by Zane Grey
“That’s a long time off.”
“I suppose so—a year or two.”
“A year or two!” he laughed with a careless jovial note. “Oh, you belong to the old towns back there,” with a jerk of his head toward the rear. “In the wilderness we don’t have such long courtships.”
“We? Who are we?”
“The mountain men, the trappers, the voyageurs.”
“Yes,” she said, her tone flashing into sudden scorn, “they marry squaws.”
At this the man threw back his head and burst into a laugh, so deep, so rich, so exuberantly joyous, that it fell upon the plain’s grim silence with the incongruous contrast of sunshine on the dust of a dungeon. She sat upright with her anger boiling toward expression. Before she realized it he had leaned forward and laid his hand on the pommel of her saddle, his face still red and wrinkled with laughter.
“That’s all right, little lady, but you don’t know quite all about us.”
“I know enough,” she answered.
“Before you get to California you’ll know more. There’s a mountain man and a voyageur now in the train. Do you think Zavier and I have squaw wives?”
With the knowledge that Zavier was just then so far from contemplating union with a squaw, she could not say the contemptuous “yes” that was on her tongue. As for the strange man—she shot a glance at him and met the gray eyes still twinkling with amusement. “Savage!” she thought, “I’ve no doubt he has”—and she secretly felt a great desire to know. What she said was, “I’ve never thought of it, and I haven’t the least curiosity about it.”
They rode on in silence, then he said,
“What’s made you mad?”
“Mad? I’m not mad.”
“Not at all?”
“No. Why should I be?”
“That’s what I want to know. You don’t like me, little lady, is that it?”
“I neither like nor dislike you. I don’t think of you.”
She immediately regretted the words. She was so completely a woman, so dowered with the instinct of attraction, that she realized they were not the words of indifference.
“My thoughts are full of other people,” she said hastily, trying to amend the mistake, and that was spoiled by a rush of color that suddenly dyed her face.
She looked over the horse’s head, her anger now turned upon herself. The man made no answer, but she knew that he was watching her. They paced on for a silent moment then he said:
“Why are you blushing?”
“I am not,” she cried, feeling the color deepening.
“You’ve told two lies,” he answered. “You said you weren’t angry, and you’re mad all through, and now you say you’re not blushing, and your face is as pink as one of those little flat roses that grow on the prairie. It’s all right to get mad and blush, but I’d like to know why you do it. I made you mad someway or other, I don’t know how. Have I made you blush, too?” he leaned nearer trying to look at her. “How’d I do that?”
She had a sidelong glimpse of his face, quizzical, astonished, full of piqued interest. She struggled with the mortification of a petted child, suddenly confronted by a stranger who finds its caprices only ridiculous and displeasing. Under the new sting of humiliation she writhed, burning to retaliate and make him see the height of her pedestal.
“Yes, I have told two lies,” she said. “I was angry and I am blushing, and it’s because I’m in a rage with you.”
The last touch was given when she saw that his surprise contained the bitter and disconcerting element of amusement.
“Isn’t that just what I said, and you denied it?” he exclaimed. “Now why are you in a rage with me?”
“Because—because—well, if you’re too stupid to know why, or are just pretending, I won’t explain. I don’t intend to ride with you any more. Please don’t try and keep up with me.”
She gave her reins a shake and her horse started on a brisk canter. As she sped away she listened for his following hoof beats, for she made no doubt he would pursue her, explain his conduct, and ask her pardon. The request not to keep up with her he would, of course, set aside. David would have obeyed it, but this man of the mountains, at once domineering and stupid, would take no command from any woman. She kept her ear trained for the rhythmic beat in the distance and decided when she heard it she would increase her speed and not let him catch her till she was up with the train. Then she would coldly listen to his words of apology and have the satisfaction of seeing him look small, and probably not know what to say.
Only it didn’t happen that way. He made no attempt to follow. As she galloped across the plain he drew his horse to a walk, his face dark and frowning. Her scorn and blush had left his blood hot. Her last words had fired his anger. He had known her antagonism, seen it in her face on the night when Bella was sick, felt its sting when she turned from him to laugh with the others. And it had stirred him to a secret irritation. For he told himself she was only a baby, but a pretty baby, on whose brown and rosy face and merry slits of eyes a man might like to look. Now he gazed after her swearing softly through his beard and holding his horse to its slowest step. As her figure receded he kept his eyes upon it. They were long-sighted eyes, used to great distances, and they watched, intent and steady, to see if she would turn her head.
“Damn her,” he said, when the dust of the train absorbed her. “Does she think she’s the only woman in the world?”
After supper that evening Susan called David over to sit on the edge of her blanket. This was a rare favor. He came hurrying, all alight with smiles, cast himself down beside her and twined his fingers in her warm grasp. She answered his hungry glance with a sidelong look, glowingly tender, and David drew the hand against his cheek. Nobody was near except Daddy John and Courant, smoking pipes on the other side of the fire.
“Do you love me?” he whispered, that lover’s text for every sermon which the unloving find so irksome to answer, almost to bear.
But now she smiled and whispered,
“Of course, silly David.”
“Ah, Susan, you’re awakening,” he breathed in a shaken undertone.
She again let the soft look touch his face, sweet as a caress. From the other side of the fire Courant saw it, and through the film of pipe smoke, watched. David thought no one was looking, leaned nearer, and kissed her cheek. She gave a furtive glance at the man opposite, saw the watching eyes, and with a quick breath like a runner, turned her face to her lover and let him kiss her lips.
She looked back at the fire, quiet, unflurried, then slowly raised her lids. Courant had moved his pipe and the obscuring film of smoke was gone. Across the red patch of embers his eyes gazed steadily at her with the familiar gleam of derision. Her tenderness died as a flame under a souse of water, and an upwelling of feeling that was almost hatred, rose in her against the strange man.
CHAPTER IV
The last fording of the river had been made, and from the summit of the Red Buttes they looked down on the long level, specked with sage and flecked with alkaline incrustings, that lay between them and the Sweetwater. Across the horizon the Wind River mountains stretched a chain of majestic, snowy shapes. Desolation ringed them round, the swimming distances fusing with the pallor of ever-receding horizons, the white road losing itself in the blotting of sage, red elevations rising lonely in extending circles of stillness. The air was so clear that a tiny noise broke it, crystal-sharp like the ring of a smitten glass. And the sense of isolation was intensified as there was no sound from anywhere, only a brooding, primordial silence that seemed to have remained unbroken since the first floods drained away.
Below in the plain the white dots of an encampment showed like a growth of mushrooms. Near this, as they crawled down upon it, the enormous form of Independence Rock detached itself from the fa
ded browns and grays to develop into a sleeping leviathan, lost from its herd and fallen exhausted in a sterile land.
Courant was curious about the encampment, and after the night halt rode forward to inspect it. He returned in the small hours reporting it a train of Mormons stopped for sickness. A boy of fifteen had broken his leg ten days before and was now in a desperate condition. The train had kept camp hoping for his recovery, or for the advent of help in one of the caravans that overhauled them. Courant thought the boy beyond hope, but in the gray of the dawn the doctor mounted, and with Susan, David, and Courant, rode off with his case of instruments strapped to his saddle.
The sun was well up when they reached the Mormon camp. Scattered about a spring mouth in the litter of a three days’ halt, its flocks and herds spread wide around it, it was hushed in a sullen dejection. The boy was a likely lad for the new Zion, and his mother, one of the wives of an elder, had forgotten her stern training, and fallen to a common despair. Long-haired men lolled in tent doors cleaning their rifles, and women moved between the wagons and the fires, or sat in rims of shade sewing and talking low. Children were everywhere, their spirits undimmed by disaster, their voices calling from the sage, little, light, half-naked figures circling and bending in games that babies played when men lived in cliffs and caves. At sight of the mounted figures they fled, wild as rabbits, scurrying behind tent flaps and women’s skirts, to peep out in bright-eyed curiosity at the strangers.
The mother met them and almost dragged the doctor from his horse. She was a toil-worn woman of middle age, a Mater Dolorosa now in her hour of anguish. She led them to where the boy lay in a clearing in the sage. The brush was so high that a blanket had been fastened to the tops of the tallest blushes, and under its roof he was stretched, gray-faced and with sharpened nose. The broken leg had been bound between rough splints of board, and he had traveled a week in the wagons in uncomplaining agony. Now, spent and silent, he awaited death, looking at the newcomers with the slow, indifferent glance of those whose ties with life are loosening. But the mother, in the ruthless unbearableness of her pain, wanted something done, anything. An Irishman in the company, who had served six months as a helper in a New York hospital, had told her he could amputate the leg, as he had seen the operation performed. Now she clamored for a doctor—a real doctor—to do it.
He tried to persuade her of its uselessness, covering the leg in which gangrene was far advanced, and telling her death was at hand. But her despair insisted on action, her own suffering made her remorseless. The clamor of their arguing voices surrounded the moribund figure lying motionless with listless eyes as though already half initiated into new and profound mysteries. Once, his mother’s voice rising strident, he asked her to let him rest in peace, he had suffered enough.
Unable to endure the scene Susan left them and joined a woman whom she found sewing in the shade of a wagon. The woman seemed unmoved, chatting as she stitched on the happenings of the journey and the accident that had caused the delay. Here presently David joined them, his face pallid, his lips loose and quivering. Nothing could be done with the mother. She had insisted on the operation, and the Irishman had undertaken it. The doctor and Courant would stay by them; Courant was to hold the leg. He, David, couldn’t stand it. It was like an execution—barbarous—with a hunting knife and a saw.
In a half hour Courant came walking round the back of the wagon and threw himself on the ground beside them. The leg had been amputated and the boy was dying. Intense silence fell on the camp, only the laughter and voices of the children rising clear on the thin air. Then a wail arose, a penetrating, fearful cry, Rachel mourning for her child. Courant raised his head and said with an unemotional air of relief, “he’s dead.” The Mormon woman dropped her sewing, gave a low exclamation, and sat listening with bitten lip. Susan leaned against the wagon wheel full of horror and feeling sick, her eyes on David, who, drawing up his knees, pressed his forehead on them. He rested thus, his face hidden, while the keening of the mother, the cries of an animal in pain, fell through the hot brightness of the morning like the dropping of agonized tears down blooming cheeks.
When they ceased and the quiet had resettled, the Mormon woman rose and put away her sewing.
“I don’t seem to have no more ambition to work,” she said and walked away.
“She’s another of his wives,” said Courant.
“She and the woman whose son is dead, wives of the same man?”
He nodded.
“And there’s a younger one, about sixteen. She was up there helping with water and rags—a strong, nervy girl. She had whisky all ready in a tin cup to give to the mother. When she saw it was all up with him she went round collecting stones to cover the grave with and keep the wolves off.”
“Before he was dead?”
“Yes. They’ve got to move on at once. They can’t lose any more time. When we were arguing with that half-crazy woman, I could see the girl picking up the stones and wiping off her tears with her apron.”
“What dreadful people,” she breathed.
“Dreadful? What’s dreadful in having some sense? Too bad about the boy. He set his teeth and didn’t make a sound when that fool of an Irishman was sawing at him as if he was a log. I never saw such grit. If they’ve got many like him they’ll be a great people some day.”
David gave a gasping moan, his arms relaxed, and he fell limply backward on the ground. They sprang toward him and Susan seeing his peaked white face, the eyes half open, thought he was dead, and dropped beside him, a crouched and staring shape of terror.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” she cried, raising wild eyes to Courant.
“Nothing at all,” said that unmoved person, squatting down on his heels and thrusting his hand inside David’s shirt. “Only a faint. Why, where’s your nerve? You’re nearly as white as he is.”
His eyes were full of curiosity as he looked across the outstretched figure at her frightened face.
“I—I—thought for a moment he was dead,” she faltered.
“And so you were going to follow his example and die on his body?” He got up. “Stay here and I’ll go and get some water.” As he turned away he paused and, looking back, said, “Why didn’t you do the fainting? That’s more your business than his,” gave a sardonic grin and walked off.
Susan raised the unconscious head and held it to her bosom. Alone, with no eye looking, she pressed her lips on his forehead. Courant’s callousness roused a fierce, perverse tenderness in her. He might sneer at David’s lack of force, but she understood. She crooned over him, moved his hair back with caressing fingers, pressing him against herself as if the strength of her hold would assure her of the love she did not feel and wanted to believe in. Her arms were close round him, his head on her shoulder when Courant came back with a dipper of water.
“Get away,” he said, standing over them. “I don’t want to wet you.”
But she curled round her lover, her body like a protecting shield between him and danger.
“Leave go of him,” said Courant impatiently. “Do you think I’m going to hurt him with a cup full of water?”
“Let me alone,” she answered sullenly. “He’ll be all right in a minute.”
“You can be any kind of a fool you like, but you can’t make me one. Come, move.” He set the dipper on the ground.
He leaned gently over her and grasped her wrists. The power of his grip amazed her; she was like a mouse in the paws of a lion. Her puny strength matched against his was conquered in a moment of futile resistance.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said softly in her ear. “Don’t act like a silly baby,” and the iron hands unclasped her arms and drew her back till David’s head slid from her knees to the ground.
“There! We’re all right now.” He let her go, snatched up the dipper and sent a splash of water into David’s fac
e.
“Poor David,” he said. “This’ll spoil his good looks.”
“Stop,” she almost screamed. “I’d rather have him lie in a faint for an hour than have you speak so about him.”
Without noticing her, he threw another jet of water and David stirred, drew a deep breath and opened his eyes. They touched the sky, the wagon, the nearby sage, and then Susan’s face. There they rested, recognition slowly suffusing them.
“What happened?” he said in a husky voice.
“Fainted, that was all,” said Courant.
David closed his eyes.
“Oh, yes, I remember now.”
Susan bent over him.
“You frightened me so!”
“I’m sorry, Missy, but it made me sick—the leg and those awful cries.”
Courant emptied the dipper on the ground.
“I’ll see if they’ve got any whisky. You’ll have to get your grit up, David, for the rest of the trail,” and he left them.
A half hour later the cry of “Roll out” sounded, and the Mormon camp broke. The rattling of chains and ox yokes, and the cursing of men ruptured the stillness that had gathered round the moment of death. Life was a matter of more immediate importance. Tents were struck, the pots and pans thrown into the wagons, the children collected, the stock driven in. With ponderous strain and movement the great train formed and took the road. As it drew away the circle of its bivouac showed in trampled sage and grass bitten to the roots. In the clearing where the boy had lain was the earth of a new-made grave, a piece of wood thrust in at the head, the mound covered with stones gathered by the elder’s young wife. The mountain tragedy was over.
By the fire that evening Zavier employed himself scraping the dust from a buffalo skull. He wiped the frontal bone clean and white, and when asked why he was expending so much care on a useless relic, shrugged his shoulders and laughed. Then he explained with a jerk of his head in the direction of the vanished Mormons that they used buffalo skulls to write their letters on. In the great emigration of the year before their route was marked by the skulls set up in prominent places and bearing messages for the trains behind.
