Part 9

“Come close, dear; and Jean, and Marjorie, and Harry. The light has faded, and I cannot see you, darlings. But be good. Obey your father. Take good care of Bobbie, Sadie, and Baby Annie. God bless—” The sentence was not finished.

There was another prolonged convulsion. Her husband released her hand and closed her eyes, believing all was over. But while they all waited, silent and awe-stricken, as if expecting a resolute move from some one, she opened her eyes again and whispered, “John!”

“Yes, Annie. John is here.”

For an instant she beamed upon him with a look of unutterable love. Then, as if attracted by a familiar voice, she turned her gaze toward the only space in the tent where no one was standing.

“Yes,” she cried in clear, ringing tones; and her brightening eyes grew strangely full of eager expectation. “I’m coming! Tell grannie I’ll be ready for her when she comes to heaven!”

“Leave me alone with my dead!” said the bereaved husband, as he cleared the tent of other occupants and threw himself upon the ground beside the still and cold and irresponsive body. No longer animated by the invisible power that for forty years had thrilled it with the mystery of being, it lay with closed eyes and folded hands beneath its drapings of white, upon the heavy, furry buffalo robe, placed beneath the inanimate form by the husband’s loving hands.

Through all the years of John Ranger’s sturdy manhood, that self-denying life had been his, devoted with all its tenderness to his interests and those of the sweet pledges of their love, for whose sake he must now live on, alone.

* * * * *

Months after, when the remnant of the Ranger family had reached the land “where rolls the Oregon,” a letter came to the bereaved husband and father, by way of the Isthmus of Panama, bringing tidings of the dear great-grandmother’s transition; and John Ranger, still an agnostic, awaiting the proofs of immortality that had never come to his physical senses in such a manner as to be recognized, wandered out alone among the whispering firs, and cried in bitterness of spirit: “Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?”

* * * * *

“I ought to have known better than to bring you out here to die in the wilderness, Annie darling!” cried the grief-stricken husband, caressing the attenuated fingers that lay stiff and cold upon the pulseless breast. “You would never have undertaken the journey but to gratify me; and the end is here! If you had positively refused to come, that might have settled it. But I knew your wishes, and disregarded them; so all the blame is mine. If I had always taken counsel of you, my better self, as I ought to have done, I should not now have been left with our precious little ones in these wild fastnesses, in danger of I know not what.”

“Daddie!” cried an anxious voice, “may I come in?”

He heard, but did not answer. Jean opened the door of the tent, and knelt beside the still, white form of her mother.

“Couldn’t you sleep, my daughter?” asked her father, reaching across the shrouded figure of his dead and tenderly caressing her tear-wet face.

“No, daddie; at least, not any more. I’ve had one short nap. When I woke and heard you moaning, I thought maybe you’d be glad to have me come in. I want to tell you my dream. May I, daddie dear, for mother’s sake?”

“Yes, child.”

“I dreamed that I was all alone in a great park. I have never seen anything half so beautiful when awake, so I can’t tell you what it was like. But there were flowers and trees and fountains, and birds of paradise that sang heavenly songs. It seemed that I could understand the language of every bird and butterfly and tree and flower. The birds did not seem the least bit afraid of me; and the memory of their music is sweet in my ears now.

“I don’t know how I got across, but before I had time to think about it, I found myself on the opposite side of a broad and shining river, as clear as crystal and as blue as the sky. On the water, which I could see through to a wonderful depth, were countless living things, reflecting all the colors of the rainbow, and many more,—all swimming, as if without effort, among the rarest foliage and flowers. Everything seemed alive,—that is, sentient, if that’s the proper word,—and acted as if it knew me, and was glad I had come.

“The park I had first entered was even prettier at a distance than it had been at closer range. The river-bank, which was covered with grass that looked like pea-green velvet spangled with diamonds, was furnished in spots with vine-embowered seats. To sit or step upon them did not crush the vines; and I noticed that after they had yielded to pressure, they would rebound at its removal, like a rubber ball,—only, unlike the rubber, they seemed to have a consciousness all their own. The bending green of the trees was like emeralds, and their leaves shone like satin. The hearts of the flowers glowed like balls of living fire; and when I plucked a spray, there was left no broken stem to show what I had done. I was too happy to think, and I closed my eyes in absolute peace.

“Suddenly a brilliant light permeated everything; the river looked like melted silver, and the park glowed so brightly that I tried to shield my eyes with my hand. But my hand was almost transparent, and I could see everything as well when my eyes were closed as open. As I sat, quietly inbreathing the wonderful beauty of it all, filled with a happiness that I cannot express in words, there came to me, not audibly, but yet as if spoken by somebody, the words of the last Sunday-school lesson I had learned in the little log schoolhouse in the Illinois woods: ‘And there shall be no night there!’

“‘Am I in heaven?’ I tried to ask aloud; but my words gave forth no audible sound. And though I heard nothing in the way we hear sounds, a reply reached my senses instantly. I heard it through and through me, though not a word was spoken. Do you want to hear the rest of it, daddie dear?”

“Yes, child. Go on.” His eager gaze betrayed his soul-hunger. He buried his face in his hands. “I am listening, Jean.”

“Then I will go on. In a little while I found myself floating, but I wasn’t the least bit afraid; I just trusted. Pretty soon I became conscious that somebody was guiding me along. I did not stir; I hardly breathed. I was too happy to move, lest I should break the spell and find that I was only dreaming.

“Suddenly I found myself seated in a wonderful chair. It was clear, like crystal, but white, like ivory. It was beautifully carved, and the figures seemed instinct with life. They yielded readily beneath my weight,—though I was not conscious of any weight,—and they always returned to their proper shape when relieved of pressure. The crystal river rippled at my feet. The beautiful park spread everywhere. A bird of paradise alighted on a bough over my head and shook its plumage in the air, exhaling a perfume that was like that of the tuberose.

“And now comes the part that you will most like to hear. As I sat, I heard, or rather felt, a sound, as of a gentle wind. A white arm, thinly covered with a filmy, lustrous lace, stole gently around my neck, and mother glided down beside me into the chair. Her eyes were as blue as the heavens and as bright as the morning star.

“I wasn’t the least bit surprised or startled. I did not care to speak, nor did I expect her to utter a word. I did not want the heavenly silence broken. I pressed her hand, which was as soft as down, and pink and white, like a sea-shell. She put her finger to her lips, as if in token of silence.

“Suddenly a light, different from any I had yet seen, surrounded us. We looked upward, and a form like unto the Son of Man stood before us. He was transparent, and as radiant as the sun. We lost ourselves in the light of His presence, as the stars lose themselves in the light of the sun. He did not speak an audible word; but as He outspread His hands above our heads, I turned to gaze at mother, whose raiment was as sheer as the finest gauze. It was all edged with luminous lace; and the sheen on her hair was like spun gold, glistening in the sunshine.”

“Didn’t she say anything, Jean?”

This man, who had all his life refused to listen to any story which could not be verified by physical law, had lost himself in the strange recital. Jean looked as one transfigured. She resumed her story.

“Mother said: ‘You must go back to your duties, Jean.’ Her arms were about my neck, and her shining draperies floated around us like a mist with the sun shining on it. ‘You have a long and weary road before you, Jean,’ she said, speaking silently, but in words that could be felt. ‘The experiences you will encounter will all be good for your development, my dear,’ she added, still inaudibly. ‘The time will come when you will realize, no matter what befalls you, that every lesson in life is necessary for your development. You are in the arms of the Infinite One, whose kingdom is within you, and who doeth all things well. Go back to your dear father, Jean. Tell him I am not dead. Tell Mary, Marjorie, Harry, and all the rest—’ Just then I felt a sudden sensation, as of floating downward, toward the earth.

“A cow lowed as I stirred myself in the wagon, and I remembered that you had tied Flossie to a wheel to keep her from straying from camp. Bells tinkled on the hillsides, the wind whistled in the trees, and I sat up, wide awake. I heard you moaning, daddie, and my heart went out to you with a longing that I cannot describe. I could not rest till I had told you all. What do you suppose it means?”

“I can only say, like one of old, ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.’ Leave me now, daughter. You are weary and must sleep.”

XVII

_FATHER AND DAUGHTER_

Jean passed out silently into the night, and pausing a moment, looked up to the silent stars, and whispered: “‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork.’”

How long she stood meditating she never realized. The tethered cow lowed again,—a plaintive, beseeching wail, that seemed almost human. She was mourning for her slain calf, poor thing,—a calf left by the roadside at its birth. It had been mercifully killed by Captain Ranger’s order, that it might escape the hardships of a sure but lingering death in following its ill-fated mother.

The cow’s udder was distended and feverish. Jean, as mindful of the practical affairs of life as of its mysteries, knelt upon the ground, and, with the skill of much practice in the art of milking, relieved the poor bereft mother of her pain.

“Poor Flossie!” she said, as the patient animal drew a sigh of relief. “Poor Flossie! It seemed cruel to deprive you of your baby. And they did it, too, before your very eyes! You must be thirsty, Flossie; you’re so feverish,” she said, as she brought the grateful animal a pail of clear, cold water.

Jean crept shivering into bed between her sleeping sisters, where she tried in vain to lie awake, to live over again the vivid experiences of her dream.

“Was it a dream?” she asked herself as she cuddled close among the blankets. “Who knows what dreams are, anyhow? And is there anybody on the earth who can understand, define, or fathom the mystery of sleep?” In a few minutes she was fast asleep, and when she awoke it was morning.

“There are, there must be, other senses finer and more acute than our five physical ones,” she thought, as she crept from her bed, refreshed and wide awake.

The stars had paled, and the clear gray of the early dawn lit up the crests of the abounding hills.

* * * * *

The simple preparations for the funeral rites were made in silence. Men and women moved mechanically about the camp. The very cattle seemed to understand.

No casket was procurable, but every man in camp was ready to do all in his power to supply the need. Junipers of goodly size abounded in the neighboring woods. From two of these, felled for the purpose, thick puncheons were hewn to form a crude but stanch enclosure for the good woman’s final home. A grave was made, with hard labor, in the abounding sandstone, and the women lined its vault and edges with flattened boughs of evergreen, thus making an ideal resting-place for the still, white form, as beautiful in death as it had been in youth.

There was no prayer or sermon. The simple rites were about to close when Mary whispered to her father: “I have heard mother say she wanted us all to sing when they should be laying her away.” And the three eldest daughters of the peaceful dead and the storm-rent living sang with tremulous but not unmusical tones:—

“Oh, heaven is nearer than mortals think, When they look with trembling dread At the misty future that stretches on From the silent home of the dead.

“’Tis no lone isle in a boundless main; No brilliant but distant shore, Where the loving ones who are called away Must go to return no more.

“No, heaven is near us; the mighty veil Of mortality blinds the eye, That we see not the glorious angel bands, On the shores of eternity.

“I know, when the silver cord is loosed, When the veil is rent away, Not long and dark shall the passage be To the realms of endless day.”

John Ranger looked upward with bared brow and streaming eyes, and in his heart a flickering hope was born.

The Reverend Thomas Rogers, with all his fervent eloquence and well grounded belief in the very orthodox scheme of salvation which he had so constantly preached, had never shaken his doubts as did the plaintive promises of that simple, impressive hymn.

His devoted wife, strong in her faith in the efficacy of prayer, had long ceased to speak to him of her religious convictions, for which his ready logic and quaint ridicule suggested no answer. At such times, consoling herself with the command of her Master, she would enter into her closet, shut the door, and pray for him and their children in secret, with never a doubt that sometime, someway, her prayers would be answered openly. And who shall say that her faith was not at last rewarded, in a way she least expected, through that plaintive song, through which, being dead, she had yet spoken?

After the burial, the remainder of the day was spent in the silent performance of the many accumulated duties of the camp. There was no time for the luxury of grief. The women and girls washed, ironed, cooked, did the dishes, mended wearing apparel, sewed up rents in wagon-covers and tents, and gathered heaps of wild flowers, with which they adorned the fresh mound of earth that none of them expected ever to see again.

* * * * *

The men were not idle. A broken ox-yoke needed mending. Wagon-tires were reset. Such heavy articles as could be dispensed with were discarded.

Jamie’s cradle, for which Mrs. Ranger had begged a place in their effects, and her grandmother’s spinning-wheel, which she had stored in one of the wagons, were among the articles ordered to be thrown away.

“Your mother will not miss them now,” said Captain Ranger, huskily.

“It is a shame to disregard our dear mother’s wishes, now that she cannot speak for herself,” said Mary, in a whisper, aside to Jean.

“I know it; and I’ve already made a bargain with Mrs. McAlpin to store them in one of her wagons. Daddie will thank us for it sometime.”

Sadly and silently the work went on; for the living had to be cared for, and nothing more could be done for the dead.

When evening came Jean sought her journal, climbed to the rim of the little natural amphitheatre overlooking the sparkling spring of icy water near her mother’s last resting-place, and read in the last space she had left blank, in her father’s bold chirography, some lines of a poem which he had quoted from memory:—

“’Twas midnight, and he sat alone, The husband of the dead. That day the dark dust had been thrown Above her buried head.

“Her orphaned children round him slept, But in their sleep would moan; In bitterness of soul he wept. He was alone—alone.

“The world is full of life and light, But, ah, no light for me! My little world, once warm and bright, Is cheerless as the sea.

“Where is her sweet and kindly face? Where is her cordial tone? I gaze upon her resting-place And feel that I’m alone.

“The lovely wife, maternal care, The self-denying zeal, The smile of hope that chased despair, And promised future weal;

“The clean, bright hearth, nice table spread, The charm o’er all things thrown, The sweetness in whate’er she said,— All gone! I am alone.

“I slept last night, and then I dreamed; Perchance her spirit woke; A soft light o’er my pillow gleamed, A voice in music spoke:

“‘Forgot, forgiven, all neglect, Thy love recalled, alone; The babes I loved, O love, protect, I still am all thine own.’”

“Dear bereaved and sorrowing daddie!” sighed Jean, as she closed the book. “I cannot write a word to-night. Sacred to him and his be the page on which he has inscribed these echoes of his heart. But let nobody say, after this, that daddie has no sentiment in his make-up. The trouble is that he is too busy a man to give rein to his feelings, except under extraordinary pressure. I wish he hadn’t tried to throw away those heirlooms of mother’s, though. The oxen wouldn’t have felt the difference in the load. It was an act that he’ll be ashamed of some day.”

Weeks after, when the memory-hallowed relics came to light, Captain Ranger bowed his head upon his hands and gave way to such a convulsion of grief as had not shaken him, even at the time of her transition. Jean had good cause to recall the stanzas he had inscribed to her mother’s memory in her battered journal, as she said to herself: “I knew all the time that daddie’s heart was right. It is only necessary to touch it in the proper place to show that it is tender.” Once more she closed the book without having written a word.

But we must not anticipate.

On the 22d of June another entry is recorded,—Jean’s last memorandum of their journey in the Black Hills: “The prickly pears still give us much annoyance. The roads are heavy with sand, and the rocks over which our wagons must bump and bound are terribly rough and jagged.

“Across the Platte, and away to the southward many miles, though they seem much nearer, owing to the rarity of the air, are quaint and curious formations in the rocky cliffs, worn by the winds of ages into rude images of men and animals that stare at us with sunken eyes, their broken noses, grinning skulls, and disfigured bodies reminding us of unhappy phantoms risen from the under world.

“Sometimes the semblance of a great mosque or cathedral rears its domes and minarets in the clear blue of the heavens; and sometimes what seems a great embattled fortification is seen rising with realistic majesty from a vast sage plain that looks, with a little aid of the imagination, like the dried-up bed of a big moat. Of course, ‘’tis distance lends enchantment to the view,’ as no doubt the images we see so distinctly would resolve themselves into shapeless masses if we could see them at close range.

“The grass we so much need for the stock has again disappeared, and daddie says we shall return to-morrow to the main travelled road. Wild flowers are blooming in profusion all around our camp, smiling at us as if in mockery of the prevailing desolation. Wood is scarce again, and we find few buffalo chips.

“We seldom see any more deer or antelope, and the buffalo have all escaped to the distant hills; that is, all but the hapless multitudes that have been cruelly and needlessly slaughtered by the unthinking and greedy hunters of the plains.

“We passed half-a-dozen newly made graves again to-day, and it is evident that we are getting back into the dreaded cholera belt. The day has been extremely hot, but the evening is chilly and blustering. Daddie says the most of the victims of the epidemic are women. I wonder if such sorrow as ours pervades every family into whose ranks the Silent Messenger comes unbidden and steals away its hope.

“The Indians seem to have all been scared away by the cholera. What must they think of us, who claim to be civilized and even enlightened, who have come to bring them our religion, and with it starvation, pestilence, and death?

“Our world isn’t yet fit for the abode of anything but beasts of prey, of which poorly civilized man is chief. No wonder the Indians fear and hate us. We destroy their range, we scare away their game, we scatter disease and death among them; and as rapidly as possible we seize and possess their lands. ‘No quarter for man or beast’ should be written upon our foreheads in letters of fire. But maybe we are merely fulfilling our destiny. I cannot tell; it’s all a mystery.” She closed the book with a sigh.

XVIII

_THE LITTLE DOCTOR_

After leaving the Black Hills and descending again into the valley of the Platte, the Ranger company found travelling still more difficult than before they had left the main travelled road. The cattle, from burning their hoofs in the alkali pools, through which they were often compelled to wade for hours at a stretch, became afflicted with a serious foot-ail.

“A more dangerous epidemic than the cholera menaces us now,” said Mrs. McAlpin, as she watched the poor brutes limping along the road, many of them bellowing with pain and writhing under the cruel lashes of the drivers’ whips, as they hobbled wearily on toward the setting sun.

“Yes,” replied Captain Ranger, as he blanched with apprehension. “Our very lives depend upon the cattle; we have no other means of getting out of the wilderness. We must do something heroic to heal their feet, or we’ll all be left to die together.”

Scotty, whose serious accident had been overshadowed by the death and burial of Mrs. Ranger, and who had grown weary of receiving only such attention as could be bestowed upon an invalid not considered dangerously afflicted, began to demand the careful nursing he at first pretended to disdain. The jolting of the wagon, in which he still lay upon a sort of swinging stretcher, though it alleviated the roughness of constant rebounds from the rocky roads, aggravated the inflammation of his wound; and the pain grew more intolerable as the bones began to knit. His ravings of discontent were often hard for Mrs. Benson to endure. But she adhered resolutely to her purpose as her daughter’s chaperon to prevent too frequent visits between the twain, and often kept Mrs. McAlpin away from his side for many hours together.

“Scotty has managed somehow to disarrange his bandages, Little Doctor,” said Captain Ranger; “and badly as our cattle need attention, you will be obliged to look after his case this evening. I know how punctilious your mother is over what she is pleased to call the proprieties, but you must attend the fellow professionally, whether she consents or not.

“I do not want any more disagreeable encounters with my mother, Captain.”

“Damn it! I beg your pardon, ma’am! But I’m sure God swore in His wrath under less provocation,—if there is any truth in Holy Writ. These are no times for conventional hair-splittings. You are in duty bound to visit Scotty as his physician. I will accompany you if it will help you out.”

“I shall be glad indeed of your company, Captain. But women are not supposed to be doctors. We’ve always been taught to look upon the profession as one beyond our comprehension.”

“And indeed it is beyond your comprehension. Men do not comprehend it any more than you do. If they did, it would long ago have been developed into a science, instead of what it is,—empiricism. I’m afraid I’ll swear again if I hear any more nonsense about the things women are not supposed to know because they are women.”