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

an infinitesimal flutter between the blaze of the sky and the purpling levels of the earth. Her arm dropped, her signal fallen futile on the plain's ironic indifference.

During the next day's march she constantly looked back, and several times halted, her hand demanding silence as if she were listening for pursuing footsteps. Courant hid a growing irritation, which once escaped him in a query as to whether she thought David, if he got away from the Indians, could possibly catch them up. She answered that if he had escaped with a horse he might, and fell again to her listening and watching. At the night camp she ordered Daddy John to build the beacon fire higher than ever, and taking a rifle moved along the outskirts of the light firing into the darkness. Finally, standing with the gun caught in the crook of her arm, she sent up a shrill call of "David." The cry fell into the silence, cleaving it with a note of wild and haunting appeal. Courant went after her and brought her back. When they returned to the fire the old man, who was busy with the cooking, looked up to speak but instead gazed in silence, caught by something unusual in their aspect, revivifying, illuminating, like the radiance of an inner glow. It glorified the squalor of their clothing, the drawn fatigue of their faces. It gave them the fleeting glamour of spiritual beauty that comes to those in whom being has reached its highest expression, the perfect moment of completion caught amid life's incompleteness.

In the following days she moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life. She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David, had been so persistently lively, now, when it came to herself, was dead. Question of right or wrong, secret communings, self judgment, had no place in the exaltation of her mood. To look at her conduct and reason of it, to do anything but feel, was as impossible for her as it would have been to disengage her senses from their tranced concentration and restore them to the composed serenity of the past.

It was not the sudden crumbling of a character, the collapse of a structure reared on a foundation of careful training. It was a logical growth, forced by the developing process of an environment with which that character was in harmony. Before she reached the level where she could surrender herself, forgetful of the rites imposed by law, unshocked by her lover's brutality, she had been losing every ingrafted and inherited modification that had united her with the world in which she had been an exotic. The trials of the trail that would have dried the soul and broken the mettle of a girl whose womanhood was less rich, drew from hers the full measure of its strength. Every day had made her less a being of calculated, artificial reserves, of inculcated modesties, and more a human animal, governed by instincts that belonged to her age and sex. She was normal and chaste and her chastity had made her shrink from the man whose touch left her cold, and yield to the one to whom her first antagonism had been first response. When she had given Courant her kiss she had given herself. There was no need for intermediary courtship. After that vacillations of doubt and conscience ended. The law of her being was all that remained.

She moved on with the men, dust-grimed, her rags held together with pins and lacings of deer hide. She performed her share of the work with automatic thoroughness, eating when the hour came, sleeping on the ground under the stars, staggering up in the deep-blue dawn and buckling her horse's harness with fingers that fatigue made clumsy. She was more silent than ever before, often when the old man addressed her making no reply. He set down her abstraction to grief over David. When he tried to cheer her, her absorbed preoccupation gave place to the old restlessness, and once again she watched and listened. These were her only moods--periods of musing when she rode in front of the wagon with vacant eyes fixed on the winding seam of the trail, and periods of nervous agitation when she turned in her saddle to sweep the road behind her and ordered him to build the night fire high and bright.

The old servant was puzzled. Something foreign in her, an inner vividness of life, a deeper current of vitality, told him that this was not a woman preyed upon by a gnawing grief. He noted, without understanding, a change in her bearing to Courant and his to her. Without words to give it expression he saw in her attitude to the leader a pliant, docile softness, a surreptitious leap of light in the glance that fell upon him in quick welcome before her lids shut it in. With Courant the change showed in a possessive tenderness, a brooding concern. When, at the morning start, he waited as she rode toward him, his face was irradiated with a look that made the old man remember the dead loves of his youth. It was going to be all right Daddy John thought. David gone, whether forever or for an unknown period, the mountain man might yet win her. And then again the old man fell a wondering at something in them that did not suggest the unassured beginnings of courtship, a settled security of relation as of complete unity in a mutual enterprise.

One afternoon a faint spot of green rose and lingered on the horizon. They thought it a mirage and watched it with eyes grown weary of the desert's delusions. But as the road bore toward it, it steadied to their anxious gaze, expanded into a patch that lay a living touch on the earth's dead face. By the time that dusk gathered they saw that it was trees and knew that Humboldt was in sight. At nightfall they reached it, the first outpost sent into the wilderness by the new country. The red light of fires came through the dusk like a welcoming hail from that unknown land which was to be theirs. After supper Daddy John and Courant left the girl and went to the mud house round which the camps clustered. The darkness was diluted by the red glow of fires and astir with dusky figures. There were trains for California and Oregon and men from the waste lands to the eastward and the south, flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the desert's shore. Inside, where the air was thick with smoke and the reek of raw liquors, they heard again the great news from California. The old man, determined to get all the information he could, moved from group to group, an observant listener in the hubbub. Presently his ear was caught by a man who declared he had been on the gold river and was holding a circle in thrall by his tales. Daddy John turned to beckon to Courant and, not seeing him, elbowed his way through the throng spying to right and left. But the mountain man had gone. Daddy John went back to the gold seeker and drew him dry of information, then foregathered with a thin individual who had a humorous eye and was looking on from a corner. This stranger introduced himself as a clergyman, returning from the East to Oregon by way of California. They talked together. Daddy John finding his new acquaintance a tolerant cheery person versed in the lore of the trail. The man gave him many useful suggestions for the last lap of the journey and he decided to go after Courant, to whom the route over the Sierra was unknown ground.

The camps had sunk to silence, the women and children asleep. He skirted their tents, bending his course to where he saw the hood of his own wagon and the shadowy forms of Julia and her mates. The fire still burned bright and on its farther side he could make out the figures of Susan and Courant seated on the ground. They were quiet, the girl sitting with her feet tucked under her, idly throwing scraps of sage on the blaze. He was about to hail Courant when he saw him suddenly drop to a reclining posture beside her, draw himself along the earth and curl about her, his elbow on the ground, his head propped on a sustaining hand. With the other he reached forward, caught Susan's and drawing it toward him pressed it against his cheek. Daddy John watched the sacrilegious act with starting eyes. He would have burst in upon them had he not seen the girl's shy smile, and her body gently droop forward till her lips rested on the mountain man's. When she drew back the old servant came forward into the light. Its reflection hid his pallor, but his heart was thumping like a hammer and his throat was dry, for suddenly he understood. At his step Susan drew away from her companion and looked at the advancing shape with eyes darkly soft as those of an antelope.

"Where have you been?" she said. "You were a long time away."

"In the mud house," said Daddy John.

"Did you find anyone interesting there?"

"Yes. When I was talkin' with him I didn't know he was so powerful interestin', but sence I come out o' there I've decided he was."

They both looked at him without much show of curiosity, merely, he guessed, that they might not look at each other and reveal their secret.

"What was he?" asked Courant.

"A clergyman."

This time they both started, the girl into sudden erectness, then held her head down as if in shame. For a sickened moment, he thought she was afraid to look at her lover for fear of seeing refusal in his face. Courant leaned near her and laid his hand on hers.

"If there's a clergyman here we can be married," he said quietly.

She drew her hand away and with its fellow covered her face. Courant looked across the fire and said:

"Go and get him, Daddy John. He can do the reading over us now."


END OF PART IV


PART V


The Promised Land

CHAPTER I

In the light of a clear September sun they stood and looked down on it--the Promised Land.

For days they had been creeping up through defiles in the mountain wall, crawling along ledges with murmurous seas of pine below and the snow lying crisp in the hollows. On the western slope the great bulwark dropped from granite heights to wooded ridges along the spines of which the road wound. Through breaks in the pine's close ranks they saw blue, vaporous distances, and on the far side of aerial chasms the swell of other mountains, clothed to their summits, shape undulating beyond shape.

Then on this bright September afternoon a sun-filled pallor of empty space shone between the tree trunks, and they had hurried to the summit of