by Zane Grey
He glimpsed obliquely at her, his old face full of whimsical tenderness. She smiled bravely and he saw above the smile, her eyes, untouched by it. He instantly became grave.
“Well, what’s goin’ to happen?” he asked soberly.
“I’m going to be married.”
He raised his eyebrows and gave a whistle.
“That is somethin’! And which is it?”
“What a question! David, of course. Who else could it be?”
“Well, he’s the best,” he spoke slowly, with considering phlegm. “He’s a first-rate boy as far as he goes.”
“I don’t think that’s a very nice way to speak of him. Can’t you say something better?”
The old man looked over the mules’ backs for a moment of inward cogitation. He was not surprised at the news but he was surprised at something in his Missy’s manner, a lack of the joyfulness, that he, too, had thought an attribute of all intending brides.
“He’s a good boy,” he said thoughtfully. “No one can say he ain’t. But some way or other, I’d rather have had a bigger man for you, Missy.”
“Bigger!” she exclaimed indignantly. “He’s nearly six feet. And girls don’t pick out their husbands because of their height.”
“I ain’t meant it that way. Bigger in what’s in him—can get hold o’ more, got a bigger reach.”
“I don’t know what you mean. If you’re trying to say he’s not got a big mind you’re all wrong. He knows more than anybody I ever met except father. He’s read hundreds and hundreds of books.”
“That’s it—too many books. Books is good enough but they ain’t the right sort ’er meat for a feller that’s got to hit out for himself in a new country. They’re all right in the city where you got the butcher and the police and a kerosene lamp to read ’em by. David ’ud be a fine boy in the town just as his books is suitable in the town. But this ain’t the town. And the men that are the right kind out here ain’t particularly set on books. I’d ’a’ chose a harder feller for you, Missy, that could have stood up to anything and didn’t have no soft feelings to hamper him.”
“Rubbish,” she snapped. “Why don’t you encourage me?”
Her tone drew his eyes, sharp as a squirrel’s and charged with quick concern. Her face was partly turned away. The curve of her cheek was devoid of its usual dusky color, her fingers played on her under lip as if it were a little flute.
“What do you want to be encouraged for?” he said low, as if afraid of being overheard.
She did not move her head, but looked at the bluffs.
“I don’t know,” she answered, then hearing her—voice hoarse cleared her throat. “It’s all—so—so—sort of new. I—I—feel—I don’t know just how—I think it’s homesick.”
Her voice broke in a bursting sob. Her control gone, her pride fell with it. Wheeling on the seat she cast upon him a look of despairing appeal.
“Oh, Daddy John,” was all she could gasp, and then bent her head so that her hat might hide the shame of her tears.
He looked at her for a nonplused moment, at her brown arms bent over her shaken bosom, at the shield of her broken hat. He was thoroughly discomfited for he had not the least idea what was the matter. Then he shifted the reins to his left hand and edging near her laid his right on her knee.
“Don’t you want to marry him?” he said gently.
“It isn’t that, it’s something else.”
“What else? You can say anything you like to me. Ain’t I carried you when you were a baby?”
“I don’t know what it is.” Her voice came cut by sobbing breaths. “I don’t understand. It’s like being terribly lonesome.”
The old frontiersman had no remedy ready for this complaint. He, too, did not understand.
“Don’t you marry him if you don’t like him,” he said. “If you want to tell him so and you’re afraid, I’ll do it for you.”
“I do like him. It’s not that.”
“Well, then, what’s making you cry?”
“Something else, something way down deep that makes everything seem so far away and strange.”
He leaned forward and spat over the wheel, then subsided against the roof prop.
“Are you well?” he said, his imagination exhausted.
“Yes, very.”
Daddy John looked at the backs of the mules. The off leader was a capricious female by name Julia who required more management and coaxing than the other five put together, and whom he loved beyond them all. In his bewildered anxiety the thought passed through his mind that all creatures of the feminine gender, animal or human, were governed by laws inscrutable to the male, who might never aspire to comprehension and could only strive to please and placate.
A footfall struck on his ear and, thrusting his head beyond the canvas hood, he saw Leff loafing up from the rear.
“Saw her come in here,” thought the old man, drawing his head in, “and wants to hang round and snoop.”
Since the Indian episode he despised Leff. His contempt was unveiled, for the country lout who had shown himself a coward had dared to raise his eyes to the one star in Daddy John’s firmament. He would not have hidden his dislike if he could. Leff was of the outer world to which he relegated all men who showed fear or lied.
He turned to Susan:
“Go back in the wagon and lie down. Here comes Leff and I don’t want him to see you.”
The young girl thought no better of Leff than he did. The thought of being viewed in her abandonment by the despised youth made her scramble into the back of the wagon where she lay concealed on a pile of sacks. In the forward opening where the canvas was drawn in a circle round a segment of sky, Daddy John’s figure fitted like a picture in a circular frame. As a step paused at the wheel she saw him lean forward and heard his rough tones.
“Yes, she’s here, asleep in the back of the wagon.”
Then Leff’s voice, surprised:
“Asleep? Why, it ain’t an hour since we started.”
“Well, can’t she go to sleep in the morning if she wants? Don’t you go to sleep every Sunday under the wagon?”
“Yes, but that’s afternoon.”
“Mebbe, but everybody’s not as slow as you at getting at what they want.”
This appeared to put Susan’s retirement in a light that gave rise to pondering. There was a pause, then came the young man’s heavy footsteps slouching back to his wagon. Daddy John settled down on the seat.
“I’m almighty glad it weren’t him, Missy,” he said, over his shoulder. “I’d ’a’ known then why you cried.”
CHAPTER V
Late the same day Leff, who had been riding on the bluffs, came down to report a large train a few miles ahead of them. It was undoubtedly the long-looked-for New York Company.
The news was as a tonic to their slackened energies. A cheering excitement ran through the train. There was stir and loud talking. Its contagion lifted Susan’s spirits and with her father she rode on in advance, straining her eyes against the glare of the glittering river. Men and women, who daily crowded by them unnoted on city streets, now loomed in the perspective as objective points of avid interest. No party Susan had ever been to called forth such hopeful anticipation. To see her fellows, to talk with women over trivial things, to demand and give out the human sympathies she wanted and that had lain withering within herself, drew her from the gloom under which she had lain weeping in the back of Daddy John’s wagon.
They were nearing the Forks of the Platte where the air was dryly transparent and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a congeries of broken white dots on the river’s edge, they could hear the bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a woman’s voice.
It was like a handclasp across space. Drawing nearer the so
unds of men and life reached forward to meet them—laughter, the neighing of horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they still longed for.
The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day’s labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring, the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night’s bivouac. It shone bright on the darkness of the grass, a cordon of flame that some kindly magician had drawn about the resting place of the tired camp.
With the night pressing on its edges it was a tiny nucleus of life dropped down between the immemorial plains and the ancient river. Home was here in the pitched tents, a hearthstone in the flame lapping on the singed grass, humanity in the loud welcome that rose to meet the newcomers. The doctor had known but one member of the Company, its organizer, a farmer from the Mohawk Valley. But the men, dropping their ox yokes and water pails, crowded forward, laughing deep-mouthed greetings from the bush of their beards, and extending hands as hard as the road they had traveled.
The women were cooking. Like goddesses of the waste places they stood around the fires, a line of half-defined shapes. Films of smoke blew across them, obscured and revealed them, and round about them savory odors rose. Fat spit in the pans, coffee bubbled in blackened pots, and strips of buffalo meat impaled on sticks sent a dribble of flame to the heat. The light was strong on their faces, lifted in greeting, lips smiling, eyes full of friendly curiosity. But they did not move from their posts for they were women and the men and the children were waiting to be fed.
Most of them were middle-aged, or the trail had made them look middle-aged. A few were very old. Susan saw a face carved with seventy years of wrinkles mumbling in the framing folds of a shawl. Nearby, sitting on the dropped tongue of a wagon, a girl of perhaps sixteen, sat ruminant, nursing a baby. Children were everywhere, helping, fighting, rolling on the grass. Babies lay on spread blankets with older babies sitting by to watch. It was the woman’s hour. The day’s march was over, but the intimate domestic toil was at its height. The home makers were concentrated upon their share of the activities—cooking food, making the shelter habitable, putting their young to bed.
Separated from Susan by a pile of scarlet embers stood a young girl, a large spoon in her hand. The light shot upward along the front of her body, painting with an even red glow her breast, her chin, the under side of her nose and finally transforming into a coppery cloud the bright confusion of her hair. She smiled across the fire and said:
“I’m glad you’ve come. We’ve been watching for you ever since we struck the Platte. There aren’t any girls in the train. I and my sister are the youngest except Mrs. Peebles over there,” with a nod in the direction of the girl on the wagon tongue, “and she’s married.”
The woman beside her, who had been too busy over the bacon pan to raise her head, now straightened herself, presenting to Susan’s eye a face more buxom and mature but so like that of the speaker that it was evident they were sisters. A band of gold gleamed on her wedding finger and her short skirt and loose calico jacket made no attempt to hide the fact that another baby was soon to be added to the already well-supplied train. She smiled a placid greeting and her eye, lazily sweeping Susan, showed a healthy curiosity tempered by the self-engrossed indifference of the married woman to whom the outsider, even in the heart of the wilderness, is forever the outsider.
“Lucy’ll be real glad to have a friend,” she said. “She’s lonesome. Turn the bacon, Lucy, it makes my back ache to bend”; and as the sister bowed over the frying pan, “move, children, you’re in the way.”
This was directed to two children who lay on the grass by the fire, with blinking eyes, already half asleep. As they did not immediately obey she assisted them with a large foot, clad in a man’s shoe. The movement though peremptory was not rough. It had something of the quality of the mother tiger’s admonishing pats to her cubs, a certain gentleness showing through force. The foot propelled the children into a murmurous drowsy heap. One of them, a little girl with a shock of white hair and a bunch of faded flowers wilting in her tight baby grasp, looked at her mother with eyes glazed with sleep, a deep look as though her soul was gazing back from the mysteries of unconsciousness.
“Now lie there till you get your supper,” said the mother, having by gradual pressure pried them out of the way. “And you,” to Susan, “better bring your things over and camp here and use our fire. We’ve nearly finished with it.”
In the desolation of the morning Susan had wished for a member of her own sex, not to confide in but to feel that there was some one near, who, if she did know, could understand. Now here were two. Their fresh, simple faces on which an artless interest was so naïvely displayed, their pleasant voices, not cultured as hers was but women’s voices for all that, gave her spirits a lift. Her depression quite dropped away, the awful lonely feeling, all the more whelming because nobody could understand it, departed from her. She ran back to the camp singing and for the first time that day looked at David, whose presence she had shunned, with her old, brilliant smile.
An hour later and the big camp rested, relaxed in the fading twilight that lay a yellow thread of separation between the day’s high colors and the dewless darkness of the night. It was like a scene from the migrations of the ancient peoples when man wandered with a woman, a tent, and a herd. The barrier of the wagons, with its girdle of fire sparks, incased a grassy oval green as a lawn. Here they sat in little groups, collecting in tent openings as they were wont to collect on summer nights at front gates and piazza steps. The crooning of women putting babies to sleep fell in with the babblings of the river. The men smoked in silence. Nature had taught them something of her large reticence in their day-long companionship. Some few lounged across the grass to have speech of the pilot, a grizzled mountain man, who had been one of the Sublette’s trappers, and had wise words to say of the day’s travel and the promise of the weather. But most of them lay on the grass by the tents where they could see the stars through their pipe smoke and hear the talk of their wives and the breathing of the children curled in the blankets.
A youth brought an accordion from his stores and, sitting cross-legged on the ground, began to play. He played “Annie Laurie,” and a woman’s voice, her head a black outline against the west, sang the words. Then there was a clamor of applause, sounding thin and futile in the evening’s suave quietness, and the player began a Scotch reel in the production of which the accordion uttered asthmatic gasps as though unable to keep up with its own proud pace. The tune was sufficiently good to inspire a couple of dancers. The young girl called Lucy rose with a partner—her brother-in-law some one told Susan—and facing one another, hand on hip, heads high, they began to foot it lightly over the blackening grass.
Seen thus Lucy was handsome, a tall, long-limbed sapling of a girl, with a flaming crest of copper-colored hair and movements as lithe and supple as a cat’s. She danced buoyantly, without losing breath, advancing and retreating with mincing steps, her face grave as though the performance had its own dignity and was not to be taken lightly. Her partner, a tanned and long-haired man, took his part in a livelier spirit, laughing at her, bending his body grotesquely and growing red with his caperings. Meanwhile from the tent door the wife looked on and Susan heard her say to the doctor with whom she had been conferring:
“And when will it be my turn to dance the reel again? There wasn’t a girl in the town could dance it with me.”
Her voice was weighted with the wistfulness of the woman whose endless patience battles with her unwilling
ness to be laid by.
Susan saw David’s fingers feeling in the grass for her hand. She gave it, felt the hard stress of his grip, and conquered her desire to draw the hand away. All her coquetry was gone. She was cold and subdued. The passionate hunger of his gaze made her feel uncomfortable. She endured it for a space and then said with an edge of irritation on her voice:
“What are you staring at me for? Is there something on my face?”
He breathed in a roughened voice:
“No, I love you.”
Her discomfort increased. Tumult and coldness make uncongenial neighbors. The man, all passion, and the woman, who has no answering spark, grope toward each other through devious and unillumined ways.
He whispered again:
“I love you so. You don’t understand.”
She did not and looked at him inquiringly, hoping to learn something from his face. His eyes, meeting hers, were full of tears. It surprised her so that she stared speechlessly at him, her head thrown back, her lips parted.
He looked down, ashamed of his emotion, murmuring:
“You don’t understand. It’s so sacred. Some day you will.”
She did not speak to him again, but she let him hold her hand because she thought she ought to and because she was sorry.
CHAPTER VI
The next morning the rain was pouring. The train rolled out without picturesque circumstance, the men cursing, the oxen, with great heads swinging under the yokes, plodding doggedly through lakes fretted with the downpour. Breakfast was a farce; nobody’s fire would burn and the women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two provident parties had stoves fitted up in their wagons with a joint of pipe coming out through holes in the canvas. From these, wafts of smoke issued with jaunty assurance, to be beaten down by the rain, which swept them fiercely out of the landscape.
There was no perspective, the distance invisible, nearer outlines blurred. The world was a uniform tint, walls of gray marching in a slant across a foreground embroidered with pools. Water ran, or dripped, or stood everywhere. The river, its surface roughened by the spit of angry drops, ran swollen among its islands, plumed shapes seen mistily through the veil. The road emerged in oases of mud from long, inundated spaces. Down the gullies in the hills, following the beaten buffalo tracks, streams percolated through the grass of the bottom, feeling their way to the river.
