The Emigrant Trail Part 28

"She's gone out into the mountains with her lover. I don't call that unfortunate, and I'll bet you she doesn't. She was brave enough to take her life when it came. She was a gallant girl, that Lucy."

"I suppose that's what you'd think."

And in scorn of more words she gave her attention to her skirt, spreading its sodden folds to the heat. Courant clasped his hands behind his head and gazed ruminantly before him.

"Do you know how she'll live, that 'poor Lucy'?"

"Like a squaw."

He was unshaken by her contempt, did not seem to notice it.

"They'll go by ways that wind deep into the mountains. It's wonderful there, peaks and peaks and peaks, and down the gorges and up over the pa.s.ses, the trails go that only the trappers and the Indians know.

They'll pa.s.s lakes as smooth as gla.s.s and green as this hollow we're in. You never saw such lakes, everything's reflected in them like a mirror. And after a while they'll come to the beaver streams and Zavier'll set his traps. At night they'll sleep under the stars, great big stars. Did you ever see the stars at night through the branches of the pine trees? They look like lanterns. It'll seem to be silent, but the night will be full of noises, the sounds that come in those wild places, a wolf howling in the distance, the little secret bubbling of the spring, and the wind in the pine trees. That's a sad sound, as if it was coming through a dream."

The girl stirred and forgot her skirt. The solemn beauty that his words conjured up called her from her petty irritation. She looked at the mountains, her face full of a wistful disquiet.

"And it'll seem as if there was no one else but them in the world. Two lovers and no one else, between the sunrise and the sunset. There won't be anybody else to matter, or to look for, or to think about.

Just those two alone, all day by the river where the traps are set and at night under the blanket in the dark of the trees."

Susan said nothing. For some inexplicable reason her spirits sank and she felt a bleak loneliness. A sense of insignificance fell heavily upon her, bearing down her high sufficiency, making her feel that she was a purposeless spectator on the outside of life. She struggled against it, struggled back toward cheer and self-a.s.sertion, and in her effort to get back, found herself seeking news of less picturesque moments in Lucy's lot.

"But the winter," she said in a small voice like a pleading child's, "the winter won't be like that?"

"When the winter comes Zavier'll build a hut. He'll make it out of small trees, long and thin, bent round with their tops stuck in the ground, and he'll thatch it with skins, and spread buffalo robes on the floor of it. There'll be a hole for the smoke to get out, and near the door'll be his graining block and stretching frame to cure his skins.

On a tree nearby he'll hang his traps, and there'll be a brace of elkhorns fastened to another tree that they'll use for a rack to hang the meat and maybe their clothes on. They'll have some coffee and sugar and salt. That's all they'll need in the way of eatables, for he'll shoot all the game they want, _les aliments du pays_, as the fur men call it. It'll be cold, and maybe for months they'll see no one.

But what will it matter? They'll have each other, snug and warm way off there in the heart of the mountains, with the big peaks looking down at them. Isn't that a good life for a man and a woman?"

She did not answer, but sat as if contemplating the picture with fixed, far-seeing gaze. He raised himself on his elbow and looked at her.

"Could you do that, little lady?" he said.

"No," she answered, beating down rebellious inner whisperings.

"Wouldn't you follow David that way?"

"David wouldn't ask it. No civilized man would."

"No, David wouldn't," he said quietly.

She glanced quickly at him. Did she hear the note of mockery which she sensed whenever he alluded to her lover? She was ready at once to take up arms for David, but the face opposite was devoid of any expression save an intent, expectant interest. She dropped her eyes to her dress, perturbed by the closeness of her escape from a foolish exhibition which would have made her ridiculous. She always felt with Courant that she would be swept aside as a trivial thing if she lost her dignity. He watched her and she grew nervous, plucking at her skirt with an uncertain hand.

"I wonder if you could?" he said after a pause.

"Of course not," she snapped.

"Aren't you enough of a woman?"

"I'm not enough of a fool."

"Aren't all women in love fools--anyway for a while?"

She made no answer, and presently he said, his voice lowered:

"Not enough of a woman to know how to love a man. Doesn't even for a moment understand it. It's 'poor Susan.'"

Fury seized her, for she had not guessed where he was leading her, and now saw herself not only shorn of her dignity but shorn of her woman's prerogative of being able to experience a mad and unreasonable pa.s.sion.

"You're a liar," she burst out before she knew what words were coming.

"Then you think you could?" he asked without the slightest show of surprise at her violence, apparently only curious.

"Don't I?" she cried, ready to proclaim that she would follow David to destruction and death.

"I don't know," he answered. "I've been wondering."

"What business have you got to wonder about me?"

"None--but," he leaned toward her, "you can't stop me doing that, little lady; that's one of the things you _can't_ control."

For a moment they eyed each other, glance held glance in a smoldering challenge. The quizzical patronage had gone from his, the gleam of a subdued defiance taken its place. Hers was defiant too, but it was openly so, a surface thing that she had raised like a defense in haste and tremor to hide weakness.

David moved in his blanket, yawned and threw out a languid hand. She leaped to her feet and ran to him.

"David, are you better?" she cried, kneeling beside him. "Are you better, dear?"

He opened his eyes, blinking, saw the beloved face, and smiled.

"All right," he said sleepily. "I was only tired."

She lifted one of the limp hands and pressed it to her cheek.

"I've been so worried about you," she purred. "I couldn't put my mind on anything else. I haven't known what I was saying, I've been so worried."

CHAPTER VI

South Pa.s.s, that had been pictured in their thoughts as a cleft between snow-crusted summits, was a wide, gentle incline with low hills sweeping up on either side. From here the waters ran westward, following the sun.

Pacific Spring seeped into the ground in an oasis of green whence whispering threads felt their way into the tawny silence and subdued by its weight lost heart and sank into the unrecording earth.

Here they found the New York Company and a Mormon train filling up their water casks and growing neighborly in talk of Sublette's cut off and the route by the Big and Little Sandy. A man was a man even if he was a Mormon, and in a country so intent on its own destiny, so rapt in the calm of contemplation, he took his place as a human unit on whom his creed hung like an unnoticed tag.

They filled their casks, visited in the two camps, and then moved on.

Plain opened out of plain in endless rotation, rings of sun-scorched earth brushed up about the horizon in a low ridge like the raised rim on a plate. In the distance the thin skein of a water course drew an intricate pattern that made them think of the thread of slime left by a wandering snail. In depressions where the soil was webbed with cracks, a livid scurf broke out as if the face of the earth were scarred with the traces of inextinguishable foulness. An even subdual of tint marked it all. White had been mixed on the palette whence the colors were drawn.

The sky was opaque with it; it had thickened the red-browns and yellows to ocher and pale shades of putty. Nothing moved and there were no sounds, only the wheeling sun changed the course of the shadows. In the morning they slanted from the hills behind, eagerly stretching after the train, straining to overtake and hold it, a living plaything in this abandoned land. At midday a blot of black lay at the root of every sage brush. At evening each filigreed ridge, each solitary cone rising detached in the sealike circle of its loneliness, showed a slant of amethyst at its base, growing longer and finer, tapering prodigiously, and turning purple as the earth turned orange.

There was little speech in the moving caravan. With each day their words grew fewer, their laughter and light talk dwindled. Gradual changes had crept into the spirit of the party. Acc.u.mulations of habit and custom that had collected upon them in the dense life of towns were dropping away. As the surface refinements of language were dying, so their faces had lost a certain facile play of expression. Delicate nuances of feeling no longer showed, for they no longer existed. Smiles had grown rarer, and harder characteristics were molding their features into sterner lines. The acquired deceptiveness of the world of men was leaving them. Ugly things that they once would have hidden cropped out unchecked by pride or fear of censure. They did not care. There was no standard, there was no public opinion. Life was resolving itself into a few great needs that drove out all lesser and more delicate desires.