[pg 202]
Jesse Wingate made a swift instinctive motion toward the revolver which swung at his hip. But Jed sprang between him and Banion.
"No! Hold on, Pap--stop!" cried Jed. "It's all right. I brought him in.
"As a prisoner?"
"I am no man's prisoner, Captain Wingate," said Banion's deep voice.
His eyes were fixed beyond the man to whom he spoke. He saw Molly, to whom her mother now ran, to take the white face in her own hands. Wingate looked from one to the other.
"Why do you come here? What do I owe you that you should bring more trouble, as you always have? And what do you owe me?"
"I owe you nothing!" said Banion. "You owe me nothing at all. I have not traveled in your train, and I shall not travel in it. I tell you once more, you're wrong in your beliefs; but till I can prove that I'll not risk any argument about it."
"Then why do you come to my camp now?"
"You should know."
[pg 203]
"I do know. It's Molly!"
"It's Molly, yes. Here's a letter from her. I found it in the cabin at Ash Hollow. Your friend Woodhull could have killed me--we passed him just now. Jed could have killed me--you can now; it's easy. But that wouldn't change me. Perhaps it wouldn't change her."
"You come here to face me down?"
"No, sir. I know you for a brave man, at least. I don't believe I'm a coward--I never asked. But I came to see Molly, because here she's asked it. I don't know why. Do you want to shoot me like a coyote?"
"No. But I ask you, what do I owe you?"
"Nothing. But can we trade? If I promise to leave you with my train?"
"You want to steal my girl!"
"No! I want to earn her--some day."
The old Roman before him was a man of quick and strong decisions. The very courage of the young man had its appeal.
"At least you'll eat," said he. "I'd not turn even a black Secesh away hungry--not even a man with your record in the Army."
"No, I'll not eat with you."
"Wait then! I'll send the girl pretty soon, if you are here by her invitation. I'll see she never invites you again."
Wingate walked toward his wagon. Banion kept out of the light circle and found his horse. He stood, leaning his head on his arms in the saddle, waiting, until after what seemed an age she slipped out of the darkness, almost into his arms, standing pale, her fingers lacing and unlacing--the girl who had kissed him once--to say good-by.
[pg 204]
"Will Banion!" she whispered. "Yes, I sent for you. I felt you'd find the letter."
"Yes, Molly." It was long before he would look at her. "You're the same," said he. "Only you've grown more beautiful every day. It's hard to leave you--awfully hard. I couldn't, if I saw you often."
He reached out again and took her in his arms, softly, kissed her tenderly on each cheek, whispered things that lovers do say. But for his arms she would have dropped again, she was so weak. She fought him off feebly.
"No! No! It is not right! No! No!"
"You're not going to be with us any more?" she said at last.
He shook his head. They both looked at his horse, his rifle, swung in its sling strap at the saddle horn. She shook her head also.
"Is this the real good-by, Will?" Her lips trembled.
"It must be. I have given my word to your father. But why did you send for me? Only to torture me? I must keep my word to hold my train apart. I've promised my men to stick with them."
"Yes, you mustn't break your word. And it was fine just to see you a minute, Will; just to tell you--oh, to say I love you, Will! But I didn't think that was why I sent. I sent to warn you--against him. It seems always to come to the same thing."
[pg 205]
She was trying not to sob. The man was in but little better case. The stars did not want them to part. All the somber wilderness world whispered for them to love and not to part at all. But after a time they knew that they again had parted, or now were able to do so.
"Listen, Will," said the girl at last, putting back a lock of her fallen hair. "I'll have to tell you. We'll meet in Oregon? I'll be married then. I've promised. Oh, God help me! I think I'm the wickedest woman in all the world, and the most unhappy. Oh, Will Banion, I--I love a thief! Even as you are, I love you! I guess that's why I sent for you, after all.
"Go find the scout--Jim Bridger!" she broke out suddenly. "He's going on ahead. Go on to his fort with him--he'll have wagons and horses. He knows the way. Go with Bridger, Will! Don't go to Oregon! I'm afraid for you. Go to California--and forget me! Tell Bridger--"
"Why, where is it?" she exclaimed.
She was feeling in the pocket of her apron, and it was empty.
"I've lost it!" she repeated. "I lose everything!"
"What was it, Molly?"
She leaned her lips to his ear.
[pg 206]
"It was gold!"
He stood, the magic name of that metal which shows the color in the shade electrifying even his ignorance of the truth.
"Gold?"
She told him then, breaking her own promise magnificently, as a woman will.
"Go, ride with Bridger," she went on. "Don't tell him you ever knew me. He'll not be apt to speak of me. But they found it, in California, the middle of last winter--gold! Gold! Carson's here in our camp--Kit Carson. He's the first man to bring it to the Valley of the Platte. He was sworn to keep it secret; so was Bridger, and so am I. Not to Oregon, Will--California! You can live down your past. If we die, God bless the man I do love. That's you, Will! And I'm going to marry--him. Ten days! On the trail! And he'll kill you, Will! Oh, keep away!"
She paused, breathless from her torrent of incoherent words, jealous of the passing moments. It was vague, it was desperate, it was crude. But they were in a world vague, desperate and crude.
"I've promised my men I'd not leave them," he said at last. "A promise is a promise."
"Then God help us both! But one thing--when I'm married, that's the end between us. So good-by."
He leaned his head back on his saddle for a time, his tired horse turning back its head. He put out his hand blindly; but it was the muzzle of his horse that had touched his shoulder. The girl was gone.
[pg 207]
The Indian drums at Laramie thudded through the dark. The great wolf in the breaks lifted his hoarse, raucous roar once more. The wilderness was afoot or bedding down, according to its like.
[pg 208]
Carson, Bridger and Jackson, now reunited after years, must pour additional libations to Auld Lang Syne at Laramie, so soon were off together. The movers sat around their thrifty cooking fires outside the wagon corral. Wingate and his wife were talking heatedly, she in her nervousness not knowing that she fumbled over and over in her fingers the heavy bit of rock which Molly had picked up and which was in her handkerchief when it was requisitioned by her mother to bathe her face just now. After a time she tossed the nugget aside into the grass. It was trodden by a hundred feet ere long. But gold will not die. In three weeks a prowling Gros Ventre squaw found it and carried it to the trader, Bordeaux, asking, "Shoog?"
"Non, non!" replied the Laramie trader. "Pas de shoog!" But he looked curiously at the thing, so heavy.
"How, cola!" wheedled the squaw. "Shoog!" She made the sign for sugar, her finger from her palm to her lips. Bordeaux tossed the thing into the tin can on the shelf and gave her what sugar would cover a spoon.
[pg 209]
"Where?" He asked her, his fingers loosely shaken, meaning, "Where did you get it?"
The Gros Ventre lied to him like a lady, and told him, on the South Fork, on the Creek of Bitter Cherries--near where Denver now is; and where placers once were. That was hundreds of miles away. The Gros Ventre woman had been there once in her wanderings and had seen some heavy metal.
Years later, after Fort Laramie was taken over by the Government, Bordeaux as sutler sold much flour and bacon to men hurrying down the South Fork to the early Colorado diggings. Meantime in his cups he often had told the mythical tale of the Gros Ventre woman--long after California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana were all afire. But one of his halfbreed children very presently had commandeered the tin cup and its contents, so that to this day no man knows whether the child swallowed the nugget or threw it into the Laramie River or the Platte River or the sagebrush. Some depose that an emigrant bought it of the baby; but no one knows.
What all men do know is that gold does not die; nay, nor the news of it. And this news now, like a multiplying germ, was in the wagon train that had started out for Oregon.
As for Molly, she asked no questions at all about the lost nugget, but hurried to her own bed, supperless, pale and weeping. She told her father nothing of the nature of her meeting with Will Banion, then nor at any time for many weeks.
[pg 210]
"Molly, come here, I want to talk to you."
Wingate beckoned to his daughter the second morning after Banion's visit.
The order for the advance was given. The men had brought in the cattle and the yoking up was well forward. The rattle of pots and pans was dying down. Dogs had taken their places on flank or at the wagon rear, women were climbing up to the seats, children clinging to pieces of dried meat. The train was waiting for the word.
The girl followed him calmly, high-headed.
"Molly, see here," he began. "We're all ready to move on. I don't know where Will Banion went, but I want you to know, as I told him, that he can't travel in our train."
"He'll not ask to, father. He's promised to stick to his own men."
"He's left you at last! That's good. Now I want you to drop him from your thoughts. Hear that, and heed it. I tell you once more, you're not treating Sam Woodhull right."
She made him no answer.
"You're still young, Molly," he went on. "Once you're settled you'll find Oregon all right. Time you were marrying. You'll be twenty and an old maid first thing you know. Sam will make you a good husband. Heed what I say."
[pg 211]
But she did not heed, though she made no reply to him. Her eye, "scornful, threatening and young," looked yonder where she knew her lover was; not was it in her soul ever to return from following after him. The name of her intended husband left her cold as ice.
"Roll out! Roll out! Ro-o-o-ll ou-t!"
The call went down the line once more. The pistolry of the wagon whips made answer, the drone of the drivers rose as the sore-necked oxen bowed their heads again, with less strength even for the lightened loads.
The old man who sat by the gate at Fort Laramie, twisting a curl around his finger, saw the plain clearing now, as the great train swung out and up the river trail. He perhaps knew that Jim Bridger, with his own freight wagons, going light and fast with mules, was on west, ahead of the main caravan. But he did not know the news Jim Bridger carried, the same news that Carson was carrying east. The three old mountain men, for a few hours meeting after years, now were passing far apart, never to meet again. Their chance encountering meant much to hundreds of men and women then on the road to Oregon; to untold thousands yet to come.
As for one Samuel Woodhull, late column captain, it was to be admitted that for some time he had been conscious of certain buffetings of fate. But as all thoroughbred animals are thin-skinned, so are all the short-bred pachydermatous, whereby they endure and mayhap arrive at the manger well as the next. True, even Woodhull's vanity and self-content had everything asked of them in view of his late series of mishaps; but by now he had somewhat chirked up under rest and good food, and was once more the dandy and hail fellow. He felt assured that very presently bygones would be bygones. Moreover--so he reasoned--if he, Sam Woodhull, won the spoils, what matter who had won any sort of victory? He knew, as all these others knew and as all the world knows, that a beautiful woman is above all thingsspolia opimaof war. Well, in ten days he was to marry Molly Wingate, the most beautiful woman of the train and the belle of more than one community. Could he not afford to laugh best, in spite of all events, even if some of them had not been to his own liking?
[pg 212]
But the girl's open indifference was least of all to his liking. It enraged his vain, choleric nature to its inner core. Already he planned dominance; but willing to wait and to endure for ten days, meantime he employed innocence, reticence, dignity, attentiveness, so that he seemed a suitor misunderstood, misrepresented, unjustly used--to whose patient soul none the less presently must arrive justice and exoneration, after which all would be happier even than a marriage bell. After the wedding bells he, Samuel Woodhull, would show who was master.
[pg 213]
Possessed once more of horse, arms and personal equipment, and having told his own story of persecution to good effect throughout the train, Woodhull had been allowed to resume a nominal command over a part of the Wingate wagons. The real control lay in the triumvirate who once had usurped power, and who might do so again.
Wingate himself really had not much more than nominal control of the general company, although he continued to give what Caleb Price called the easy orders. His wagons, now largely changed to ox transport, still traveled at the head of the train, Molly continuing to drive her own light wagon and Jed remaining on the cow column.
The advance hardly had left Fort Laramie hidden by the rolling ridges before Woodhull rode up to Molly's wagon and made excuse to pass his horse to a boy while he himself climbed up on the seat with his fiancée.
She made room for him in silence, her eyes straight ahead. The wagon cover made good screen behind, the herdsmen were far in the rear, and from the wagons ahead none could see them. Yet when, after a moment, her affianced husband dropped an arm about her waist the girl flung it off impatiently.
"Don't!" she exclaimed. "I detest love-making in public. We see enough of it that can't be hid. It's getting worse, more open, the farther we get out."
"The train knows we are to be married at the halfway stop, Molly. Then you'll change wagons and will not need to drive."
[pg 214]
"Wait till then."
"I count the hours. Don't you, dearest?"
She turned a pallid face to him at last, resentful of his endearments.
"Yes, I do," she said. But he did not know what she meant, or why she was so pale.
"I think we'll settle in Portland," he went on. "The travelers' stories say that place, at the head of navigation on the Willamette, has as good a chance as Oregon City, at the Falls. I'll practice law. The goods I am taking out will net us a good sum, I'm hoping. Oh, you'll see the day when you'll not regret that I held you to your promise! I'm not playing this Oregon game to lose it."
"Do you play any game to lose it?"
"No! Better to have than to explain have not--that's one of my mottoes."
"No matter how?"
"Why do you ask?"
"I was only wondering."
"About what?"
"About men--and the differences."
"My dear, as a school-teacher you have learned to use a map, a blackboard. Do you look on us men as ponderable, measurable, computable?"
"A girl ought to if she's going to marry."
"Well, haven't you?"
[pg 215]
"Have I?"
She still was staring straight ahead, cold, making no silent call for a lover's arms or arts. Her silence was so long that at length even his thick hide was pierced.
"Molly!" he broke out. "Listen to me! Do you want the engagement broken? Do you want to be released?"
"What would they all think?"
"Not the question. Answer me!"
"No, I don't want it broken. I want it over with. Isn't that fair?"
"Is it?"
"Didn't you say you wanted me on any terms?"
"Surely!"
"Don't you now?"
"Yes, I do, and I'm going to have you, too!"
His eye, covetous, turned to the ripe young beauty of the maid beside him. He was willing to pay any price.
"Then it all seems settled."
"All but one part. You've never really and actually told me you loved me."
A wry smile.
"I'm planning to do that after I marry you. I suppose that's the tendency of a woman? Of course, it can't be true that only one man will do for a woman to marry, or one woman for a man? If anything went wrong on that basis--why, marrying would stop? That would be foolish, wouldn't it? I suppose women do adjust? Don't you think so?"
[pg 216]
His face grew hard under this cool reasoning.
"Am I to understand that you are marrying me as a second choice, and so that you can forget some other man?"
"Couldn't you leave a girl a secret if she had one? Couldn't you be happier if you did? Couldn't you take your chance and see if there's anything under the notion about more than one man and more than one woman in the world? Love? Why, what is love? Something to marry on? They say it passes. They tell me that marriage is more adjustable, means more interests than love; that the woman who marries with her eyes open is apt to be the happiest in the long run. Well, then you said you wanted me on any terms. Does not that include open eyes?"
"You're making a hard bargain--the hardest a man can be obliged to take."
"It was not of my seeking."
"You said you loved me--at first."
"No. Only a girl's in love with love--at first. I've not really lied to you. I'm trying to be honest before marriage. Don't fear I'll not be afterward. There's much in that, don't you think? Maybe there's something, too, in a woman's ability to adjust and compromise? I don't know. We ought to be as happy as the average married couple, don't you think? None of them are happy for so very long, they say. They say love doesn't last long. I hope not. One thing, I believe marriage is easier to beat than love is."
[pg 217]
"How old are you, really, Molly?"
"I am just over nineteen, sir."
"You are wise for that; you are old."
"Yes--since we started for Oregon."
He sat in sullen silence for a long time, all the venom of his nature gathering, all his savage jealousy.
"You mean since you met that renegade, traitor and thief, Will Banion! Tell me, isn't that it?"
"Yes, that's true. I'm older now. I know more."
"And you'll marry me without love. You love him without marriage? Is that it?"
"I'll never marry a thief."
"But you love one?"
"I thought I loved you."
"But you do love him, that man!"
Now at last she turned to him, gazing straight through the mist of her tears.
"Sam, if you really loved me, would you ask that? Wouldn't you just try to be so gentle and good that there'd no longer be any place in my heart for any other sort of love, so I'd learn to think that our love was the only sort in the world? Wouldn't you take your chance and make good on it, believing that it must be in nature that a woman can love more than one man, or love men in more than one way? Isn't marriage broader and with more chance for both? If you love me and not just yourself alone, can't you take your chance as I am taking mine? And after all, doesn't a woman give the odds? If you do love, me--"
[pg 218]
"If I do, then my business is to try to make you forget Will Banion."
"There is no other way you could. He may die. I promise you I'll never see him after I'm married.
"And I'll promise you another thing"--her strained nerves now were speaking truth for her--"if by any means I ever learn--if I ever believe--that Major Banion is not what I now think him, I'll go on my knees to him. I'll know marriage was wrong and love was right all the time."
"Fine, my dear! Much happiness! But unfortunately for Major Banion's passing romance, the official records of a military court-martial and a dishonorable discharge from the Army are facts which none of us can doubt or deny."
"Yes, that's how it is. So that's why."
"What do you really mean then, Molly--you say, that's why?"
"That's why I'm going to marry you, Sam. Nine days from to-day, at the Independence Rock, if we are alive. And from now till then, and always, I'm going to be honest, and I'm going to pray God to give you power to make me forget every other man in all the world except my--my--" But she could not say the word "husband."
"Your husband!"
[pg 219]
He said it for her, and perhaps then reached his zenith in approximately unselfish devotion, and in good resolves at least.
The sun shone blinding hot. The white dust rose in clouds. The plague of flies increased. The rattle and creak of wheel, the monotone of the drivers, the cough of dust-afflicted kine made the only sounds for a long time.
"You can't kiss me, Molly?"
He spoke not in dominance but in diffidence. The girl awed him.
"No, not till after, Sam; and I think I'd rather be left alone from now till then. After--Oh, be good to me, Sam! I'm trying to be honest as a woman can. If I were not that I'd not be worth marrying at all."
Without suggestion or agreement on his part she drew tighter the reins on her mules. He sprang down over the wheel. The sun and the dust had their way again; the monotony of life, its drab discontent, its yearnings and its sense of failure once more resumed sway in part or all of the morose caravan. They all sought new fortunes, each of these. One day each must learn that, travel far as he likes, a man takes himself with him for better or for worse.
[pg 220]
Banion allowed the main caravan two days' start before he moved beyond Fort Laramie. Every reason bade him to cut entirely apart from that portion of the company. He talked with every man he knew who had any knowledge of the country on ahead, read all he could find, studied such maps as then existed, and kept an open ear for advice of old-time men who in hard experience had learned how to get across a country.
Two things troubled him: The possibility of grass exhaustion near the trail and the menace of the Indians. Squaw men in from the north and west said that the Arapahoes were hunting on the Sweetwater, and sure to make trouble; that the Blackfeet were planning war; that the Bannacks were east of the Pass; that even the Crows were far down below their normal range and certain to harass the trains. These stories, not counting the hostility of the Sioux and Cheyennes of the Platte country, made it appear that there was a tacit suspense of intertribal hostility, and a general and joint uprising against the migrating whites.
These facts Banion did not hesitate to make plain to all his men; but, descendants of pioneers, with blood of the wilderness in their veins, and each tempted by adventure as much as by gain, they laughed long and loud at the thought of danger from all the Indians of the Rockies. Had they not beaten the Sioux? Could they not in turn humble the pride of any other tribe? Had not their fathers worked with rifle lashed to the plow beam? Indians? Let them come!
[pg 221]
Founding his own future on this resolute spirit of his men, Banion next looked to the order of his own personal affairs. He found prices so high at Fort Laramie, and the stock of all manner of goods so low, that he felt it needless to carry his own trading wagons all the way to Oregon, when a profit of 400 per cent lay ready not a third of the way across and less the further risk and cost. He accordingly cut down his own stocks to one wagon, and sold off wagons and oxen as well, until he found himself possessed of considerably more funds than when he had started out.
He really cared little for these matters. What need had he for a fortune or a future now? He was poorer than any jeans-clad ox driver with a sunbonnet on the seat beside him and tow-headed children on the flour and bacon sacks, with small belongings beyond the plow lashed at the tail gate, the ax leaning in the front corner of the box and the rifle swinging in its loops at the wagon bows. They were all beginning life again. He was done with it.
The entire caravan now had passed in turn the Prairies and the Plains. In the vestibule of the mountains they had arrived in the most splendid out-of-doors country the world has ever offered. The climate was superb, the scenery was a constant succession of changing beauties new to the eyes of all. Game was at hand in such lavish abundance as none of them had dreamed possible. The buffalo ranged always within touch, great bands of elk now appeared, antelope always were in sight. The streams abounded in noble game fish, and the lesser life of the open was threaded across continually by the presence of the great predatory animals--the grizzly, the gray wolf, even an occasional mountain lion. The guarding of the cattle herds now required continual exertion, and if any weak or crippled draft animal fell out its bones were clean within the hour. The feeling of the wilderness now was distinct enough for the most adventurous. They fed fat, and daily grew more like savages in look and practice.
[pg 222]
Wingate's wagons kept well apace with the average schedule of a dozen miles a day, at times spurting to fifteen or twenty miles, and made the leap over the heights of land between the North Platte and the Sweetwater, which latter stream, often winding among defiles as well as pleasant meadows, was to lead them to the summit of the Rockies at the South Pass, beyond which they set foot on the soil of Oregon, reaching thence to the Pacific. Before them now lay the entry mark of the Sweetwater Valley, that strange oblong upthrust of rock, rising high above the surrounding plain, known for two thousand miles as Independence Rock.
[pg 223]
At this point, more than eight hundred miles out from the Missouri, a custom of unknown age seemed to have decreed a pause. The great rock was an unmistakable landmark, and time out of mind had been a register of the wilderness. It carried hundreds of names, including every prominent one ever known in the days of fur trade or the new day of the wagon trains. It became known as a resting place; indeed, many rested there forever, and never saw the soil of Oregon. Many an emigrant woman, sick well-nigh to death, held out so that she might be buried among the many other graves that clustered there. So, she felt, she had the final company of her kind. And to those weak or faint of heart the news that this was not halfway across often smote with despair and death, and they, too, laid themselves down here by the road to Oregon.
But here also were many scenes of cheer. By this time the new life of the trail had been taken on, rude and simple. Frolics were promised when the wagons should reach the Rock. Neighbors made reunions there. Weddings, as well as burials, were postponed till the train got to Independence Rock.
Here then, a sad-faced girl, true to her promise and true to some strange philosophy of her own devising, was to become the wife of a suitor whose persistency had brought him little comfort beyond the wedding date. All the train knew that Molly Wingate was to be married there to Sam Woodhull, now restored to trust and authority. Some said it was a good match, others shook their heads, liking well to see a maid either blush or smile in such case as Molly's, whereas she did neither.
[pg 224]
At all events, Mrs. Wingate was two days baking cakes at the train stops. Friends got together little presents for the bride. Jed, Molly's brother, himself a fiddler of parts, organized an orchestra of a dozen pieces. The Rev. Henry Doak, a Baptist divine of much nuptial diligence en route, made ready his best coat. They came into camp. In the open spaces of the valley hundreds of wagons were scattered, each to send representatives to Molly Wingate's wedding. Some insisted that the ceremony should be performed on the top of the Rock itself, so that no touch of romance should lack.
Then approached the very hour--ten of the night, after duties of the day were done. A canopy was spread for the ceremony. A central camp fire set the place for the wedding feast. Within a half hour the bride would emerge from the secrecy of her wagon to meet at the canopy under the Rock the impatient groom, already clad in his best, already giving largess to the riotous musicians, who now attuned instruments, now broke out into rude jests or pertinent song.
But Molly Wingate did not appear, nor her father, nor her mother. A hush fell on the rude assemblage. The minister of the gospel departed to the Wingate encampment to learn the cause of the delay. He found Jesse Wingate irate to open wrath, the girl's mother stony calm, the girl herself white but resolute.
[pg 225]
"She insists on seeing the marriage license, Mr. Doak," began Jesse Wingate. "As though we could have one! As though she should care more for that than her parents!"
"Quite so," rejoined the reverend man. "That is something I have taken up with the happy groom. I have with all the couples I have joined in wedlock on the trail. Of course, being a lawyer, Mr. Woodhull knows that even if they stood before the meeting and acknowledged themselves man and wife it would be a lawful marriage before God and man. Of course, also we all know that since we left the Missouri River we have been in unorganized territory, with no courts and no form of government, no society as we understand it at home. Very well. Shall loving hearts be kept asunder for those reasons? Shall the natural course of life be thwarted until we get to Oregon? Why, sir, that is absurd! We do not even know much of the government of Oregon itself, except that it is provisional."
The face of Molly Wingate appeared at the drawn curtains of her transient home. She stepped from her wagon and came forward. Beautiful, but not radiant, she was; cold and calm, but not blushing and uncertain. Her wedding gown was all in white, true enough to tradition, though but of delaine, pressed new from its packing trunk by her mother's hands. Her bodice, long and deep in front and at back, was plain entirely, save for a treasure of lace from her mother's trunk and her mother's wedding long ago. Her hands had no gloves, but white short-fingered mitts, also cherished remnants of days of schoolgirl belledom, did service. Over white stockings, below the long and full-bodied skirt, showed the crossed bands of long elastic tapes tied in an ankle bow to hold in place her little slippers of black high-finished leather. Had they seen her, all had said that Molly Wingate was the sweetest and the most richly clad bride of any on all the long, long trail across the land that had no law. And all she lacked for her wedding costume was the bride's bouquet, which her mother now held out to her, gathered with care that day of the mountain flowers--blue harebells, forget-me-nots of varied blues and the blossom of the gentian, bold and blue in the sunlight, though at night infolded and abashed, its petals turning in and waiting for the sun again to warm them.
[pg 226]
Molly Wingate, stout and stern, full bosomed, wet eyed, held out her one little present to her girl, her ewe lamb, whom she was now surrendering. But no hand of the bride was extended for the bride's bouquet. The voice of the bride was not low and diffident, but high pitched, insistent.
"Provisional? Provisional? What is it you are saying, sir? Are you asking me to be married in a provisional wedding? Am I to give all I have provisionally? Is my oath provisional, or his?"
[pg 227]
"Now, now, my dear!" began the minister.
Her father broke out into a half-stifled oath.
"What do you mean?"
Her mother's face went pale under its red bronze.
"I mean this," broke out the girl, still in the strained high tones that betokened her mental state: "I'll marry no man in any halfway fashion! Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't I think? How could I have forgotten? Law, organization, society, convention, form, custom--haven't I got even those things to back me? No? Then I've nothing! It was--it was those things--form, custom--that I was going to have to support me. I've got nothing else. Gone--they're gone, too! And you ask me to marry him--provisionally--provisionally! Oh, my God! what awful thing was this? I wasn't even to have that solid thing to rest on, back of me, after it all was over!"
They stood looking at her for a time, trying to catch and weigh her real intent, to estimate what it might mean as to her actions.
"Like images, you are!" she went on hysterically, her physical craving for one man, her physical loathing of another, driving her well-nigh mad. "You wouldn't protect your own daughter!"--to her stupefied parents. "Must I think for you at this hour of my life? How near--oh, how near! But not now--not this way! No! No!"
[pg 228]
"What do you mean, Molly?" demanded her father sternly. "Come now, we'll have no woman tantrums at this stage! This goes on! They're waiting! He's waiting!"
"Let him wait!" cried the girl in sudden resolution.
All her soul was in the cry, all her outraged, self-punished heart. Her philosophy fell from her swiftly at the crucial moment when she was to face the kiss, the embrace of another man. The great inarticulate voice of her woman nature suddenly sounded, imperative, terrifying, in her own ears--"Oh, Will Banion, Will Banion, why did you take away my heart?" And now she had been on the point of doing this thing! An act of God had intervened.
Jesse Wingate nodded to the minister. They drew apart. The holy man nodded assent, hurried away--the girl sensed on what errand.
"No use!" she said. "I'll not!"
Stronger and stronger in her soul surged the yearning for the dominance of one man, not this man yonder--a yearning too strong now for her to resist.
"But Molly, daughter," her mother's voice said to her, "girls has--girls does. And like he said, it's the promise, it's the agreement they both make, with witnesses."
"Yes, of course," her father chimed in. "It's the consent in the contract when you stand before them all."
[pg 229]
"I'll not stand before them. I don't consent! There is no agreement!"
Suddenly the girl reached out and caught from her mother the pitiful little bride's bouquet.
"Look!" she laughed. "Look at these!"
One by one, rapidly, she tore out and flung down the folded gentian flowers.
"Closed, closed! When the night came, they closed! They couldn't! They couldn't! I'll not--I can't!"
She had the hand's clasp of mountain blossoms stripped down to a few small flowers of varied blooms. They heard the coming of the groom, half running. A silence fell over all the great encampment. The girl's father made a half step forward, even as her mother sank down, cowering, her hands at her face.
Then, without a word, with no plan or purpose, Molly Wingate turned, sprang away from them and fled out into a night that was black indeed.
Truly she had but one thought, and that in negation only. Yonder came to claim her a man suddenly odious to her senses. It could not be. His kiss, his arms--if these were of this present time and place, then no place in all the world, even the world of savage blackness that lay about, could be so bad as this. At the test her philosophy had forsaken her, reason now almost as well, and sheer terrified flight remained her one reaction.
She was gone, a white ghost in her wedding gown, her little slippers stumbling over the stones, her breath coming sobbingly as she ran. They followed her. Back of them, at the great fire whose illumination deepened the shadows here, rose a murmur, a rising of curious people, a pressing forward to the Wingate station. But of these none knew the truth, and it was curiosity that now sought answer for the delay in the anticipated divertisement.
[pg 230]
Molly Wingate ran for some moments, to some distance--she knew of neither. Then suddenly all her ghastly nightmare of terror found climax in a world of demons. Voices of the damned rose around her. There came a sudden shock, a blow. Before she could understand, before she could determine the shadowy form that rose before her in the dark, she fell forward like the stricken creature.