Part 7

The twilight had deepened. Below the camp ran a deep ravine, at the base of which a little brook sang merrily. Clumps of cottonwood, badly crippled by wayfarers’ axes, struggled for existence here and there. In her haste to reach the covert of the bushes unobserved, Jean ran diagonally over a settlement of prairie dogs, near which the campers had inadvertently pitched their tents. The Lilliputian municipality was evidently well disciplined, for at the sound of approaching footsteps the same sharp, staccato bark, of mingled warning and authority, that had for an instant startled the foremost team at camping-time, was heard, and every little rodent dropped instantly out of sight. Profound silence fell at once upon the little city, which had before been a bedlam of voices.

Jean reached the foot of the ravine and stopped to listen, her heart beating hard. “I am sure Sally made an appointment to meet somebody in this ravine to-night,” she said to herself, “and I’m just as sure she’ll need a friend. Women are such fools where men are concerned.” She heard the sound of human voices, and pressed her hand hard over her heart.

“I know you think you’re safe from arrest,” said a voice she knew to be Sally O’Dowd’s. “As your wife, I may not be able to give legal testimony that will send you to the gallows; but you’re not beyond the pale of lynch law.”

A mocking laugh was the only audible response.

“I haven’t even told the Squire,” resumed the woman’s voice. “Nobody knows about it but you and me and the unseen messengers of God.”

Again that mocking, brutal laugh, followed by oaths, with words of commingled anger and exultation. Jean held her breath.

“S’posing you could testify,—which you can’t, for that divorce is tied up on appeal,— my oath would be as binding as yours, Mrs. O’Dowd. And I would swear to God that it was you did the deed. It would be easy enough to make any court believe my story, for it was common talk that you rebelled all the time against such a litter of babies.”

“O God, have mercy!”

“Nobody saw me kill the brat but you, Sally. It would have been bad enough if the young ones had come one at a time, being only a year apart; but when it came to two pairs of twins inside o’ thirteen months, it was time to call a halt.”

“Are you never to have any mercy on me, Sam?”

“Come back to me as my lawful wife, and you’ll see. I’ll be easy enough to get along with if you’ll treat me right.”

The wife was struck dumb with astonishment.

“Come back to me, darling!” The mocking tone gave way to one of cooing tenderness. Jean saw his dusky figure through the shadows. “You see you’re in my power, Sally. Better make a virtue of necessity. You can coax the Squire to let me join his train. I will even be a teamster, if necessary, for your sake and the children’s.”

“What?” cried the woman, in sincere alarm. “Could I be your wife after I’ve seen you kill one of our children before my very eyes? No, no! Go your way, and let me go mine in peace. If you will leave me and the three surviving babies alone, I’ll never tell anybody about the murder. I swear it!”

Again that brutal laugh.

“Do your worst, Sally O’Dowd! You can’t prove that I killed the brat. You haven’t any witness.”

“I have the silent witness of my own conscience; and so have you, Sam O’Dowd. Do you think that I am such an idiot as to come out here to meet you alone?”

“She knows he’s a coward,” thought Jean, “and she’s bluffing.”

“Now see here, Sally! You love me; you know you do; you’ve told me so a thousand times.”

“I did love you once, Sam; but that was so long ago that it seems like a far-off dream. I despise, I loathe, I abhor you now!”

“Then this’ll settle it. I’ll go to the Squire and tell him we’ve buried the hatchet, and I’m going with you to Oregon. I don’t care a rap whether you hate me or not. But if you give me any trouble, I’ll swear that you did that killing.”

“Oh, help me, pitying Christ!” wailed the unhappy woman. “Is there, in all this world, no Canada to which a fugitive wife may flee, and no underground railroad by which to reach it?”.

Again arose that brutal laugh upon the air. The belated bird in the bushes cooed to its mate, and the prairie dogs chattered in the distance.

“Don’t be afraid of him, Sally,” cried a clear voice from the depths of the cottonwoods. “A tyrant is always a coward. I heard your confession, Sam O’Dowd; and as I am not your wife, I can be a witness.”

There was no more brutal laughter. A horse stood picketed and stamping at the head of the gulch, and the murderer hurried toward it with heavy strides. Jean listened with eager attention till he mounted and rode rapidly away.

“Are you still there, Sally?” she asked, as the hoof-beats died away in the distance.

“Yes, Jean; but where are you, and why are you here?”

“The Holy Spirit guided me, I reckon. I was just possessed to come. I didn’t know I was following you, or why I came; but I just did it ’cause I had to.”

“It was hazardous, Jean. He might have killed us both.”

“He’s too big a coward to kill a more formidable foe than his own baby. But you were an idiot to meet him out here, Sally.”

“He was with that freighters’ outfit, but on horseback. He came to me a few minutes before camping-time, when I was walking for exercise. I didn’t want a scene at camp, so I agreed to meet him out here alone, if he would keep out of sight.”

“You’re a bigger fool than Thompson’s colt, and he swam the river to get a drink,” said Jean. “But we mustn’t linger here. He may have a confederate.”

“Not he, Jean. He’s too suspicious to trust a confederate.”

“Let’s go back to camp, anyhow, Sally; mother will be missing us. But you needn’t be afraid of Sam again. I’ve settled his hash,” she said, as they hurried to the open. “Isn’t it a terrible thing to be married?” she added, as soon as she could speak again.

“No, Jean. Marriage under right conditions is the world’s greatest blessing. All enlightened men and women prefer to live in pairs, and make each other and their children as happy as possible. I admit that I made a big mistake when I married; but your mother didn’t, because your father is one of God’s noblemen. The fault isn’t in marriage, but in the couple, one or both of whom make the trouble, when there is trouble. But the conditions between husbands and wives are not equal. Law and usage make the husband and wife one, and the husband that one. Where both the parties to the compact are better than the law, it doesn’t pinch either one; but when a woman finds herself chained for life to a sordid, disagreeable, stingy, domineering man, the advantages of law and custom are all on his side. It is no wonder that trouble ensues in such cases.”

“But, young as I am, I have seen wives that could discount almost any man for meanness,” said Jean. “There are women, now and then, who take all the rights in the matrimonial category, and their husbands haven’t any rights at all.”

“Women sometimes inherit the strongest traits of their fathers; I admit that. And such women can outwit the very best husbands.”

“I’ve read of a woman,” said Jean, musingly, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton by name, who went before a legislative assembly in New York a few years ago, and secured the passage of a law enabling a married woman of that State to hold, in her own right, the property bequeathed to her by her father. And then, as if to prove that women are idiots, there were women in Albany who refused to associate with their financial savior any more. They said she had left her sphere. But never mind. The world is moving, and women are moving with it.”

The camp-fires had died to heaps of embers, the lights were out in the tents and wagons, and all except themselves were settled for the night.

“Don’t say anything to anybody about my meeting with Sam, will you, Jean?”

“Not unless he annoys you again. Then I’ll be ready to meet him with facts.”

“He might put your life in jeopardy, my dear.”

“Jeopardy nothin’!” cried Jean, adopting the slang of the road. “He’s too big a coward to put his neck in danger. But just you wait! I’ll live to see an end to one-sided laws and a one-sexed government. See if I don’t! And the men will fight our battle for us, too, as soon as they are wise enough.”

“If you don’t come across a matrimonial fate that’ll change your tune, my name isn’t Sally O’Dowd,” exclaimed her companion, as they drew near the camp.

“Your name isn’t O’Dowd, but Danover,” cried Jean. “You’re safe in making such a prophecy on such a basis.”

XIII

_AN APPROACHING STORM_

“We came eighteen miles to-day,” wrote Jean, under date of May 28, “and halted for the night opposite Grand Island, in the Platte River, where we find both wood and pasture. All day we floundered through the muddy roads, occasionally getting almost swamped in heavy and treacherous bogs, with ‘water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ I’m too tired to write, and too sleepy to think.”

On the evening of May 29 she added: “We started early, and reached Fort Kearney after eight miles of heavy wheeling, where we halted to write letters for the folks at home, and examine many things quaint and crude and curious. The old fort is weather-worn, and a general air of dilapidation pervades its very atmosphere. There are two substantial dwellings for the officers, though; and they (I mean the officers) keep up a show of military pomp, very amusing to us, but quite necessary to maintain in an Indian country, to hold the savage instinct in check. The officers were very gracious to daddie, and very kind and condescending to the rest of us. They made us a present of some mounted buffalo-horns, some elks’ antlers, and the stuffed head of a mountain sheep, all of which, mother says, we’ll be glad to leave at the roadside before the weary oxen haul them very far.

“A week ago a party passed us, going westward with a four-wheeled wagon, two yokes of discouraged oxen, two anxious-looking men, two dispirited women, and about fourteen snub-nosed, shaggy-headed children. On their wagon-cover was a sign, done in yellow ochre, which read: ‘Oregon or bust!’ To-day we met the same outfit coming back, and no description from my unpractised pen can do it justice. The party, doubtless from over-crowding, had quarrelled; and the two families had settled their dispute by dividing the wagon into two parts of two wheels each. On the divided and dilapidated cover of each cart were smeared in yellow ochre the words, ‘Busted, by thunder!’

“May 30. We forded the Platte to-day. It is a broad, lazy, milky sheet of silt-thickened water, with a quicksand bottom. It is about two miles wide at this season of the year at the ford, and is three feet deep.

“The day was as hot as a furnace, and the sunshine burned us like blisters of Spanish flies. Our wagon-beds were hoisted to the tops of their standards to keep them from taking water, and at a given signal from daddie, they were all plunged pell-mell into the quicksand, over which teams, drivers, wagons, and all were compelled to move quickly to avoid catastrophe.

“Poor dear mother suffered from constant nervous fear because of the quicksand and the danger that some of the children might be drowned. It took us two and a half hours to ford the stream; but we reached the opposite bank without accident, and camped near an old buffalo wallow, where we get clearer water than that of the Platte, but we are not allowed to drink it till it has been boiled. Cholera has broken out in the trains both before and behind us; and daddie lays our escape from attack thus far to drinking boiled water. We have no fuel but buffalo chips, and almost no grass for the poor stock. The game has disappeared altogether, and the fishes in the Platte don’t bite. But we have plenty of beans and bacon, coffee, flour, and dried apples; so we shall not starve.

“June 1. The day has been intensely hot. The stifling air shimmers, and the parched earth glitters as it bakes in the sun. The mud has changed to a fine, impalpable dust, and the loaded air is too oppressive to breathe, if it could be avoided. We passed a number of newly made graves during the day. We meet returning teams every day that have given up the journey as a bad job. Daddie often says he’d die before he’d retrace his tracks, and then he wouldn’t do it! We found at sundown, just as we were losing hope, a bountiful spring of clear, cold water, beside which we have halted for the night.

“June 3. Another insufferably hot day. But we encountered at nightfall a stiff west wind, which soon arose to a gale, in the teeth of which we with difficulty made camp and cooked our food. Heavy clouds blacken the sky as I write, and vivid flashes of sheet lightning, which blind us for a moment, are followed by thunder that startles and stuns.

“June 4. The storm passed to the south of us, on the other side of the Platte. But daddie has ordered the tents and wagons staked to the ground hereafter every night, as long as we are travelling in these treeless, unsheltered bottom-lands, as he says we would have been swept away _en masse_ into the river if last night’s storm had squarely struck our camp.”

The hoods of the wagons, so white and clean at the outset, were now of an ashen hue, disfigured by spots of grease, and askew in many places from damage to their supporting arches of hickory bows. Heavy log-chains, for use in possible emergencies, dangled between axles, and the inevitable tar-bucket rode adjacent on a creaking hook, from which it hung suspended by a complaining iron bail.

* * * * *

“The incessant heat by day, followed by the chilly air of night, is perilous to health, John,” said Mrs. Ranger, one evening, as she lay wrapped in blankets in the big family wagon, watching the usual preparations for the evening meal.

He gazed into her pinched, white face with sudden apprehension.

“Don’t be afraid of the cholera, dear,” he said tenderly. “I understand the nature of the epidemic, and I don’t fear it at all. Cholera is a filth disease, and we are guarding against it at every point. Your blood is pure, darling. There’s nothing the matter with you but a little debility, the result of past years of overwork. Time and rest and change of climate will cure all that. No uncooked food or unboiled water is used by any of us, and no cold victuals are allowed to be eaten after long exposure to this pernicious, cholera-laden air. You can’t get the germs of cholera unless you eat or drink them.”

That Captain Ranger should have thus imbibed the germ theory of cholera long in advance of its discovery by medical schools, is only another proof that there is nothing new under the sun. A newer system of medical treatment than that of the Allopathic School, styled the Eclectic by its founders, had come into vogue before his departure from the States.

Many different decoctions of fiery liquid, of which capsicum was supposed to be the base,—conspicuous among them a compound called “Number Six,”—proved efficacious in effecting many cures in the early stages of cholera; and the contents of Captain Ranger’s medicine chest were in steady demand long after his supplies for general distribution had been exhausted.

* * * * *

“Can you imagine what this wild-goose chase of ours is for?” asked Mrs. Benson.

“I undertook it to gratify my good husband,” was Mrs. Ranger’s prompt reply.

“And I to gratify my daughter.”

“Excuse me, ladies; but I came along to please myself,” interposed Mrs. O’Dowd.

“I, too, came to please myself,” cried Jean; “that is, I made a virtue of necessity, and compelled myself to be pleased. There are two things that mother says we must never fret about: one is what we can, and the other what we cannot, help. Every human being belongs primarily to himself or herself, and to satisfy one’s self is sure to please somebody.”

“But a married couple belong, secondarily, at least, to each other,” said Mrs. Ranger. “No couple can pull in double and single harness at the same time.”

“Some day,” said Mrs. Benson, “it will become the fashion to read your journal, Jean; and then the dear public will both praise and pity our unsophisticated Captain, who led these hapless emigrants out on these plains to die.”

“That’s so, Mrs. Benson,” exclaimed Jean; “and they won’t see that it’s all a part of the eternal programme. Evolution is the order of nature, and one generation of human beings is a very small fraction of the race at large.”

“Haven’t you gossiped long enough, mamma?” asked Mrs. McAlpin, petulantly. “Your supper is ready and waiting. What has detained you so long?”

“I was listening to the chat of the Ranger family. They are an uncommon lot; very clever and original.”

“Yes, mamma; they talk like oracles. A little brusque and unpolished, but that will be outgrown in time. You’re looking splendid, mamma! The society of your neighbors is a tonic. You must take it often.”

“I wish we might all stop here, Daphne.”

“We’ve no more right to these lands of the Indians than we have to—”

“Oregon,” interrupted her mother. “Oregon was Indian territory originally.”

Jean approached with a plate of hot cakes, saying: “I fell to thinking so deeply over the problems we had been talking about that I forgot what I was doing, and baked too many cakes. They’re sweet and light, and we hope you’ll like them.”

“Thank you ever so much, Miss Jean!” said Mrs. McAlpin. “I congratulate you with all my heart upon the way you cheer your mother, my dear. You are a jewel of the first water!”

“We all try to keep mother in good spirits,” replied Jean. “Dear soul! she’s weak and nervous; and what seem trifles to us often appear like mountains to her. Never can I forget, to my dying day, the look of terror that came into her gentle eyes when we were crossing the Platte that day in the quicksands. The raised wagon-bed had tilted, for some cause. I suppose the weight of so many of us was not evenly distributed; and we should all have been pitched into the water if it had not been that dear mother hustled us to the other side. She forgot her own danger in her effort to save the children, giving her orders like a sea captain in a storm. Each of us grabbed a baby,—Susannah’s coon fell to my lot,—and we clung like death to the upper edge of the wagon-bed till the danger was over, and the great lopsided thing settled back to its place.

“But I must go now. Daddie’s calling me to write up that pestilent old journal!”

* * * * *

On the evening of the 4th of June, the train had its first encounter with a blizzard.

Captain Ranger, seeing the approach of the storm, as did the cattle and horses, ordered a sudden halt a little way from the banks of the Platte. The day, like a number of its predecessors, had been oppressively hot; but about five o’clock a sudden squall came up, though not without premonitory warning in the way of a calm so dead that not a blade of grass was quivering. The wagon-hoods flapped idly, like sails becalmed in the tropics. Suddenly the air grew icy cold, bringing at first a moment of relief to suffocating man and beast.

“Gather your buffalo chips in a hurry,” exclaimed the Captain, addressing the girls. “Get ’em under cover in the tents, under the wagon-beds; anywhere so they’ll keep dry. Turn out the stock in a jiffy, boys. Head ’em away from the river. Drive ’em up yonder gulch. Be on the alert, everybody!”

XIV

_A CAMP IN CONSTERNATION_

“Stake down the wagons,” was the next order. “Don’t stop to pitch any more tents. Don’t try to kindle any fires.”

Scarcely had the orders been obeyed before a darkness as black as Erebus had settled upon the camp like a gigantic pall. It was a peculiar darkness, permeated by an ominous, silent, intangible, vibrating, appalling Something! A silence that could be felt was in the air. The oxen in the gulch bellowed in terror; the horses neighed. The stillness of the air was oppressive, portentous, awful. The women clasped the children in close embrace. The children clung to their protectors in silent terror. All hands save the teamsters, who were out with the stock at the mouth of the ravine, where they were stationed to guard the animals against stampede, crouched under the wagons in the Cimmerian blackness. Anon, a blinding flash of sheet lightning, followed by others and yet others in bewildering succession, awoke a rolling, roaring, reverberating cannonade of thunder. Guided by the flashes of lightning, the frightened men left the cattle to their fate and, returning to the camp, took refuge under the wagons. Hailstones as big as hens’ eggs fell by hundreds of tons, displacing the awful silence with a cannonade like unto the heaviest artillery of a great army in battle.

The wind blew a terrific gale. The chained wagons rocked like cradles. Several heavy vehicles in a neighboring train, not being chained to the ground, as the Ranger wagons had been, were upset and their contents ruined by the hail and rain. Others were blown bodily into the river. Luckily no lives were lost. The cattle and horses, pelted by the hail till their bodies were bruised and bleeding, huddled together at the head of the gulch for mutual protection.

The storm lasted less than twenty minutes, and ceased as suddenly as it began. The black clouds soared away to the northward, leaving a blue starlit sky overhead, and underfoot a mass of hail and mud. The Platte, having caught the full fury of a cloud-burst a few miles above the camp, rose rapidly, threatening the frightened refugees in the wagons with a new danger. But the shallow banks were high enough to confine the mad rush of muddy water within an inch or two of the top, thus averting the horror of a flood which, had it come, would have completed the havoc of the storm.

The lightning, as though weary of its display of power, retreated to the distant hills, and played at hide-and-seek on the horizon’s edge, while Heaven’s Gatling guns answered each pyrotechnic display with a distant, growling, intermittent roar.

Mrs. McAlpin’s carriage was a total wreck; but her wagons remained intact, and she and her mother escaped to them in safety.

The morning revealed a scene of desolation. The earth in all directions as far as the eye could see had been torn into gulleys by the mad rush of falling hail and rain, each seeking its level in frantic haste. Hailstones lay in heaps, some soiled by contact with the liquid mud, some as clean and white as freshly fallen snow.

The contents of Mrs. McAlpin’s carriage were entirely gone. Nothing remained of the vehicle but one of its wheels and some shreds of its cover, which were found half buried in the mud. Of the harness, nothing was left but a bridle bit, in which was lodged a woman’s glove, and near it the remains of a palm-leaf fan.

“We should all be thankful that no lives were lost,” said Mrs. Ranger, who was looking on while Sally O’Dowd and Susannah assisted her daughters, who, with Mrs. Benson and Mrs. McAlpin, were exposing the wet and dilapidated paraphernalia of the camp to the hot rays of the morning sun.

“But we’d have a heap mo’ to thank Gahd fo’, missus, if He’d hel’ off dat stawm,” exclaimed Susannah, with a characteristic “yah! yah! yah!”

At eleven o’clock the order was given to bring in the stock, and prepare to move on, when it was discovered that Scotty was missing.

“We s’posed he was helpin’ Mrs. McAlpin’s men, as he generally does, to get her things to rights, so we didn’t bother our heads about him,” said Sawed-off, who was Scotty’s partner of the whip and yoke. “I’ve been doing the most of his share of the work ever since we’ve been on the road.”