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

/> "Lucy, you're the most hard-hearted girl! Poor Zavier, who's going off into the mountains and may be killed by the Indians. Don't you feel any pity for him? And he's in love with you--truly in love. I've watched him and I know."

She could not refrain from letting a hint of superior wisdom, of an advantage over the unengaged Lucy, give solemnity to her tone.

Lucy's face flushed.

"He's half an Indian," she said with an edge on her voice. "Doesn't everyone in the train keep saying that every ten minutes? Do you want me to fall in love with a man like that?"

"Why no, of course not. You couldn't. That's the sad part of it. He seems as much like other men as those trappers in the fort who were all white. Just because he had a Crow mother it seems unjust that he should be so sort of on the outside of everything. But of course you couldn't marry him. Nobody ever heard of a girl marrying a half-breed."

Lucy bent over the piece of deer meat that she was cutting apart. They were preparing supper at the flaring end of a hot day, when the wagons had crawled through a loose alkaline soil and over myriads of crickets that crushed sickeningly under the wheels. Both girls were tired, their throats parched, their hair as dry as hemp, and Lucy was irritable, her face unsmiling, her movement quick and nervous.

"What's it matter what a man's parents are if he's kind to you?" she said, cutting viciously into the meat. "It's a lot to have some one fill the kettles for you and help you get the firewood, and when you're tired tell you to go back in the wagon and go to sleep. Nobody does that for me but Zavier."

It was the first time she had shown any appreciation of her swain's attentions. She expressed the normal, feminine point of view that her friend had been looking for, and as soon as she heard it Susan adroitly vaulted to the other side:

"But, Lucy, you _can't_ marry him!"

"Who says I'm going to?" snapped Lucy. "Do I have to marry every Indian that makes eyes at me? All the men in the fort were doing it. They hadn't a look for anyone else."

Susan took this with reservations. A good many of the men in the fort had made eyes at her. It was rather grasping of Lucy to take it all to herself, and in her surprise at the extent of her friend's claims she was silent.

"As for me," Lucy went on, "I'm dead sick of this journey. I wish we could stop or go back or do something. But we've got to keep on and on to the end of nowhere. It seems as if we were going forever in these tiresome old wagons or on horses that get lame every other day, and then you have to walk. I don't mind living in a tent. I like it. But I hate always going on, never having a minute to rest, getting up in the morning when I'm only half awake, and having to cook at night when I'm so tired I'd just like to lie down on the ground without taking my clothes off and go to sleep there. I wish I'd never come. I wish I'd married the man in Cooperstown that I wouldn't have wiped my feet on then."

She slapped the frying pan on the fire and threw the meat into it. Her voice and lips were trembling. With a quick, backward bend she stooped to pick up a fork, and Susan saw her face puckered and quivering like a child's about to cry.

"Oh, Lucy," she cried in a burst of sympathy. "I didn't know you felt like that," and she tried to clasp the lithe uncorseted waist that flinched from her touch. Lucy's elbow, thrown suddenly out, kept her at a distance, and she fell back repulsed, but with consolations still ready to be offered.

"Let me alone," said Lucy, her face averted. "I'm that tired I don't know what I'm saying. Go and get the children for supper, and don't let them stand round staring at me or they'll be asking questions."

She snatched the coffee pot and shook it upside down, driblets of coffee running out. With her other hand she brushed the tears off her cheeks.

"Don't stand there as if you never saw a girl cry before," she said, savagely. "I don't do it often, and it isn't such a wonderful sight. Get the children, and if you tell anyone that I feel this way I'll murder you."

The children were at some distance lying on the ground. Such unpromising materials as dust and sage brush had not quenched their inventive power or hampered their imaginations. They played with as an absorbed an industry here as in their own garden at home. They had scraped the earth into mounded shapes marked with the print of baby fingers and furrowed with paths. One led to a central mound crowned with a wild sunflower blossom. Up the path to this Bob conducted twigs of sage, murmuring the adventures that attended their progress. When they reached the sunflower house he laid them carefully against its sides, continuing the unseen happenings that befell them on their entrance. The little girl lay beside him, her cheek resting on an outflung arm, her eyes fixed wistfully on the personally conducted party. Her creative genius had not risen to the heights of his, and her fat little hands were awkward and had pushed the sunflower from its perch. So she had been excluded from active participation, and now looked on, acquiescing in her exclusion, a patient and humble spectator.

"Look," Bob cried as he saw Susan approaching. "I've builded a house and a garden, and these are the people," holding up one of the sage twigs, "they walk fru the garden an' then go into the house and have coffee and buf'lo meat."

Susan admired it and then looked at the baby, who was pensively surveying her brother's creation.

"And did the baby play, too?" she asked.

"Oh, no, she couldn't. She doesn't know nuffing, she's too small," with the scorn of one year's superiority.

The baby raised her solemn eyes to the young girl and made no attempt to vindicate herself. Her expression was that of subdued humility, of one who admits her short-comings. She rose and thrust a soft hand into Susan's, and maintained her silence as they walked toward the camp. The only object that seemed to have power to rouse her from her dejected reverie were the broken sage stalks in the trail. At each of these she halted, hanging from Susan's sustaining grasp, and stubbed her toe accurately and carefully against the protruding root.

They would have been silent that evening if it had not been for Zavier. His mood was less merry than usual, but a stream of frontier anecdote and story flowed from him, that held them listening with charmed attention. His foreign speech interlarded with French words added to the picturesqueness of his narratives, and he himself sitting crosslegged on his blanket, his hair hanging dense to his shoulders, his supple body leaning forward in the tension of a thrilling climax, was a fitting minstrel for these lays of the wild.

His final story was that of Antoine Godin, one of the classics of mountain history. Godin was the son of an Iroquois hunter who had been brutally murdered by the Blackfeet. He had become a trapper of the Sublette brothers, then mighty men of the fur trade, and in the expedition of Milton Sublette against the Blackfeet in 1832 joined the troop. When the two bands met, Godin volunteered to hold a conference with the Blackfeet chief. He chose as his companion an Indian of the Flathead tribe, once a powerful nation, but almost exterminated by wars with the Blackfeet. From the massed ranks of his warriors the chief rode out for the parley, a pipe of peace in his hand. As Godin and the Flathead started to meet him, the former asked the Indian if his piece was charged, and when the Flathead answered in the affirmative told him to cock it and ride alongside.

Midway between the two bands they met. Godin clasped the chief's hand, and as he did so told the Flathead to fire. The Indian levelled his gun, fired, and the Blackfeet chief rolled off his horse. Godin snatched off his blanket and in a rain of bullets fled to the Sublette camp.

"And so," said the voyageur with a note of exultation in his voice, "Godin got revenge on those men who had killed his father."

For a moment his listeners were silent, suffering from a sense of bewilderment, not so much at the story, as at Zavier's evident approval of Godin's act.

It was Susan who first said in a low tone, "What an awful thing to do!" This loosened Bella's tongue, who lying in the opening of her tent had been listening and now felt emboldened to express her opinion, especially as Glen, stretched on his face nearby, had emitted a snort of indignation.

"Well, of all the wicked things I've heard since I came out here that's the worst."

Zavier shot a glance at them in which for one unguarded moment, race antagonism gleamed.

"Why is it wicked?" he said gently.

David answered heatedly, the words bursting out:

"Why, the treachery of it, the meanness. The chief carried the pipe of peace. That's like our flag of truce. You never heard of any civilized man shooting another under the flag of truce."

Zavier looked stolid. It was impossible to tell whether he comprehended their point of view and pretended ignorance, or whether he was so restricted to his own that he could see no other.

"The Blackfeet had killed his father," he answered. "They were treacherous too. Should he wait to be murdered? It was his chance and he took it."

Sounds of dissent broke out round the circle. All the eyes were trained on him, some with a wide, expectant fixity, others bright with combative fire. Even Glen sat up, scratching his head, and remarking sotto voce to his wife:

"Ain't I always said he was an Indian?"

"But the Blackfeet chief wasn't the man who killed his father," said the doctor.

"No, he was chief of the tribe who did."

"But why kill an innocent man who probably had nothing to do with it?"

"It was for vengeance," said Zavier with unmoved patience and careful English. "Vengeance for his father's death."

Several pairs of eyes sought the ground giving up the problem. Others continued to gaze at him either with wonder, or hopeful of extracting from his face some clew to his involved and incomprehensible moral attitude. They suddenly felt as if he had confessed himself of an alien species, a creature as remote from them and their ideals as a dweller in the moon.

"He had waited long for vengeance," Zavier further explained, moving his glittering glance about the circle, "and if he could not find the right man, he must take