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

the butte and scanned their surroundings. The world shone a radiant floor out of which each sage brush rose a floating, feathered tuft, but of gleam or trickle of water there was none. When they came down David lay beside the spring his eyes on its basin, now a muddied hole, the rim patterned with hoof prints. When he heard them coming he rose on his elbow awaiting them with a haggard glance, then seeing their blank looks sank back groaning. To Susan's command that a cask be broached, Courant gave a sullen consent. She drew off the first cupful and gave it to the sick man, his lean hands straining for it, his fingers fumbling in a search for the handle. The leader, after watching her for a moment, turned away and swung off, muttering. David dropped back on the ground, his eyes closed, his body curved about the damp depression.

The evening burned to night, the encampment growing black against the scarlet sky. The brush fire sent a line of smoke straight up, a long milky thread, that slowly disentangled itself and mounted to a final outspreading. Each member of the group was still, the girl lying a dark oblong under her blanket, her face upturned to the stars which blossomed slowly in the huge, unclouded heaven. At the root of the butte, hidden against its shadowy base, the mountain man lay motionless, but his eyes were open and they rested on her, not closing or straying.

When no one saw him he kept this stealthy watch. In the daytime, with the others about, he still was careful to preserve his brusque indifference, to avoid her, to hide his passion with a jealous subtlety. But beneath the imposed bonds it grew with each day, stronger and more savage as the way waxed fiercer. It was not an obsession of occasional moments, it was always with him. As pilot her image moved across the waste before him. When he fell back for words with Daddy John, he was listening through the old man's speech, for the fall of her horse's hoofs. Her voice made his heart stop, the rustle of her garments dried his throat. When his lowered eyes saw her hand on the plate's edge, he grew rigid, unable to eat. If she brushed by him in the bustle of camp pitching, his hands lost their strength and he was sick with the sense of her. Love, courtship, marriage, were words that no longer had any meaning for him. All the tenderness and humanity he had felt for her in the days of her father's sickness were gone. They were burned away, as the water and the grass were. When he saw her solicitude for David, his contempt for the weak man hardened into hatred. He told himself that he hated them both, and he told himself he would crush and kill them both before David should get her. The desire to keep her from David was stronger than the desire to have her for himself. He did not think or care what he felt. She was the prey to be won by cunning or daring, whose taste or wishes had no place in the struggle. He no longer looked ahead, thought, or reasoned. The elemental in him was developing to fit a scene in which only the elemental survived.

They broke camp at four the next morning. For the last few days the heat had been unbearable, and they decided to start while the air was still cool and prolong the noon halt. The landscape grew barer. There were open areas where the soil was soft and sifted from the wheels like sand, and dried stretches where the alkali lay in a caked, white crust. In one place the earth humped into long, wavelike swells each crest topped with a fringe of brush, fine and feathery as petrified spray. At mid-day there was no water in sight. Courant, standing on his saddle, saw no promise of it, nothing but the level distance streaked with white mountain rims, and far to the south a patch of yellow--bare sand, he said, as he pointed a horny finger to where it lay.

They camped in the glare and opened the casks. After the meal they tried to rest, but the sun was merciless. The girl crawled under the wagon and lay there on the dust, sleeping with one arm thrown across her face. The two men sat near by, their hats drawn low over their brows. There was not a sound. The silence seemed transmuted to a slowly thickening essence solidifying round them. It pressed upon them till speech was as impossible as it would be under water. A broken group in the landscape's immensity, they were like a new expression of its somber vitality, motionless yet full of life, in consonance with its bare and brutal verity.

Courant left them to reconnoiter, and at mid afternoon came back to announce that farther on the trail bent to an outcropping of red rock where he thought there might be water. It was the hottest hour of the day. The animals strained at their harness with lolling tongues and white-rimmed eyeballs, their sweat making tracks on the dust. To lighten the wagon Daddy John walked beside it, plodding on in his broken moccasins, now and then chirruping to Julia. The girl rode behind him, her blouse open at the neck, her hair clinging in a black veining to her bedewed temples. Several times he turned back to look at her as the only other female of the party to be encouraged. When she caught his eye she nodded as though acknowledging the salutation of a passerby, her dumbness an instinctive hoarding of physical force.

The red rock came in sight, a nicked edge across the distance. As they approached, it drew up from the plain in a series of crumpled points like the comb of a rooster. The detail of the intervening space was lost in the first crepuscular softness, and they saw nothing but a stretch of darkening purple from which rose the scalloped crest painted in strange colors. Courant trotted forward crying a word of hope, and they pricked after him to where the low bulwark loomed above the plain's swimming mystery.

When they reached it he was standing at the edge of a caverned indentation. Dead grasses dropped against the walls, withered weeds thickened toward the apex in a tangled carpet. There had once been water there, but it was gone, dried, or sunk to some hidden channel in the rock's heart. They stood staring at the scorched herbage and the basin where the earth was cracked apart in its last gasping throes of thirst.

David's voice broke the silence. He had climbed to the front seat, and his face, gilded with the sunlight, looked like the face of a dead man painted yellow.

"Is there water?" he said, then saw the dead grass and dried basin, and met the blank looks of his companions.

Susan's laconic "The spring's dry," was not necessary. He fell forward on the seat with a moan, his head propped in his hands, his fingers buried in his hair. Courant sent a look of furious contempt over his abject figure, then gave a laugh that fell on the silence bitter as a curse. Daddy John without a word moved off and began unhitching the mules. Even in Susan pity was, for the moment, choked by a swell of disgust. Had she not had the other men to measure him by, had she not within her own sturdy frame felt the spirit still strong for conflict, she might still have known only the woman's sympathy for the feebler creature. But they were a trio steeled and braced for invincible effort, and this weakling, without the body and the spirit for the enterprise, was an alien among them.

She went to the back of the wagon and opened the mess chest. As she picked out the supper things she began to repent. The lean, bent figure and sunken head kept recurring to her. She saw him not as David but as a suffering outsider, and for a second, motionless, with a blackened skillet in her hand, had a faint, clairvoyant understanding of his soul's desolation amid the close-knit unity of their endeavor. She dropped the tin and went back to the front of the wagon. He was climbing out, hanging tremulous to the roof support, a haggard spectacle, with wearied eyes and skin drawn into fine puckerings across the temples. Pity came back in a remorseful wave, and she ran to him and lifted his arm to her shoulder. It clasped her hard and they walked to where at the rock's base the sage grew high. Here she laid a blanket for him and spread another on the top of the bushes, fastening it to the tallest ones till it stretched, a sheltering canopy, over him. She tried to cheer him with assurances that water would be found at the next halting place. He was listless at first, seeming not to listen, then the life in her voice roused his sluggish faculties, his cheeks took color, and his dull glance lit on point after point in its passage to her face, like the needle flickering toward the pole.

"If I could get water enough to drink, I'd be all right," he said. "The pains are gone."

"They _must_ find it soon," she answered, lifting the weight of his fallen courage, heavy as his body might have been to her arms. "This is a traveled road. There _must_ be a spring somewhere along it."

And she continued prying up the despairing spirit till the man began to respond, showing returning hope in the eagerness with which he hung on her words. When he lay sinking into drowsy quiet, she stole away from him to where the camp was spread about the unlit pyre of Daddy John's sage brush. It was too early for supper, and the old man, with the accouterments of the hunt slung upon his person and his rifle in his hand, was about to go afield after jack rabbit.

"It's a bad business this," he said in answer to the worry she dared not express. "The animals can't hold out much longer."

"What are we to do? There's only a little water left in one of the casks."

"Low's goin' to strike across for the other trail. He's goin' after supper, and he says he'll ride all night till he gets it. He thinks if he goes due that way," pointing northward, "he can strike it sooner than by goin' back."

They looked in the direction he pointed. Each bush was sending a phenomenally long shadow from its intersection with the ground. There was no butte or hummock to break the expanse between them and the faint, far silhouette of mountains. Her heart sank, a sinking that fatigue and dread of thirst had never given her.

"He may lose us," she said.

The old man jerked his head toward the rock.

"He'll steer by that, and I'll keep the fire going till morning."

"But how can he ride all night? He must be half dead now."

"A man like him don't die easy. It's not the muscle and the bones, it's