo was sick. Glen was glad--he couldn't say how glad--that it was their camp. He'd camp there with them. His wife wasn't able to go on.

Susan edged up to him, caught his eye and said stealthily:

"Don't tell my father."

He hesitated.

"They--they--seemed to want him."

"I'll see to that," she answered. "Don't you let him know that anything's the matter, or I'll never forgive you."

It was a command, and the glance that went with it accented its authority.

The prairie schooner was now close at hand, and they straggled forward to meet it, one behind the other, through the brushing of the knee-high bushes. The child recognizing them ran screaming toward them, his hands out-stretched, crying out their names. Lucy appeared at the front of the wagon, climbed on the tongue and jumped down. She was pale, the freckles on her fair skin showing like a spattering of brown paint, her flaming hair slipped in a tousled coil to one side of her head.

"It's you!" she cried. "Glen didn't know whose camp it was till he saw David. Oh, I'm so glad!" and she ran to Susan, clutched her arm and said in a hurried lower key, "Bella's sick. She feels terribly bad, out here in this place with nothing. Isn't it dreadful?"

"I'll speak to her," said Susan. "You stay here."

The oxen, now at the outskirts of the camp, had come to a standstill. Susan stepping on the wheel drew herself up to the driver's seat. Bella sat within on a pile of sacks, her elbows on her knees, her forehead in her hands. By her side, leaning against her, stood the little girl, blooming and thoughtful, her thumb in her mouth. She withdrew it and stared fixedly at Susan, then smiled a slow, shy smile, full of meaning, as if her mind held a mischievous secret. At Susan's greeting the mother lifted her head.

"Oh, Susan, isn't it a mercy we've found you?" she exclaimed. "We saw the camp hours ago, but we didn't know it was yours. It's as if God had delayed you. Yes, my dear, it's come. But I'm not going to be afraid. With your father it'll be all right."

The young girl said a few consolatory words and jumped down from the wheel. She was torn both ways. Bella's plight was piteous, but to make her father rise in his present state of health and attend such a case, hours long, in the chill, night breath of the open--it might kill him! She turned toward the camp, vaguely conscious of the men standing in awkward attitudes and looking thoroughly uncomfortable as though they felt a vicarious sense of guilt--that the entire male sex had something to answer for in Bella's tragic predicament. Behind them stood the doctor's tent, and as her eyes fell on it she saw Lucy's body standing in the opening, the head and shoulders hidden within the inclosure. Lucy was speaking with the doctor.

Susan gave a sharp exclamation and stopped. It was too late to interfere. Lucy withdrew her head and came running back, crying triumphantly:

"Your father's coming. He says he's not sick at all. He's putting on his coat."

Following close on her words came the doctor, emerging slowly, for he was weak and unsteady. In the garish light of the afternoon he looked singularly white and bleached, like a man whose warm, red-veined life is dried into a sere grayness of blood and tissue. He was out of harmony with the glad living colors around him, ghostlike amid the brightness of the flowering earth and the deep-dyed heaven. He met his daughter's eyes and smiled.

"Your prisoner has escaped you, Missy."

She tried to control herself, to beat down the surge of anger that shook her. Meeting him she implored with low-toned urgence:

"Father, you can't do it. Go back. You're too sick."

He pushed her gently away, his smile gone.

"Go back, Missy? The woman is suffering, dear."

"I know it, and I don't care. You're suffering, you're sick. She should have known better than to come. It's her fault, not ours. Because she was so foolhardy is no reason why you should be victimized."

His gravity was crossed by a look of cold, displeased surprise, a look she had not seen directed upon her since once in her childhood when she had told him a lie.

"I don't want to feel ashamed of you, Missy," he said quietly, and putting her aside went on to the wagon.

She turned away blinded with rage and tears. She had a dim vision of David and fled from it, then felt relief at the sight of Daddy John. He saw her plight, and hooking his hand in her arm took her behind the tent, where she burst into furious words and a gush of stifled weeping.

"No good," was the old man's consolation. "Do you expect the doctor to lie comfortable in his blanket when there's some one around with a pain?"

"Why did she come? Why didn't she stay at home?"

"That ain't in the question," he said, patting her arm; "she's here, and she's got the pain, and you and I know the doctor."

The McMurdo's prairie schooner rolled off to a place where the lupines were high, and Glen pitched the tent. The men, not knowing what else to do to show their sympathy, laid the fires and cleaned the camp. Then the two younger ones shouldered their rifles and wandered away to try and get some fresh buffalo meat, they said; but it was obvious that they felt out of place and alarmed in a situation where those of their sex could only assume an apologetic attitude and admit the blame.

The children were left to Susan's care. She drew them to the cleared space about the fires, and as she began the preparations for supper asked them to help. They took the request very seriously, and she found a solace in watching them as they trotted up with useless pans, bending down to see the smile of thanks to which they were accustomed, and which made them feel proud and important. Once she heard Bob, in the masterful voice of the male, tell his sister the spoon she was so triumphantly bringing was not wanted. The baby's joy was stricken from her, she bowed to the higher intelligence, and the spoon slid from her limp hand to the ground, while she stood a figure of blank disappointment. Susan had to set down her pan and call her over, and kneeling with the soft body clasped close, and the little knees pressing against her breast, felt some of the anger there melting away. After that they gathered broken twigs of lupine, and standing afar threw them at the flames. There was a moment of suspense when they watched hopefully, and then a sad awakening when the twigs fell about their feet. They shuffled back, staring down at the scattered leaves in a stupor of surprise.

Sunset came and supper was ready. Daddy John loomed up above the lip of Ash Hollow with a load of roots and branches for the night. Lucy emerged from the tent and sat down by her cup and plate, harrassed and silent. Glen said he wanted no supper. He had been sitting for an hour on the pole of David's wagon, mute and round-shouldered in his dusty homespuns. No one had offered to speak to him. It was he who had induced the patient woman to follow him on the long journey. They all knew this was now the matter of his thoughts. His ragged figure and down-drooped, miserable face were dignified with the tragedy of a useless remorse. As Lucy passed him he raised his eyes, but said nothing. Then, as the others drew together round the circle of tin cups and plates, a groan came suddenly from the tent. He leaped up, made a gesture of repelling something unendurable, and ran away, scudding across the plain not looking back. The group round the fire were silent. But the two children did not heed. With their blond heads touching, they held their cups close together and argued as to which one had the most coffee in it.

When the twilight came there was no one left by the fire but Susan and the children. She gathered them on a buffalo robe and tucked a blanket round them watching as sleep flowed over them, invaded and subdued them even while their lips moved with belated, broken murmurings. The little girl's hand, waving dreamily in the air, brushed her cheek with a velvet touch, and sank languidly, up-curled like a rose petal. With heads together and bodies nestled close they slept, exhaling the fragrance of healthy childhood, two sparks of matter incased in an envelope of exquisite flesh, pearly tissue upon which life would trace a pattern not yet selected.

Darkness closed down on the camp, pressing on the edges of the firelight like a curious intruder. There was no wind, and the mound of charring wood sent up a line of smoke straight as a