The Emigrant Trail Part 4

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 gra.s.s. 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 brus.h.i.+ng of a beloved hand. Sometimes they walked, dipped into hollows where the wattled huts of the Indians edged a creek, noted the pa.s.sage of earlier trains in the cropped gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sisted 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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, would you believe it, I gathered up all those pennies before I ran and just had time to scramble over a fence."

It was impossible not to laugh, especially with her laughter leading, her eyes narrowed to cracks through which light and humor sparkled at him.

He was beginning to know Miss Gillespie--"Miss Susan" he called her--very well. It was just like his dream, riding beside her every day, and growing more friendly, the spell of her youth, and her dark bloom, and her attentive eyes--for she was an admirable listener if her answers sometimes lacked point--drawing from him secret thoughts and hopes and aspirations he had never dared to tell before. If she did not understand him she did not laugh at him, which was enough for David with the sleepy whisperings of the prairie around him, and new, strange matter stirring in his heart and making him bold.

There was only one thing about her that was disappointing. He did not admit it to himself but it kept falling on their interviews with a depressive effect. To the call of beauty she remained unmoved. If he drew up his horse to gaze on the wonders of the sunset the waiting made her impatient. He had noticed that heat and mosquitoes would distract her attention from the hazy distances drowsing in the clear yellow of noon. The sky could flush and deepen in majestic splendors, but if she was busy over the fire and her skillets she never raised her head to look. And so it was with poetry. She did not know and did not care anything about the fine frenzies of the masters. Byron?--wrinkling up her forehead--yes, she thought she'd read something in school.

Sh.e.l.ley?--"The Ode to the West Wind?" No, she'd never read that. What was an ode anyway? Once he recited the "Lines to an Indian Air," his voice trembling a little, for the words were almost sacred.

She pondered for a s.p.a.ce and then said:

"What are champak odors?"

David didn't know. He had never thought of inquiring.

"Isn't that odd," she murmured. "That would have been the first thing I would have wanted to know. Champak? I suppose it's some kind of a flower--something like a magnolia. It has a sound like a magnolia."

A lively imagination was evidently not one of Miss Gillespie's possessions.

Late one afternoon, riding some distance in front of the train, she and David had seen an Indian loping by on his pony. It was not an unusual sight. Many Indians had visited their camp and at the crossing of the Kaw they had come upon an entire village in transit to the summer hunting grounds. But there was something in this lone figure, moving solitary through the evening glow, that put him in accord with the landscape's solemn beauty, retouched him with his lost magnificence.

In buckskins black with filth, his blanket a tattered rag, an ancient rifle across his saddle, the undying picturesqueness of the red man was his.

"Look," said David, his imagination fired. "Look at that Indian."

The savage saw them and turned a face of melancholy dignity upon them, giving forth a deep "How, How."

"He's a very dirty Indian," said Susan, sweeping him with a glance of disfavor.

David did not hear her. He looked back to watch the lonely figure as it rode away over the swells. It seemed to him to be riding into the past, the lordly past, when the red man owned the land and the fruits thereof.

"Look at him as he rides away," he said. "Can't you seem to see him coming home from a battle with his face streaked with vermilion and his war bonnet on? He'd be solemn and grand with the wet scalps dripping at his belt. When they saw him coming his squaws would come out in front of the lodges and begin to sing the war chant."

"Squaws!" in a tone of disgust. "That's as bad as the Mormons."

The muse had possession of David and a regard for monogamy was not sufficient to stay his n.o.ble rage.

"And think how he felt! All this was his, the pale face hadn't come.

He'd fought his enemies for it and driven them back. In the cool of the evening when he was riding home he could look out for miles and miles, clear to the horizon, and know he was the King of it all. Just think what it was to feel like that! And far away he could see the smoke of his village and know that they were waiting for the return of the chief."

"Chief!" with even greater emphasis, "that poor dirty creature a _chief_!"

The muse relinquished her hold. The young man explained, not with impatience, but as one mortified by a betrayal into foolish enthusiasm:

"I didn't mean that _he_ was a chief. I was just imagining."

"Oh," with the falling inflexion of comprehension. "You often imagine, don't you? Let's ride on to where the road goes down into that hollow."

They rode on in silence, both slightly chagrined, for if David found it trying to have his fine flights checked, Susan was annoyed when she said things that made him wear a look of forbearing patience. She may not have had much imagination, but she had a very observing eye, and could have startled not only David, but her father by the shrewdness with which she read faces.

The road sloped to a hollow where the mottled trunks of cotton woods stood in a group round the dimpling face of a spring. With well-moistened roots the gra.s.s grew long and rich. Here was the place for the night's camp. They would wait till the train came up. And even as they rested on this comfortable thought they saw between the leaves the canvas top of a wagon.