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

enter into the conversation, and it seemed to David, who now and then stole a shy look at her to see if she was impressed by his intelligent comments, that she did not listen. Once or twice, when the talk was at its acutest point of interest, she struck her horse and left them, dashing on ahead at a gallop. At another time she dropped behind, and his ear, trained in her direction, heard her voice in alternation with Daddy John's. When she joined them after this withdrawal she was bright eyed and excited.

"Father," she called as she came up at a sharp trot, "Daddy John says the prairie's not far beyond. He says we'll see it soon--the prairie that I've been thinking of all winter!"

Her enthusiasm leaped to David and he forgot the Mexican boundaries and the polygamous Mormons, and felt like a discoverer on the prow of a ship whose keel cuts unknown seas. For the prairie was still a word of wonder. It called up visions of huge unpeopled spaces, of the flare of far flung sunsets, of the plain blackening with the buffalo, of the smoke wreath rising from the painted tepee, and the Indian, bronzed and splendid, beneath his feathered crest.

"It's there," she cried, pointing with her whip. "I can't wait. I'm going on."

David longed to go with her, but the doctor was deep in the extension of slavery and of all the subjects this burned deepest. The prairie was interesting but not when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was on the carpet. Watching the girl's receding shape, David listened respectfully and heard of the dangers and difficulties that were sure to follow on the acquisition of the great strip of Mexican territory.

All afternoon they had been passing through woods, the remnant of that mighty forest which had once stretched from the Missouri to the Alleghenies. Now its compact growth had become scattered and the sky, flaming toward sunset, shone between the tree trunks. The road ascended a slight hill and at the top of this Miss Gillespie appeared and beckoned to them. As they drew near she turned and made a sweeping gesture toward the prospect. The open prairie lay before them.

No one spoke. In mute wonderment they gazed at a country that was like a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or gathered in clusters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other pools. They shone, a line of glistening disks, imbedded in the green. Space that seemed to stretch to the edges of the world, the verdure of Eden, the silence of the unpolluted, unconquered earth were here.

So must it have looked when the beaked Viking ships nosed along the fretted shores of Rhode Island, when Columbus took the sea in his high-pooped caravals, when the Pilgrims saw the rocks and naked boughs of the New England coast. So it had been for centuries, roamed by wild men who had perished from its face and left no trace, their habitation as a shadow in the sun, their work as dew upon the grass, their lives as the lives of the mayfly against its immemorial antiquity.

The young man felt his spirit mount in a rush of exaltation like a prayer. Some fine and exquisite thing in himself leaped out in wild response. The vision and the dream were for a moment his. And in that moment life, all possible, all perfect, stretched before him, to end in a triumphant glory like the sunset.

The doctor took off his hat.

"The heavens declare the glory of God. All the earth doth magnify his name," he said in a low voice.


CHAPTER V


A broken line of moving dots, the little company trailed a slow way across this ocean of green. Nothing on its face was more insignificant than they. The birds in the trees and the bees in the flowers had a more important place in its economy. One afternoon David riding in the rear crested a ridge and saw them a mile in advance, the road stretching before and behind them in a curving thread. The tops of the wagons were like the backs of creeping insects, the mounted figures, specks of life that raised a slight tarnish of dust on the golden clearness. He wondered at their lack of consequence, unregarded particles of matter toiling across the face of the world.

This was what they suggested viewed largely from the distance. Close at hand--one of them--and it was a very different matter. They enjoyed it. If they were losing their significance as man in the aggregate, the tamer, and master, they were gaining a new importance as distinct and separate units. Convention no longer pressed on them. What law there was they carried with them, bore it before them into the wilderness like the Ark of the Covenant. But nobody wanted to be unlawful. There was no temptation to be so. Envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness had been left behind in the cities. They were a very cheerful company, suffering a little from fatigue, and with now and then a faint brush of bad temper to put leaven into the dough.

There was a Biblical simplicity in their life. They had gone back to the era when man was a nomad, at night pitching his tent by the water hole, and sleeping on skins beside the fire. When the sun rose over the rim of the prairie the camp was astir. When the stars came out in the deep blue night they sat by the cone of embers, not saying much, for in the open, spoken words lose their force and the human creature becomes a silent animal.

Each day's march was a slow, dogged, progression, broken by fierce work at the fords. The dawn was the beautiful time when the dew was caught in frosted webs on the grass. The wings of the morning were theirs as they rode over the long green swells where the dog roses grew and the leaves of the sage palpitated to silver like a woman's body quivering to the brushing of a beloved hand. Sometimes they walked, dipped into hollows where the wattled huts of the Indians edged a creek, noted the passage of earlier trains in the cropped grass at the spring mouth and the circles of dead fires.

In the afternoons it grew hot. The train, deliberate and determined as a tortoise, moved through a shimmer of light. The drone of insect voices rose in a sleepy chorus and the men drowsed in the wagons. Even the buoyant life of the young girl seemed to feel the stupefying weight of the prairie's deep repose. She rode at a foot pace, her hat hanging by its strings to the pommel, her hair pushed back from her beaded forehead, not bothering about her curls now.

Then came the wild blaze of the sunset and the pitching of the camp, and after supper the rest by the fire with pipe smoke in the air, and overhead the blossoming of the stars.

They were wonderful stars, troops and troops of them, dust of myriad, unnumbered worlds, and the white lights of great, bold planets staring at ours. David wondered what it looked like from up there. Was it as large, or were we just a tiny, twinkling point too? From city streets the stars had always chilled him by their awful suggestion of worlds beyond worlds circling through gulfs of space. But here in the primordial solitudes, under the solemn cope of the sky, the thought lost its terror. He seemed in harmony with the universe, part of it as was each speck of star dust. Without question or understanding he felt secure, convinced of his oneness with the great design, cradled in its infinite care.

One evening while thus dreaming he caught Susan's eye full of curious interest like a watching child's.

"What are you thinking of?" she asked.

"The stars," he answered. "They used to frighten me."

She looked from him to the firmament as if to read a reason for his fear:

"Frighten you? Why?"

"There were so many of them, thousands and millions, wandering about up there. It was so awful to think of them, how they'd been swinging round forever and would keep on forever. And maybe there were people on some of them, and what it all was for."

She continued to look up and then said indifferently:

"It doesn't seem to me to matter much."

"It used to make me feel that nothing was any use. As if I was just a grain of dust."

Her eyes came slowly down and rested on him in a musing gaze.

"A grain of dust. I never felt that way. I shouldn't think you'd like it, but I don't see why you were afraid."

David felt uncomfortable. She was so exceedingly practical and direct that he had an unpleasant feeling she would set him down as a coward, who went about under the fear that a meteor might fall on him and strike him dead. He tried to explain:

"Not afraid actually, just sort of frozen by the idea of it all. It's so--immense, so--so crushing and terrible."

Her gaze continued, a questioning quality entering it. This gained in force by a slight tilting of her head to one side. David began to fear her next question. It might show that she regarded him not only as a coward but also as a fool.

"Perhaps you don't understand," he hazarded timidly.

"I don't think I do," she answered, then dropped her eyes and added after a moment of pondering, "I can't remember ever being really afraid of anything."

Had it been daylight she would have noticed that the young man colored. He thought guiltily of certain haunting fears of his childhood, ghosts in the attic, a banshee of which he had once heard a fearsome story, a cow that had chased him on the farm. She unconsciously assisted him from this slough of shame by saying suddenly:

"Oh, yes, I can. I remember now. I'm afraid of mad dogs."

It was not very comforting for, after all, everybody was afraid of mad dogs.

"And there was a reason for that," she went on. "I was frightened by a mad dog when I was a little girl eight years old. I was going out to spend some of my allowance. I got twenty cents a month and I had it all in pennies. And suddenly there was a great commotion in the street, everybody running and screaming and rushing into doorways. I didn't know what was the matter but I was startled and dropped my pennies. And just as I stooped to pick them up I saw the dog coming toward me, tearing, with its tongue hanging out. And,