Chapter 24

Fort Bridger was like a giant magnet perpetually revolving and sweeping the western half of the country with its rays. They wheeled from the west across the north over the east and down to the south. Ox teams, prairie schooners, pack trains, horsemen came to it from the barren lands that guarded the gates of California, from the tumultuous rivers and fragrant forests of the Oregon country, from the trapper's paths and the thin, icy streams of the Rockies, from the plains where the Platte sung round its sand bars, from the sun-drenched Spanish deserts. All roads led to it, and down each one came the slow coil of the long trains and the pacing files of mounted men. Under its walls they rested and repaired their waste, ere they took the trail again intent on the nation's work of conquest.

The fort's centripetal attraction had caught the doctor's party, and was drawing it to the focus. They reckoned the days on their fingers and pressed forward with a feverish hurry. They were like wayworn mariners who sight the lights of a port. Dead desires, revived, blew into a glow extinguished vanities. They looked at each other, and for the first time realized how ragged and unkempt they were, then dragged out best clothes from the bottom of their chests and hung their looking-glasses to the limbs of trees. They were coming to the surface after a period of submersion.

Susan fastened her mirror to the twig on an alder trunk and ransacked her store of finery. It yielded up a new red merino bodice, and the occasion was great enough to warrant breaking into her reserve of hairpins. Then she experimented with her hair, parted and rolled it in the form that had been the fashion in that long dead past--was it twenty years ago?--when she had been a girl in Rochester. She inspected her reflected image with a fearful curiosity, as if expecting to find gray hairs and wrinkles. It was pleasant to see that she looked the same--a trifle thinner may be. And as she noted that her cheeks were not as roundly curved, the fullness of her throat had melted to a more muscular, less creased and creamy firmness, she felt a glow of satisfaction. For in those distant days--twenty-five years ago it must be--she had worried because she was a little _too_ fat. No one could say that now. She stole a look over her shoulder to make sure she was not watched--it seemed an absurdly vain thing to do--and turned back the neck of her blouse. The faintest rise of collar bone showed under the satiny skin, fine as a magnolia petal, the color of faintly tinted meerschaum. She ran her hand across it and it was smooth as curds yielding with an elastic resistance over its bedding of firm flesh. The young girl's pride in her beauty rose, bringing with it a sense of surprise. She had thought it gone forever, and now it still held, the one surviving sensation that connected her with that other Susan Gillespie who had lived a half century ago in Rochester.

It was the day after this recrudescence of old coquetry that the first tragedy of the trail, the tragedy that was hers alone, smote her.

The march that morning had been over a high level across which they headed for a small river they would follow to the Fort. Early in the afternoon they saw its course traced in intricate embroidery across the earth's leathern carpet. The road dropped into it, the trail grooved deep between ramparts of clay. On the lip of the descent the wayward Julia, maddened with thirst, plunged forward, her obedient mates followed, and the wagon went hurling down the slant, dust rising like the smoke of an explosion. The men struggled for control and, seized by the contagion of their excitement, the doctor laid hold of a wheel. It jerked him from his feet and flung him sprawling, stunned by the impact, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his lips. The others saw nothing, in the tumult did not hear Susan's cry. When they came back the doctor was lying where he had fallen, and she was sitting beside him wiping his lips with the kerchief she had torn from her neck. She looked up at them and said:

"It's a hemorrhage."

Her face shocked them into an understanding of the gravity of the accident. It was swept clean of its dauntless, rosy youth, had stiffened into an unelastic skin surface, taut over rigid muscles. But her eyes were loopholes through which anguish escaped. Bending them on her father a hungry solicitude suffused them, too all-pervading to be denied exit. Turned to the men an agonized questioning took its place. It spoke to them like a cry, a cry of weakness, a cry for succor. It was the first admission of their strength she had ever made, the first look upon them which had said, "You are men, I am a woman. Help me."

They carried the doctor to the banks of the stream and laid him on a spread robe. He protested that it was nothing, it had happened before, several times. Missy would remember it, last winter in Rochester? Her answering smile was pitiable, a grimace of the lips that went no farther. She felt its failure and turned away plucking at a weed near her. Courant saw the trembling of her hand and the swallowing movement of her throat, bared of its sheltering kerchief. She glanced up with a stealthy side look, fearful that her moment of weakness was spied upon, and saw him, the pity surging from his heart shining on his face like a softening light. She shrank from it, and, as he made an involuntary step toward her, warned him off with a quick gesture. He turned to the camp and set furiously to work, his hands shaking as he drove in the picket pins, his throat dry. He did not dare to look at her again. The desire to snatch her in his arms, to hold her close till he crushed her in a passion of protecting tenderness, made him fear to look at her, to hear her voice, to let the air of her moving body touch him.

The next morning, while lifting the doctor into the wagon, there was a second hemorrhage. Even the sick man found it difficult to maintain his cheery insouciance. Susan looked pinched, her tongue seemed hardened to the consistency of leather that could not flex for the ready utterance of words. The entire sum of her consciousness was focused on her father. "Breakfast?"--with a blank glance at the speaker--"is it breakfast time?" The men cooked for her and brought her a cup of coffee and her plate of food. She set them on the driver's seat, and when the doctor, keeping his head immovable, and turning smiling eyes upon her, told her to eat she felt for them like a blind woman. It was hard to swallow the coffee, took effort to force it down a channel that was suddenly narrowed to a parched, resistent tube. She would answer no one, seemed to have undergone an ossifying of all faculties turned to the sounds and sights of life. David remembered her state when the doctor had been ill on the Platte. But the exclusion of the outer world was then an obsession of worry, a jealous distraction, as if she resented the well-being of others when hers were forced to suffer. This was different. She did not draw away from him now. She did not seem to see or hear him. Her glance lit unknowing on his face, her hand lay in his, passive as a thing of stone. Sometimes he thought she did not know who he was.

"Can't we do anything to cheer her or take her mind off it?" he said to Daddy John behind the wagon.

The old man gave him a glance of tolerant scorn.

"You can't take a person's mind off the only thing that's in it. She's got nothing inside her but worry. She's filled up with it, level to the top. You might as well try and stop a pail from overflowing that's too full of water."

They fared on for two interminable, broiling days. The pace was of the slowest, for a jolt or wrench of the wagon might cause another hemorrhage. With a cautious observance of stones and chuck holes they crawled down the road that edged the river. The sun was blinding, beating on the canvas hood till the girl's face was beaded with sweat, and the sick man's blankets were hot against the intenser heat of his body. Outside the world held its breath spellbound in a white dazzle. The river sparkled like a coat of mail, the only unquiet thing on the earth's incandescent surface. When the afternoon declined, shadows crept from the opposite bluffs, slanted across the water, slipped toward the little caravan and engulfed it. Through the front opening Susan watched the road. There was a time when each dust ridge showed a side of bright blue. To half-shut eyes they were like painted stripes weaving toward the distance. Following them to where the trail bent round a buttress, her glance brought up on Courant's mounted figure. He seemed the vanishing point of these converging stripes, the object they were striving toward, the end they aimed for. Reaching him they ceased as though they had accomplished their purpose, led the woman's eyes to him as to a symbolical figure that piloted the train to succor.

With every hour weakness grew on the doctor, his words were fewer. By the ending of the first day, he lay silent looking out at the vista of bluffs and river, his eyes shining in sunken orbits. As dusk fell Courant dropped back to the wagon and asked Daddy John if the mules could hold the pace all night. Susan heard the whispered conference, and in a moment was kneeling on the seat, her hand clutched like a spread starfish on the old man's shoulder.

Courant leaned from his saddle to catch the driver's ear with his lowered tones. "With a forced march we can get there to-morrow afternoon. The animals can rest up and we can make him comfortable and maybe find a doctor."

Her face, lifted to him, was like a transparent medium through which anxiety and hope that was almost pain, shone. She hung on his words and breathed back quick agreement. It would have been the same if he had suggested the impossible, if the angel of the Lord had appeared and barred the way with a flaming sword.

"Of course they can go all night. They must. We'll walk and ride by turns. That'll lighten the wagon. I'll go and get my horse," and she was out and gone to the back of the train where David rode at the head of the pack animals.

The night was of a clear blue darkness, suffused with the misty light of stars. Looking back, Courant could see her upright slenderness topping the horse's black shape. When the road lay pale and unshaded behind her he could decipher the curves of her head and shoulders. Then he turned to the trail in front, and her face, as it had been when he first saw her and as it was now, came back to his memory. Once, toward midnight, he drew up till they reached him, her horse's muzzle nosing soft against his pony's flank. He could see the gleam of her eyes, fastened on him, wide and anxious.

"Get into the wagon and ride," he commanded.

"Why? He's no worse! He's sleeping."

"I was thinking of you. This is too hard for you. It'll wear you out."

"Oh, I'm all right," she said with a slight movement of impatience. "Don't worry about me. Go on."

He returned to his post and she paced slowly on, keeping level with the wheels. It was very still, only the creaking of the wagon and the hoof beats on the dust. She kept her eyes on his receding shape, watched it disappear in dark turns, then emerge into faintly illumined stretches. It moved steadily, without quickening of gait, a lonely shadow that they followed through the unknown to hope. Her glance hung to it, her ear strained for the thud of his pony's feet, sight and sound of him came to her like a promise of help. He was the one strong human thing in this place of remote skies and dumb unfeeling earth.

It was late afternoon when the Fort came in sight. A flicker of animation burst up in them as they saw the square of its long, low walls, crowning an eminence above the stream. The bottom lay wide at its feet, the river slipping bright through green meadows sprinkled with an army of cattle. In a vast, irregular circle, a wheel of life with the fort as its hub, spread an engirdling encampment. It was scattered over plain and bottom in dottings of white, here drawn close in clustering agglomerations, there detached in separate spatterings. Coming nearer the white spots grew to wagon hoods and tent roofs, and among them, less easy to discern, were the pointed summits of the lodges with the bunched poles bristling through the top. The air was very still, and into it rose the straight threads of smoke from countless fires, aspiring upwards in slender blue lines to the bluer sky. They lifted and dispersed the smell of burning wood that comes to the wanderer with a message of home, a message that has lain in his blood since the first man struck fire and turned the dry heap of sticks to an altar to be forever fixed as the soul of his habitation.

They camped in the bottom withdrawn from the closer herding of tents. It was a slow settling, as noiseless as might be, for two at least of their number knew that the doctor was dying. That afternoon Daddy John and Courant had seen the shadow of the great change. Whether Susan saw it they neither knew. She was full of a determined, cold energy, urging them at once to go among the camps and search for a doctor. They went in different directions, leaving her sitting by her father's feet at the raised flap of the tent. Looking back through the gathering dusk Courant could see her, a dark shape, her body drooping in relaxed lines. He thought that she knew.

When they came back with the word that there was no doctor to be found, darkness was closing in. Night came with noises of men and the twinkling of innumerable lights. The sky, pricked with stars, looked down on an earth alive with answering gleams, as though a segment of its spark-set shield had fallen and lay beneath it, winking back messages in an aerial telegraphy. The fires leaped high or glowed in smoldering mounds, painting the sides of tents, the flanks of ruminating animals, the wheels of wagons, the faces of men and women. Coolness, rest, peace brooded over the great bivouac, with the guardian shape of the Fort above it and the murmur of the river at its feet.

A lantern, standing on a box by the doctor's side, lit the tent. Through the opening the light from the fire outside poured in, sending shadows scurrying up the canvas walls. Close within call David sat by it, his chin on his knees, his eyes staring at the tongues of flames as they licked the fresh wood. There was nothing now for him to do. He had cooked the supper, and then to ease the pain of his unclaimed sympathies, cleaned the pans, and from a neighboring camp brought a piece of deer meat for Susan. It was the only way he could serve her, and he sat disconsolately looking now at the meat on a tin plate, then toward the tent where she and Daddy John were talking. He could hear the murmur of their voices, see their silhouettes moving on the canvas, gigantic and grotesque. Presently she appeared in the opening, paused there for a last word, and then came toward him.

"He wants to speak to Daddy John for a moment," she said and dropping on the ground beside him, stared at the fire.

David looked at her longingly, but he dared not intrude upon her somber abstraction. The voices in the tent rose and fell. Once at a louder phrase from Daddy John she turned her head quickly and listened, a sheaf of strained nerves. The voices dropped again, her eye came back to the light and touched the young man's face. It contained no recognition of him, but he leaped at the chance, making stammering proffer of such aid as he could give.

"I've got you some supper."

He lifted the plate, but she shook her head.

"Let me cook it for you," he pleaded. "You haven't eaten anything since morning."

"I can't eat," she said, and fell back to her fire-gazing, slipping away from him into the forbidding dumbness of her thoughts. He could only watch her, hoping for a word, an expressed wish. When it came it was, alas! outside his power to gratify:

"If there had only been a doctor here! That was what I was hoping for."

And so when she asked for the help he yearned to give, it was his fate that he should meet her longing with a hopeless silence.

When Daddy John emerged from the tent she leaped to her feet.

"Well?" she said with low eagerness.

"Go back to him. He wants you," answered the old man. "I've got something to do for him."

He made no attempt to touch her, his words and voice were brusque, yet David saw that she responded, softened, showed the ragged wound of her pain to him as she did to no one else. It was an understanding that went beneath all externals. Words were unnecessary between them, heart spoke to heart.

She returned to the tent and sunk on the skin beside her father. He smiled faintly and stretched a hand for hers, and her fingers slipped between his, cool and strong against the lifeless dryness of his palm. She gave back his smile bravely, her eyes steadfast. She had no desire for tears, no acuteness of sensation. A weight as heavy as the world lay on her, crushing out struggle and resistance. She knew that he was dying. When they told her there was no doctor in the camp her flickering hope had gone out. Now she was prepared to sit by him and wait with a lethargic patience beyond which was nothing.

He pressed her hand and said: "I've sent Daddy John on a hunt. Do you guess what for?"

She shook her head feeling no curiosity.

"The time is short, Missy."

The living's instinct to fight against the acquiescence of the dying prompted her to the utterance of a sharp "No."

"I want it all arranged and settled before it's too late. I sent him to see if there was a missionary here."

She was leaning against the couch of robes, resting on the piled support of the skins. In the pause after his words she slowly drew herself upright, and with her mouth slightly open inhaled a deep breath. Her eyes remained fixed on him, gleaming from the shadow of her brows, and their expression, combined with the amaze of the dropped underlip, gave her a look of wild attention.

"Why?" she said. The word came obstructed and she repeated it.

"I want you to marry David here to-night."

The doctor's watch on a box at the bed head ticked loudly in the silence. They looked at each other unconscious of the length of the pause. Death on the one hand, life pressing for its due on the other, were the only facts they recognized. Hostility, not to the man but to the idea, drove the amazement from her face and hardened its softness to stone.

"Here, to-night?" she said, her comprehension stimulated by an automatic repetition of his words.

"Yes. I may not be able to understand tomorrow."

She moved her head, her glance touching the watch, the lantern, then dropping to the hand curled round her own. It seemed symbolic of the will against which hers was rising in combat. She made an involuntary effort to withdraw her fingers but his closed tighter on them.

"Why?" she whispered again.

"Some one must take care of you. I can't leave you alone."

She answered with stiffened lips: "There's Daddy John."

"Some one closer than Daddy John. I want to leave you with David."

Her antagonism rose higher, sweeping over her wretchedness. Worn and strained she had difficulty to keep her lips shut on it, to prevent herself from crying out her outraged protests. All her dormant womanhood, stirring to wakefulness in the last few weeks, broke into life, gathering itself in a passion of revolt, abhorrent of the indignity, ready to flare into vehement refusal. To the dim eyes fastened on her she was merely the girl, reluctant still. He watched her down-drooped face and said:

"Then I could go in peace. Am I asking too much?"

She made a negative movement with her head and turned her face away from him.

"You'll do this for my happiness now?"

"Anything," she murmured.

"It will be also for your own."

He moved his free hand and clasped it on the mound made by their locked fingers. Through the stillness a man's voice singing Zavier's Canadian song came to them. It stopped at the girl's outer ear, but, like a hail from a fading land, penetrated to the man's brain and he stirred.

"Hist!" he said raising his brows, "there's that French song your mother used to sing."

The distant voice rose to the plaintive burden and he lay motionless, his eyes filmed with memories. As the present dimmed the past grew clearer. His hold on the moment relaxed and he slipped away from it on a tide of recollection, muttering the words.

The girl sat mute, her hand cold under his, her being passing in an agonized birth throe from unconsciousness to self-recognition. Her will--its strength till now unguessed--rose resistant, a thing of iron. Love was too strong in her for open opposition, but the instinct to fight, blindly but with caution, for the right to herself was stronger.

His murmuring died into silence and she looked at him. His eyes were closed, the pressure of his fingers loosened. A light sleep held him, and under its truce she softly withdrew her hand, then stole to the tent door and stood there a waiting moment, stifling her hurried breathing. She saw David lying by the fire, gazing into its smoldering heart. With noiseless feet she skirted the encircling ropes and pegs, and stood, out of range of his eye, on the farther side. Here she stopped, withdrawn from the light that came amber soft through the canvas walls, slipping into shadow when a figure passed, searching the darkness with peering eyes.

Around her the noises of the camp rose, less sharp than an hour earlier, the night silence gradually hushing them. The sparks and shooting gleams of fires still quivered, imbued with a tenacious life. She had a momentary glimpse of a naked Indian boy flinging loose his blanket, a bronze statue glistening in a leap of flame. Nearer by a woman's figure bent over a kettle black on a bed of embers, then a girl's fire-touched form, with raised arms, shaking down a snake of hair, which broke and grew cloudy under her disturbing hands. A resounding smack sounded on a horse's flank, a low ripple of laughter came tangled with a child's querulous crying, and through the walls of tents and the thickness of smoke the notes of a flute filtered.

Her ear caught the pad of a footstep on the grass, and her eyes seized on a shadow that grew from dusky uncertainty to a small, bent shape. She waited, suffocated with heartbeats, then made a noiseless pounce on it.

"Daddy John," she gasped, clutching at him.

The old man staggered, almost taken off his feet.

"Is he worse?" he said.

"He's told me. Did you find anyone?"

"Yes--two. One's Episcopal--in a train from St. Louis."

A sound came from her that he did not understand. She gripped at his shoulders as if she were drowning. He thought she was about to swoon and put his arm around her saying:

"Come back to the tent. You're all on a shake as if you had ague."

"I can't go back. Don't bring him. Don't bring him. Don't tell father. Not now. I will later, some other time. When we get to California, but not now--not to-night."

The sentences were cut apart by breaths that broke from her as if she had been running. He was frightened and tried to draw her to the light and see her face.

"Why, Missy!" he said with scared helplessness, "Why, Missy! What's got you?"

"Don't get the clergyman. Tell him there isn't any. Tell him you've looked all over. Tell him a lie."

He guessed the trouble was something more than the grief of the moment, and urged in a whisper:

"What's the matter now? Go ahead and tell me. I'll stick by you."

She bent her head back to look into his face.

"I don't want to marry him now. I can't. I can't. I _can't_."

Her hands on his shoulders shook him with each repetition. The force of the words was heightened by the suppressed tone. They should have been screamed. In these whispered breaths they burst from her like blood from a wound. With the last one her head bowed forward on his shoulder with a movement of burrowing as though she would have crawled up and hidden under his skin, and tears, the most violent he had ever seen her shed, broke from her. They came in bursting sobs, a succession of rending throes that she struggled to stifle, swaying and quivering under their stress.

He thought of nothing now but this new pain added to the hour's tragedy, and stroked her shoulder with a low "Keep quiet--keep quiet," then leaned his face against her hair and breathed through its tangles.

"It's all right, I'll do it. I'll say I couldn't find anyone. I'll lie for you, Missy."

She released him at once, dropped back a step and, lifting a distorted face, gave a nod. He passed on, and she fell on the grass, close to the tent ropes and lay there, hidden by the darkness.

She did not hear a step approaching from the herded tents. Had she been listening it would have been hard to discern, for the feet were moccasin shod, falling noiseless on the muffling grass. A man's figure with fringes wavering along its outline came round the tent wall. The head was thrust forward, the ear alert for voices. Faring softly his foot struck her and he bent, stretching down a feeling hand. It touched her shoulder, slipped along her side, and gripped at her arm. "What's the matter?" came a deep voice, and feeling the pull on her arm she got to her knees with a strangled whisper for silence. When the light fell across her, he gave a smothered cry, jerked her to her feet and thrust his hand into her hair, drawing her head back till her face was uplifted to his.

There was no one to see, and he let his eyes feed full upon it, a thief with the coveted treasure in his hands. She seemed unconscious of him, a broken thing without sense or volition, till a stir came from the tent. Then he felt her resist his grasp. She put a hand on his breast and pressed herself back from him.

"Hush," she breathed. "Daddy John's in there."

A shadow ran up the canvas wall, bobbing on it, huge and wavering. She turned her head toward it, the tears on her cheeks glazed by the light. He watched her with widened nostrils and immovable eyes. In the mutual suspension of action that held them he could feel her heart beating.

"Well?" came the doctor's voice.

The old servant answered:

"There weren't no parsons anywhere, I've been all over and there's not one."

"Parsons?" Courant breathed.

She drew in the fingers spread on his breast with a clawing movement and emitted an inarticulate sound that meant "Hush."

"Not a clergyman or missionary among all these people?"

"Not one."

"We must wait till to-morrow, then."

"Yes--mebbe there'll be one to-morrow."

"I hope so."

Then silence fell and the shadow flickered again on the canvas.

She made a struggle against Courant's hold, which for a moment he tried to resist, but her fingers plucked against his hand, and she tore herself free and ran to the tent opening. She entered without speaking, threw herself at the foot of the couch, and laid her head against her father's knees.

"Is that you, Missy?" he said, feeling for her with a groping hand. "Daddy John couldn't find a clergyman."

"I know," she answered, and lay without moving, her face buried in the folds of the blanket.

They said no more, and Daddy John stole out of the tent.

The next day the doctor was too ill to ask for a clergyman, to know or to care. At nightfall he died. The Emigrant Trail had levied its first tribute on them, taken its toll.

END OF PART III