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

thread, which somewhere aloft widened and dissolved. The stillness of the wilderness brooded close and deep, stifling the noises of the day. When the sounds of suffering from the tent tore the airy veil apart, it shuddered full of the pain, then the torn edges delicately adhered, and it was whole again. Once Lucy came, haggard and tight-lipped, and asked Susan to put on water to heat. Bella was terribly sick, the doctor wouldn't leave her. The other children were nothing to this. But the Emigrant Trail was molding Lucy. She made no complaints, and her nerves were steady as a taut string. It was one of the hazards of the great adventure to be taken as it came.

After she had gone, and the iron kettle was balanced on a bed of heat, Susan lay down on her blanket. Fear and loathing were on her. For the first time a shrinking from life and its requirements came coldly over her, for the first time her glad expectancy knew a check, fell back before tremendous things blocking the path. Her dread for her father was submerged in a larger dread--of the future and what it might bring, of what might be expected of her, of pains and perils once so far away they seemed as if she would never reach them, now suddenly close to her, laying a gripping hand on her heart.

Her face was toward the camp, and she could not see on the plain behind her a moving shadow bearing down on the fire's glow, visible for miles in that level country. It advanced noiselessly through the swaying bushes, till, entering the limits of the light, it detached itself from the darkness, taking the form of a mounted man followed by a pack animal. The projected rays of red played along the barrel of a rifle held across the saddle, and struck answering gleams from touches of metal on the bridle. So soundless was the approach that Susan heard nothing till a lupine stalk snapped under the horse's hoof. She sat up and turned. Over the horse's ears she saw a long swarthy face framed in hanging hair, and the glint of narrowed eyes looking curiously at her. She leaped to her feet with a smothered cry, Indians in her mind. The man raised a quick hand, and said:

"It's all right. It's a white man."

He slid off his horse and came toward her. He was so like an Indian, clad in a fringed hunting shirt and leggings, his movements lithe and light, his step noiseless, his skin copper dark, that she stood alert, ready to raise a warning cry. Then coming into the brighter light she saw he was white, with long red hair hanging from the edge of his cap, and light-colored eyes that searched her face with a hard look. He was as wild a figure as any the plains had yet given up, and she drew away looking fearfully at him.

"Don't be afraid," he said in a deep voice. "I'm the same kind as you."

"Who are you?" she faltered.

"A mountain man. I'll camp with you." Then glancing about, "Where are the rest of them?"

"They're round somewhere," she answered. "We have sickness here."

"Cholera?" quickly.

She shook her head.

Without more words he went back and picketed his horses, and took the pack and saddle off. She could see his long, pale-colored figure moving from darkness into light, and the animals drooping with stretched necks as their bonds were loosened. When he came back to the fire he dropped a blanket and laid his gun close to it, then threw himself down. The rattle of the powder horn and bullet mold he wore hanging from his shoulder came with the movement. He slipped the strap off and threw it beside the gun. Then drew one foot up and unfastened a large spur attached to his moccasined heel. He wore a ragged otter-skin cap, the animal's tail hanging down on one side. This he took off too, showing his thick red hair, damp and matted from the heat of the fur. With a knotted hand he pushed back the locks pressed down on his forehead. The skin there was untanned and lay like a white band above the darkness of his face, thin, edged with a fringe of red beard and with blue eyes set high above prominent cheek bones. He threw his spur on the other things, and looking up met Susan's eyes staring at him across the fire.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"To California."

"So am I."

She made no answer.

"Were you asleep when I came?"

"No, I was thinking."

A sound of anguish came from the tent, and Susan set her teeth on her underlip stiffening. He looked in its direction, then back at her.

"What's the matter there?" he asked.

"A child is being born."

He made no comment, swept the background of tents and wagon roofs with an investigating eye that finally came to a stop on the sleeping children.

"Are these yours?"

"No, they belong to the woman who is sick."

His glance left them as if uninterested, and he leaned backward to pull his blanket out more fully. His body, in the sleekly pliant buckskins, was lean and supple. As he twisted, stretching an arm to draw out the crumpled folds, the lines of his long back and powerful shoulders showed the sinuous grace of a cat. He relaxed into easeful full length, propped on an elbow, his red hair coiling against his neck. Susan stole a stealthy glance at him. As if she had spoken, he instantly raised his head and looked into her eyes.

His were clear and light with a singularly penetrating gaze, not bold but intent, eyes not used to the detailed observation of the peopled ways, but trained to unimpeded distances and to search the faces of primitive men. They held hers, seeming to pierce the acquired veneer of reserve to the guarded places beneath. She felt a slow stir of antagonism, a defensive gathering of her spirit as against an intruder. Her pride and self-sufficiency responded, answering to a hurried summons. She was conscious of a withdrawal, a closing of doors, a shutting down of her defenses in face of aggression and menace. And while she rallied to this sudden call-to-arms the strange man held her glance across the fire. It was she who spoke slowly in a low voice:

"Where do you come from?"

"From Taos, and after that Bent's Fort."

"What is your name?"

"Low Courant."

Then with an effort she turned away and bent over the children. When she looked back at him he was rolled in his blanket, and with his face to the fire was asleep.

Lucy came presently for the hot water with a bulletin of progress growing each moment more direful. Her eyes fell on the sleeping man, and she said, peering through the steam of the bubbling water:

"Who's that?"

"A strange man."

"From where?"

"Taos, and after that Bent's Fort," Susan repeated, and Lucy forgot him and ran back to the tent.

There was a gray line in the east when she returned to say the child was born dying as it entered the world, and Bella was in desperate case. She fell beside her friend, quivering and sobbing, burying her face in Susan's bosom. Shaken and sickened by the dreadful night they clung together holding to each other, as if in a world where love claimed such a heavy due, where joy realized itself at such exceeding cost, nothing was left but the bond of a common martyrdom. Yet each of them, knowing the measure of her pain, would move to the head of her destiny and take up her heavy engagement without fear, obeying the universal law.

But now, caught in the terror of the moment, they bowed their heads and wept together while the strange man slept by the fire.


END OF PART II


PART III


The Mountains

CHAPTER I


Fort Laramie stood where the eastern roots of the mountains start in toothed reef and low, premonitory sweep from the level of the plains. Broken chains and spurs edged up toward it. Far beyond, in a faint aerial distance, the soaring solidity of vast ranges hung on the horizon, cloudy crests painted on the sky. Laramie Peak loomed closer, a bold, bare point, gold in the morning, purple at twilight. And the Black Hills, rock-ribbed and somber, dwarf pines clutching their lodges, rose in frowning ramparts to the North and West.

It was a naked country, bleak and bitter. In winter it slept under a snow blanket, the lights of the fort encircled by the binding, breathless cold. Then the wandering men that trapped and traded with the Indians came seeking shelter behind the white walls, where the furs were stacked in storerooms, and the bourgeois' table was hospitable with jerked meat and meal cakes. When the streams began to stir under the ice, and a thin green showed along the bottoms, it opened its gates and the men of the mountains went forth with their traps rattling at the saddle horn. Later, when the spring was in waking bloom, and each evening the light stayed longer on Laramie Peak, the Indians came in migrating villages moving to the summer hunting grounds, and in painted war parties, for there was a season when the red man, like the Hebrew kings, went forth to battle.

It was midsummer now, the chalk-white walls of the fort were bathed in a scorching sunshine, and the nomads of the wilderness met and picked up dropped threads in its courtyard. It stood up warlike on a rise of ground with the brown swiftness of a stream hurrying below it. Once the factors had tried to cultivate the land, but had given it up, as the Indians carried off the maize and corn as it ripened. So the short-haired grass grew to the stockade. At this season the surrounding plain was thick with grazing animals, the fort's own supply, the ponies of the Indians, and the cattle of the emigrants. Encampments were on every side, clustering close under the walls, whence a cannon poked its nose protectingly from the bastion above the gate. There was no need to make the ring of wagons here. White man and red camped together, the canvas peaks of the tents showing beside the frames of lodge poles, covered with dried skins. The pale face treated his red brother to coffee and rice cakes, and the red brother offered in return a feast of boiled dog.

Just now the fort was a scene of ceaseless animation. Its courtyard was a kaleidoscopic whirl of color, shifting as the sun shifted and the shadow of the walls offered shade. Indians with bodies bare above the dropped blankets, moved stately or squatted on their heels watching the emigrants as they bartered for supplies. Trappers in fringed and beaded leather played cards with the plainsmen in shady corners or lounged in the cool arch of the gateway looking aslant at the emigrant girls. Their squaws, patches of color against the walls, sat docile, with the swarthy, half-breed children playing about