A slowly lightening sky, beneath it the transparent sapphire of the desert wakening to the dawn, and cutting the blue expanse the line of the new trail. A long butte, a bristling outline on the paling north, ran out from a crumpled clustering of hills, and the road bent to meet it. The air came from it touched with a cooling freshness, and as they pressed toward it they saw the small, swift shine of water, a little pool, grass-ringed, with silver threads creeping to the sands.
They drank and then slept, sinking to oblivion as they dropped on the ground, not waiting to undo their blankets or pick out comfortable spots. The sun, lifting a bright eye above the earth's rim, shot its long beams over their motionless figures, "bundles of life," alone in a lifeless world.
David alone could not rest. Withdrawn from the others he lay in the shadow of the wagon, watching small points in the distance with a glance that saw nothing. All sense of pain and weakness had left him. Physically he felt strangely light and free of sensation. With his brain endowed with an abnormal activity he suffered an agony of spirit so poignant that there were moments when he drew back and looked at himself wondering how he endured it. He was suddenly broken away from everything cherished and desirable in life. The bare and heart-rending earth about him was as the expression of his ruined hopes. And after these submergences in despair a tide of questions carried him to livelier torment: Why had she done it? What had changed her? When had she ceased to care?
All his deadened manhood revived. He wanted her, he owned her, she was his. Sick and unable to fight for her she had been stolen from him, and he writhed in spasms of self pity at the thought of the cruelty of it. How could he, disabled, broken by unaccustomed hardships, cope with the iron-fibered man whose body and spirit were at one with these harsh settings?Hewas unfitted for it, for the heroic struggle, for the battle man to man for a woman as men had fought in the world's dawn into which they had retraced their steps. He could not make himself over, become another being to appeal to a sense in her he had never touched. He could only plead with her, beg mercy of her, and he saw that these were not the means that won women grown half savage in correspondence with a savage environment.
Then came moments of exhaustion when he could not believe it. Closing his eyes he called up the placid life that was to have been his and Susan's, and could not think but that it still must be. Like a child he clung to his hope, to the belief that something would intervene and give her back to him; not he, he was unable to, but something that stood for justice and mercy. All his life he had abided by the law, walked uprightly, done his best. Was he to be smitten now through no fault of his own? It was all a horrible dream, and presently there would be an awakening with Susan beside him as she had been in the first calm weeks of their betrothal. The sweetness of those days returned to him with the intolerable pang of a fair time, long past and never to come again. He threw his head back as if in a paroxysm of pain. It could not be and yet in his heart he knew it was true. In the grip of his torment he thought of the God that watching over Israel slumbered not nor slept. With his eyes on the implacable sky he tried to pray, tried to drag down from the empty gulf of air the help that would bring back his lost happiness.
At Susan's first waking movement he started and turned his head toward her. She saw him, averted her face, and began the preparations for the meal. He lay watching her and he knew that her avoidance of his glance was intentional. He also saw that her manner of preoccupied bustle was affected. She was pale, her face set in hard lines. When she spoke once to Daddy John her voice was unlike itself, hoarse and throaty, its mellow music gone.
They gathered and took their places in silence, save for the old man, who tried to talk, but meeting no response gave it up. Between the three others not a word was exchanged. A stifling oppression lay on them, and they did not dare to look at one another. The girl found it impossible to swallow and taking a piece of biscuit from her mouth threw it into the sand.
The air was sultry, light whisps of mist lying low over the plain. The weight of these vaporous films seemed to rest on them heavy as the weight of water, and before the meal was finished, Susan, overborne by a growing dread and premonition of tragedy, rose and left her place, disappearing round a buttress of the rock. Courant stopped eating and looked after her, his head slowly moving as his eye followed her. To anyone watching it would have been easy to read this pursuing glance, the look of the hunter on his quarry. David saw it and rose to his knees. A rifle lay within arm's reach, and for one furious moment he felt an impulse to snatch it and kill the man. But a rush of inhibiting instinct checked him. Had death or violence menaced her he could have done it, but without the incentive of the immediate horror he could never rise so far beyond himself.
Susan climbed the rock's side to a plateau on its western face. The sun beat on her like a furnace mouth. Here and there black filigrees of shade shrank to the bases of splintered ledges. Below the plain lay outflung in the stupor of midday. On its verge the mountains stretched, a bright blue, shadowless film. A mirage trembled to the south, a glassy vision, crystal clear amid the chalky streakings and the rings of parched and blanching sinks. Across the prospect the faint, unfamiliar mist hung as if, in the torrid temperature, the earth was steaming.
She sat down on a shelf of rock not feeling the burning sunshine or the heat that the baked ledges threw back upon her. The life within her was so intense that no impressions from the outside could enter, even her eyes took in no image of the prospect they dwelt on. Courant's kiss had brought her to a place toward which, she now realized, she had been moving for a long time, advancing upon it, unknowing, but impelled like a somnambulist willed toward a given goal. What was to happen she did not know. She felt a dread so heavy that it crushed all else from her mind. They had reached a crisis where everything had stopped, a dark and baleful focus to which all that had gone before had been slowly converging. The whole journey had been leading to this climax of suspended breath and fearful, inner waiting.
She heard the scraping of ascending feet, and when she saw David stared at him, her eyes unblinking in stony expectancy. He came and stood before her, and she knew that at last he had guessed, and felt no fear, no resistance against the explanation that must come. He suddenly had lost all significance, was hardly a human organism, or if a human organism, one that had no relation to her. Neither spoke for some minutes. He was afraid, and she waited, knowing what he was going to say, wishing it was said, and the hampering persistence of his claim was ended.
At length he said tremulously:
"Susan, I saw you last night. What did you do it for? What am I to think?"
That he had had proof of her disloyalty relieved her. There would be less to say in this settling of accounts.
"Well," she answered, looking into his eyes. "You saw!"
He cried desperately, "I saw him kiss you. You let him. What did it mean?"
"Why do you ask? If you saw you know."
"I don't know. I want to know. Tell me, explain to me." He paused, and then cried with a pitiful note of pleading, "Tell me it wasn't so. Tell me I made a mistake."
He was willing, anxious, for her to lie. Against the evidence of his own senses he would have made himself believe her, drugged his pain with her falsehoods. What remnant of consideration she had vanished.
"You made no mistake," she answered. "It was as you saw."
"I don't believe it. I can't. You wouldn't have done it. It's I you're promised to. Haven't I your word? Haven't you been kind as an angel to me when the others would have let me die out here like a dog? What did you do it for if you didn't care?"
"I was sorry," and then with cold, measured slowness, "and I felt guilty."
"That's it—you felt guilty. It's not your doing. You've been led away. While I've been sick that devil's been poisoning you against me. He's tried to steal you from me. But you're not the girl to let him do that. You'll come back to me—the man that you belong to, that's loved you since the day we started."
To her at this naked hour, where nothing lived but the truth, the thought that he would take her back with the other man's kisses on her lips, made her unsparing. She drew back from him, stiffening in shocked repugnance, and speaking with the same chill deliberation.
"I'll never come back to you. It's all over, that love with you. I didn't know. I didn't feel. I was a child with no sense of what she was doing. Now everything's different. It's he I must go with and be with as long as I live."
The hideousness of the discovery had been made the night before. Had her words been his first intimation they might have shocked him into stupefied dumbness and made him seem the hero who meets his fate with closed lips. But hours long he had brooded and knew her severance from him had taken place. With the mad insistance of a thought whirling on in fevered repetition he had told himself that he must win her back, urge, struggle, plead, till he had got her where she was before or lose her forever.
"You can't. You can't do it. It's a temporary thing. It's the desert and the wildness and because he could ride and get water and find the trail. In California it will be different. Out there it'll be the same as it used to be back in the States. You'll think of this as something unreal that never happened and your feeling for him—it'll all go. When we get where it's civilized you'll be like you were when we started. You couldn't have loved a savage like that then. Well, you won't when you get where you belong. It's horrible. It's unnatural."
She shook her head, glanced at him and glanced away. The sweat was pouring off his face and his lips quivered like a weeping child's.
"Oh, David," she said with a deep breath like a groan, "thisis natural for me. The other was not."
"You don't know what you're saying. And how about your promise?Yougave that of your own free will. Was it a thing you give and take back whenever you please? What would your father think of your breaking your word—throwing me off for a man no better than a half-blood Indian? Is that your honor?" Then he was suddenly fearful that he had said too much and hurt his case, and he dropped to a wild pleading: "Oh, Susan, you can't, you can't. You haven't got the heart to treat me so."
She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in hopeless desperation.
"Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the Fort."
"Where would we be now without him?" she said and smiled grimly at the thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.
"We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We can go on without him, there's no more danger."
She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.
"He'll go on with us," she said.
"It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and Icanget you back if he goes."
"You'll never get me back," she answered, and rising moved away from him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to the unloved and urgent suitor. He followed her and caught at her dress.
"Don't go. Don't leave me this way. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. If I hadn't grown into thinking you were going to be my wife maybe I could. But it's just unbearable when I'd got used to looking upon you as mine, almost as good as married to me. You can't do it. You can't make me suffer this way."
His complete abandonment filled her with pain, the first relenting she had had. She could not look at him and longed to escape. She tried to draw her dress from his hands, saying:
"Oh, David, don't say any more. There's no good. It's over. It's ended. I can't help it. It's something stronger than I am."
He saw the repugnance in her face and loosened his hold, dropping back from her.
"It's the end of my life," he said in a muffled voice.
"I feel as if it was the end of the world," she answered, and going to the pathway disappeared over its edge.
She walked back skirting the rock's bulk till she found a break in its side, a small gorge shadowed by high walls. The cleft penetrated deep, its mouth open to the sky, its apex a chamber over which the cloven walls slanted like hands with finger tips touching in prayer. It was dark in this interior space, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots. Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out through the entrance at the desert shimmering through the heat haze. The mist wreaths were dissolving, every line and color glassily clear. Her eyes rested vacantly on it, her body inert, her heart as heavy as a stone.
David made no movement to follow her. He had clung to his hope with the desperation of a weak nature, but it was ended now. No interference, no miracle, could restore her to him. He saw—he had to see—that she was lost to him as completely as if death had claimed her. More completely, for death would have made her a stranger. Now it was the Susan he had loved who had looked at him with eyes not even indifferent but charged with a hard hostility. She was the same and yet how different! Hopeless!—Hopeless! He wondered if the word had ever before voiced so abject a despair.
He turned to the back of the plateau and saw the faint semblance of a path leading upward to higher levels, a trail worn by the feet of other emigrants who had climbed to scan with longing eyes the weary way to the land of their desire. As he walked up it and the prospect widened on his sight, its message came, clearer with every mounting step. Thus forever would he look out on a blasted world uncheered by sound or color. The stillness that lapped him round was as the stillness of his own dead heart. The mirage quivered brilliant in the distance, and he paused, a solitary shape against the exhausted sky, to think that his dream of love had had no more reality. Beautiful and alluring it had floated in his mind, an illusion without truth or substance.
He reached the higher elevation, barren and iron hard, the stone hot to his feet. On three sides the desert swept out to the horizon, held in its awful silence. Across it, a white seam, the Emigrant Trail wound, splindling away into the west, a line of tortuous curves, a loop, a straight streak, and then a tiny thread always pressing on to that wonderful land which he had once seen as a glowing rim on the world's remotest verge. It typified the dauntless effort of man, never flagging, never broken, persisting to its goal. He had not been able to thus persist, the spirit had not reached far enough to know its aim and grasp it. He knew his weakness, his incapacity to cope with the larger odds of life, a watcher not an actor in the battle, and understanding that his failure had come from his own inadequacy he wished that he might die.
On one side the eminence broke away in a sheer fall to the earth below. At its base a scattering of sundered bowlders and fragments lay, veiled by a growth of small, bushy shrubs to which a spring gave nourishment. Behind this the long spine of the rock tapered back to the parent ridge that ran, a bristling rampart, east and west. He sat down on the edge of the precipice watching the trail. He had no idea how long he remained thus. A shadow falling across him brought him back to life. He turned and saw Courant standing a few feet from him.
Without speech or movement they eyed one another. In his heart each hated the other, but in David the hate had come suddenly, the hysteric growth of a night's anguish. The mountain man's was tempered by a process of slow-firing to a steely inflexibility. He hated David that he had ever been his rival, that he had ever thought to lay claim to the woman who was his, that he had ever aspired to her, touched her, desired her. He hated him when he saw that, all unconsciously, he had still a power to hold her from the way her passion led. And back of all was the ancient hatred, the heritage from ages lost in the beginnings of the race, man's of man in the struggle for a woman.
David rose from his crouching posture to his knees. The other, all his savage instincts primed for onslaught, saw menace in the movement, and stood braced and ready. Like Susan he understood that David had guessed the secret. He could judge him only by his own measure, and he knew the settling of the score had come. There was no right or justice in his claim, only the right of the stronger to win what he wanted, but that to him was the supreme right.
David's sick fury shot up into living flame. He judged Susan innocent, a tool in ruthless hands. He saw the destroyer of their lives, a devil who had worked subtly for his despoilment. The air grew dark and in the center of the darkness, his hate concentrated on the watching face, and an impulse, the strongest of his life, nerved him with the force to kill. For once he broke beyond himself, rose outside the restrictions that had held him cowering within his sensitive shell. His rage had the vehemence of a distracted woman's, and he threw himself upon his enemy, inadequate now as always, but at last unaware and unconscious.
They clutched and rocked together. From the moment of the grapple it was unequal—a sick and wounded creature struggling in arms that were as iron bands about his puny frame. But as a furious child fights for a moment successfully with its enraged elder, he tore and beat at his opponent, striking blindly at the face he loathed, writhing in the grip that bent his body and sent the air in sobbing gasps from his lungs. Their trampling was muffled on the stone, their shadows leaped in contorted waverings out from their feet and back again. Broken and twisted in Courant's arms, David felt no pain only the blind hate, saw the livid plain heaving about him, the white ball of the sun, and twisting through the reeling distance the pale thread of the Emigrant Trail, glancing across his ensanguined vision like a shuttle weaving through a blood-red loom.
They staggered to the edge of the plateau and there hung. It was only for a moment, a last moment of strained and swaying balance. Courant felt the body against his weaken, wrenched himself free, and with a driving blow sent it outward over the precipice. It fell with the arms flung wide, the head dropped backward, and from the open mouth a cry broke, a shrill and dreadful sound that struck sharp on the plain's abstracted silence, spread and quivered across its surface like widening rings on the waters of a pool. The mountain man threw himself on the edge and looked down. The figure lay limp among the bushes thirty feet below. He watched it, his body still as a panther's crouched for a spring. He saw one of the hands twitch, a loosened sliver of slate slide from the wall, and cannoning on projections, leap down and bury itself in the outflung hair. The face looking up at him with half-shut eyes that did not wink as the rock dust sifted into them, was terrible, but he felt no sensation save a grim curiosity.
He stole down a narrow gulley and crept with stealthy feet and steadying hands toward the still shape. The shadows were cool down there, and as he touched the face its warmth shocked him. It should have been cold to have matched its look and the hush of the place. He thrust his hand inside the shirt and felt at the heart. No throb rose under his palm, and he sent it sliding over the upper part of the body, limp now, but which he knew would soon be stiffening. The man was dead.
Courant straightened himself and sent a rapid glance about him. The bushes among which the body lay were close matted in a thick screen. Through their roots the small trickle of the spring percolated, stealing its way to the parched sands outside. It made a continuous murmuring, as if nature was lifting a voice of low, insistent protest against the desecration of her peace.
The man standing with stilled breath and rigid muscles listened for other sounds. Reassured that there were none, his look swept right and left for a spot wherein to hide the thing that lay at his feet. At its base the rock wall slanted outward leaving a hollow beneath its eave where the thin veneer of water gleamed from the shadows. He took the dead man under the arms and dragged him to it, careful of branches that might snap under his foot, pausing to let the echoes of rolling stones die away—a figure of fierce vitality with the long, limp body hanging from his hands. At the rock he crouched and thrust his burden under the wall's protecting cope, the trickle of the water dying into a sudden, scared silence. Stepping back he brushed the bushes into shape, hiding their breakage, and bent to gather the scattered leaves and crush them into crevices. When it was done the place showed no sign of the intruder, only the whispering of the streamlet told that its course was changed and it was feeling for a new channel.
Then he crept softly out to the plain's edge where the sunlight lay long and bright. It touched his face and showed it white, with lips close set and eyes gleaming like crystals. He skirted the rock, making a soft, quick way to where the camp lay. Here the animals stood, heads drooped as they cropped the herbage round the spring. Daddy John sat in the shade of the wagon, tranquilly cleaning a gun. The mountain man's passage was so soundless that he did not hear it. The animals raised slow eyes to the moving figure, then dropped them indifferently. He passed them, his step growing lighter, changing as he withdrew from the old man's line of vision, to a long, rapid glide. His blood-shot eyes nursed the extending buttresses, and as he came round them, with craned neck and body reaching forward, they sent a glance into each recess that leaped round it like a flame.
Susan had remained in the same place. She made no note of the passage of time, but the sky between the walls was growing deeper in color, the shadows lengthening along the ground. She was lying on her side looking out through the rift's opening when Courant stood there. He made an instant's pause, a moment when his breath caught deep, and, seeing him, she started to her knees with a blanching face. As he came upon her she held out her hands, crying in uprising notes of terror, "No! No! No!" But he gathered her in his arms, stilled her cries with his kisses, and bending low carried her back into the darkened cavern over which the rocks closed like hands uplifted in prayer.
Till the afternoon of the next day they held the train for David. When evening fell and he did not come Daddy John climbed the plateau and kindled a beacon fire that threw its flames against the stars. Then he took his rifle and skirted the rock's looming bulk, shattering the stillness with reports that let loose a shivering flight of echoes. All night they sat by the fire listening and waiting. As the hours passed their alarm grew and their speculations became gloomier and more sinister. Courant was the only one who had a plausible theory. The moving sparks on the mountains showed that the Indians were still following them and it was his opinion that David had strayed afar and been caught by a foraging party. It was not a matter for desperate alarm as the Diggers were harmless and David would no doubt escape from them and join a later train. This view offered the only possible explanation. It was Courant's opinion and so it carried with the other two.
Early in the evening the girl had shown no interest. Sitting back from the firelight, a shawl over her head, she seemed untouched by the anxiety that prompted the old man's restless rovings. As the night deepened Daddy John had come back to Courant who was near her. He spoke his fears low, for he did not want to worry her. Glancing to see if she had heard him, he was struck by the brooding expression of her face, white between the shawl folds. He nodded cheerily at her but her eyes showed no responsive gleam, dwelling on him wide and unseeing. As he moved away he heard her burst into sudden tears, such tears as she had shed at the Fort, and turning back with arms ready for her comforting, saw her throw herself against Courant's knees, her face buried in the folds of her shawl. He stood arrested, amazed not so much by the outburst as by the fact that it was to Courant she had turned and not to him. But when he spoke to her she drew the shawl tighter over her head and pressed her face against the mountain man's knees. Daddy John had no explanation of her conduct but that she had been secretly fearful about David and had turned for consolation to the human being nearest her.
The next day her anxiety was so sharp that she could not eat and the men grew accustomed to the sight of her mounted on the rock's summit, or walking slowly along the trail searching with untiring eyes. When alone with her lover he kissed and caressed her fears into abeyance. As he soothed her, clasped close against him, her terrors gradually subsided, sinking to a quiescence that came, not alone from his calm and practical reassurances, but from the power of his presence to drug her reason and banish all thoughts save those of him. He wanted her mind free of the dead man, wanted him eliminated from her imagination. The spiritual image of David must fade from her thoughts as his corporeal part would soon fade in the desiccating desert airs. Alone by the spring, held against Courant's side by an arm that trembled with a passion she still only half understood, she told him of her last interview with David. In an agony of self-accusation she whispered:
"Oh, Low, could he have killed himself?"
"Where?" said the man. "Haven't we searched every hole and corner of the place? He couldn't have hidden his own body."
The only evidence that some mishap had befallen David was Daddy John's, who, on the afternoon of the day of the disappearance had heard a cry, a single sound, long and wild. It had seemed to come from the crest of the rock, and the old man had listened and hearing no more had thought it the yell of some animal far on the mountains. This gave color to Courant's theory that the lost man had been seized by the Diggers. Borne away along the summit of the ridge he would have shouted to them and in that dry air the sound would have carried far. He could have been overpowered without difficulty, weakened by illness and carrying no arms.
They spent the morning in a fruitless search and in the afternoon Courant insisted on the train moving on. They cached provisions by the spring and scratched an arrow on the rock pointing their way, and underneath it the first letters of their names. It was useless, the leader said, to leave anything in the form of a letter. As soon as their dust was moving on the trail the Diggers would sweep down on the camp and carry away every scrap of rag and bone that was there. This was why he overrode Susan's plea to leave David's horse. Why present to the Indians a horse when they had only sufficient for themselves? She wrung her hands at the grewsome picture of David escaping and stealing back to find a deserted camp. But Courant was inexorable and the catching-up went forward with grim speed.
She and the old man were dumb with depression as the train rolled out. To them the desertion seemed an act of appalling heartlessness. But the mountain man had overcome Daddy John's scruples by a picture of their own fate if they delayed and were caught in the early snows of the Sierras. The girl could do nothing but trust in the word that was already law to her. He rode beside her murmuring reassurances and watching her pale profile. Her head hung low on her breast, her hat casting a slant of shadow to her chin. Her eyes looked gloomily forward, sometimes as his words touched a latent chord of hope, turning quickly upon him and enveloping him in a look of pathetic trust.
At the evening halt she ate nothing, sitting in a muse against the wagon wheel. Presently she put her plate down and, mounting on the axle, scanned the way they had come. She could see the rock, rising like the clumsy form of a dismantled galleon from the waters of a darkling sea. For a space she stood, her hand arched above her eyes, then snatched the kerchief from her neck and, straining an arm aloft, waved it. The white and scarlet rag flapped with a languid motion, an infinitesimal flutter between the blaze of the sky and the purpling levels of the earth. Her arm dropped, her signal fallen futile on the plain's ironic indifference.
During the next day's march she constantly looked back, and several times halted, her hand demanding silence as if she were listening for pursuing footsteps. Courant hid a growing irritation, which once escaped him in a query as to whether she thought David, if he got away from the Indians, could possibly catch them up. She answered that if he had escaped with a horse he might, and fell again to her listening and watching. At the night camp she ordered Daddy John to build the beacon fire higher than ever, and taking a rifle moved along the outskirts of the light firing into the darkness. Finally, standing with the gun caught in the crook of her arm, she sent up a shrill call of "David." The cry fell into the silence, cleaving it with a note of wild and haunting appeal. Courant went after her and brought her back. When they returned to the fire the old man, who was busy with the cooking, looked up to speak but instead gazed in silence, caught by something unusual in their aspect, revivifying, illuminating, like the radiance of an inner glow. It glorified the squalor of their clothing, the drawn fatigue of their faces. It gave them the fleeting glamour of spiritual beauty that comes to those in whom being has reached its highest expression, the perfect moment of completion caught amid life's incompleteness.
In the following days she moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life. She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David, had been so persistently lively, now, when it came to herself, was dead. Question of right or wrong, secret communings, self judgment, had no place in the exaltation of her mood. To look at her conduct and reason of it, to do anything but feel, was as impossible for her as it would have been to disengage her senses from their tranced concentration and restore them to the composed serenity of the past.
It was not the sudden crumbling of a character, the collapse of a structure reared on a foundation of careful training. It was a logical growth, forced by the developing process of an environment with which that character was in harmony. Before she reached the level where she could surrender herself, forgetful of the rites imposed by law, unshocked by her lover's brutality, she had been losing every ingrafted and inherited modification that had united her with the world in which she had been an exotic. The trials of the trail that would have dried the soul and broken the mettle of a girl whose womanhood was less rich, drew from hers the full measure of its strength. Every day had made her less a being of calculated, artificial reserves, of inculcated modesties, and more a human animal, governed by instincts that belonged to her age and sex. She was normal and chaste and her chastity had made her shrink from the man whose touch left her cold, and yield to the one to whom her first antagonism had been first response. When she had given Courant her kiss she had given herself. There was no need for intermediary courtship. After that vacillations of doubt and conscience ended. The law of her being was all that remained.
She moved on with the men, dust-grimed, her rags held together with pins and lacings of deer hide. She performed her share of the work with automatic thoroughness, eating when the hour came, sleeping on the ground under the stars, staggering up in the deep-blue dawn and buckling her horse's harness with fingers that fatigue made clumsy. She was more silent than ever before, often when the old man addressed her making no reply. He set down her abstraction to grief over David. When he tried to cheer her, her absorbed preoccupation gave place to the old restlessness, and once again she watched and listened. These were her only moods—periods of musing when she rode in front of the wagon with vacant eyes fixed on the winding seam of the trail, and periods of nervous agitation when she turned in her saddle to sweep the road behind her and ordered him to build the night fire high and bright.
The old servant was puzzled. Something foreign in her, an inner vividness of life, a deeper current of vitality, told him that this was not a woman preyed upon by a gnawing grief. He noted, without understanding, a change in her bearing to Courant and his to her. Without words to give it expression he saw in her attitude to the leader a pliant, docile softness, a surreptitious leap of light in the glance that fell upon him in quick welcome before her lids shut it in. With Courant the change showed in a possessive tenderness, a brooding concern. When, at the morning start, he waited as she rode toward him, his face was irradiated with a look that made the old man remember the dead loves of his youth. It was going to be all right Daddy John thought. David gone, whether forever or for an unknown period, the mountain man might yet win her. And then again the old man fell a wondering at something in them that did not suggest the unassured beginnings of courtship, a settled security of relation as of complete unity in a mutual enterprise.
One afternoon a faint spot of green rose and lingered on the horizon. They thought it a mirage and watched it with eyes grown weary of the desert's delusions. But as the road bore toward it, it steadied to their anxious gaze, expanded into a patch that lay a living touch on the earth's dead face. By the time that dusk gathered they saw that it was trees and knew that Humboldt was in sight. At nightfall they reached it, the first outpost sent into the wilderness by the new country. The red light of fires came through the dusk like a welcoming hail from that unknown land which was to be theirs. After supper Daddy John and Courant left the girl and went to the mud house round which the camps clustered. The darkness was diluted by the red glow of fires and astir with dusky figures. There were trains for California and Oregon and men from the waste lands to the eastward and the south, flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the desert's shore. Inside, where the air was thick with smoke and the reek of raw liquors, they heard again the great news from California. The old man, determined to get all the information he could, moved from group to group, an observant listener in the hubbub. Presently his ear was caught by a man who declared he had been on the gold river and was holding a circle in thrall by his tales. Daddy John turned to beckon to Courant and, not seeing him, elbowed his way through the throng spying to right and left. But the mountain man had gone. Daddy John went back to the gold seeker and drew him dry of information, then foregathered with a thin individual who had a humorous eye and was looking on from a corner. This stranger introduced himself as a clergyman, returning from the East to Oregon by way of California. They talked together. Daddy John finding his new acquaintance a tolerant cheery person versed in the lore of the trail. The man gave him many useful suggestions for the last lap of the journey and he decided to go after Courant, to whom the route over the Sierra was unknown ground.
The camps had sunk to silence, the women and children asleep. He skirted their tents, bending his course to where he saw the hood of his own wagon and the shadowy forms of Julia and her mates. The fire still burned bright and on its farther side he could make out the figures of Susan and Courant seated on the ground. They were quiet, the girl sitting with her feet tucked under her, idly throwing scraps of sage on the blaze. He was about to hail Courant when he saw him suddenly drop to a reclining posture beside her, draw himself along the earth and curl about her, his elbow on the ground, his head propped on a sustaining hand. With the other he reached forward, caught Susan's and drawing it toward him pressed it against his cheek. Daddy John watched the sacrilegious act with starting eyes. He would have burst in upon them had he not seen the girl's shy smile, and her body gently droop forward till her lips rested on the mountain man's. When she drew back the old servant came forward into the light. Its reflection hid his pallor, but his heart was thumping like a hammer and his throat was dry, for suddenly he understood. At his step Susan drew away from her companion and looked at the advancing shape with eyes darkly soft as those of an antelope.
"Where have you been?" she said. "You were a long time away."
"In the mud house," said Daddy John.
"Did you find anyone interesting there?"
"Yes. When I was talkin' with him I didn't know he was so powerful interestin', but sence I come out o' there I've decided he was."
They both looked at him without much show of curiosity, merely, he guessed, that they might not look at each other and reveal their secret.
"What was he?" asked Courant.
"A clergyman."
This time they both started, the girl into sudden erectness, then held her head down as if in shame. For a sickened moment, he thought she was afraid to look at her lover for fear of seeing refusal in his face. Courant leaned near her and laid his hand on hers.
"If there's a clergyman here we can be married," he said quietly.
She drew her hand away and with its fellow covered her face. Courant looked across the fire and said:
"Go and get him, Daddy John. He can do the reading over us now."
In the light of a clear September sun they stood and looked down on it—the Promised Land.
For days they had been creeping up through defiles in the mountain wall, crawling along ledges with murmurous seas of pine below and the snow lying crisp in the hollows. On the western slope the great bulwark dropped from granite heights to wooded ridges along the spines of which the road wound. Through breaks in the pine's close ranks they saw blue, vaporous distances, and on the far side of aerial chasms the swell of other mountains, clothed to their summits, shape undulating beyond shape.
Then on this bright September afternoon a sun-filled pallor of empty space shone between the tree trunks, and they had hurried to the summit of a knoll and seen it spread beneath them—California!
The long spurs, broken apart by ravines, wound downward to where a flat stretch of valley ran out to a luminous horizon. It was a yellow floor, dotted with the dark domes of trees and veined with a line of water. The trail, a red thread, was plain along the naked ridges, and then lost itself in the dusk of forests. Right and left summit and slope swelled and dropped, sun-tipped, shadow filled. Slants of light, rifts of shade, touched the crowded pine tops to gold, darkened them to sweeps of unstirred olive. The air, softly clear, was impregnated with a powerful aromatic scent, the strong, rich odor of the earth and its teeming growths. It lay placid and indolent before the way-worn trio, a new world waiting for their conquering feet.
The girl, with a deep sigh, dropped her head upon her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes. She weakened with the sudden promise of rest. It was in the air, soft as a caress, in the mild, beneficent sun, in the stillness which had nothing of the desert's sinister quiet. Courant put his arm about her, and looking into her face, saw it drawn and pinched, all beauty gone. Her closed eyelids were dark and seamed with fine folds, the cheek bones showed under her skin, tanned to a dry brown, its rich bloom withered. Round her forehead and ears her hair hung in ragged locks, its black gloss hidden under the trail's red dust. Even her youth had left her, she seemed double her age. It was as if he looked at the woman she would be twenty years from now.
Something in the sight of her, unbeautiful, enfeebled, her high spirit dimmed, stirred in him a new, strange tenderness. His arm tightened about her, his look lost its jealous ardor and wandering over her blighted face, melted to a passionate concern. The appeal of her beauty gave place to a stronger, more gripping appeal, never felt by him before. She was no longer the creature he owned and ruled, no longer the girl he had broken to an abject submission, but the woman he loved. Uplifted in the sudden realization he felt the world widen around him and saw himself another man. Then through the wonder of the revelation came the thought of what he had done to win her. It astonished him as a dart of pain would have done. Why had he remembered it? Why at this rich moment should the past send out this eerie reminder? He pushed it from him, and bending toward her murmured a lover's phrase.
She opened her eyes and they met an expression in his that she had felt the need of, hoped and waited for, an answer to what she had offered and he had not seen or wanted. It was completion, arrival at the goal, so longed for and despaired of, and she turned her face against his shoulder, her happiness too sacred even for his eyes. He did not understand the action, thought her spirit languished and, pointing outward, cried in his mounting gladness:
"Look—that's where our home will be."
She lifted her head and followed the directing finger. The old man stood beside them also gazing down.
"It's a grand sight," he said. "But it's as yellow as the desert. Must be almighty dry."
"There's plenty of water," said Courant. "Rivers come out of these mountains and go down there into the plain. And they carry the gold, the gold that's going to make us rich."
He pressed her shoulder with his encircling arm and she answered dreamily:
"We are rich enough."
He thought she alluded to the Doctor's money that was hidden in the wagon.
"But we'll be richer. We've got here before the rest of 'em. We're the first comers and it's ours. You'll be queen here, Susan. I'll make you one." His glance ranged over the splendid prospect, eager with the man's desire to fight and win for his own. She thought little of what he said, lost in her perfect content.
"When we've got the gold we'll take up land and I'll build a house for you, a good house, my wife won't live in a tent. It'll be of logs, strong and water tight, and as soon as they bring things in—and the ships will be coming soon—we'll furnish it well. And that'll be only the beginning."
"Where will we build it?" she said, catching his enthusiasm and straining her eyes as if then and there to pick out the spot.
"By the river under a pine."
"With a place for Daddy John," she cried, stretching a hand toward the old man. "He must be there too."
He took it and stood linked to the embracing pair by the girl's warm grasp.
"I'll stick by the tent," he said; "no four walls for me."
"And you two," she looked from one to the other, "will wash for the gold and I'll take care of you. I'll keep everything clean and comfortable. It'll be a cozy little home—our log house under the pine."
She laughed, the first time in many weeks, and the clear sound rang joyously.
"And when we've got all the dust we want," Courant went on, his spirit expanding on the music of her laughter, "we'll go down to the coast. They'll have a town there soon for the shipping. We'll grow up with it, build it into a city, and as it gets richer so will we. It's going to be a new empire, out here by the Pacific, with the gold rivers back of it and the ocean in front. And it's going to be ours."
She looked over the foreground of hill and vale to the shimmering sweep of the rich still land. Her imagination, wakened by his words, passed from the log house to the busy rush of a city where the sea shone between the masts of ships. It was a glowing future they were to march on together, with no cloud to mar it now that she had seen the new look in his eyes.
A few days later they were in the Sacramento Valley camped near the walls of Sutter's Fort. The plain, clad with a drab grass, stretched to where the low-lying Sacramento slipped between oozy banks. Here were the beginnings of a town, shacks and tents dumped down in a helter skelter of slovenly hurry. Beyond, the American river crept from the mountains and threaded the parched land. Between the valley and the white sky-line of the Sierra, the foot hills swelled, indented with ravines and swathed in the matted robe of the chaparral.
While renewing their supplies at the fort they camped under a live oak. It was a mighty growth, its domed outline fretted with the fineness of horny leaves, its vast boughs outflung in contorted curves. The river sucked about its roots. Outside its shade the plain grew dryer under unclouded suns, huge trees casting black blots of shadow in which the Fort's cattle gathered. Sometimes vaqueros came from the gates in the adobe walls, riding light and with the long spiral leap of the lasso rising from an upraised hand. Sometimes groups of half-naked Indians trailed through the glare, winding a way to the spot of color that was their camp.
To the girl it was all wonderful, the beauty, the peace, the cessation of labor. When the men were at the Fort she lay beneath the great tree watching the faint, white chain of the mountains, or the tawny valley burning to orange in the long afternoons. For once she was idle, come at last to the end of all her journeyings. Only the present, the tranquil, perfect present, existed. What did not touch upon it, fit in and have some purpose in her life with the man of whom she was a part, was waste matter. She who had once been unable to endure the thought of separation from her father could now look back on his death and say, "How I suffered then," and know no reminiscent pang. She would have wondered at herself if, in the happiness in which she was lapped, she could have drawn her mind from its contemplation to wonder at anything. There was no world beyond the camp, no interest in what did not focus on Courant, no people except those who added to his trials or his welfare. The men spent much of their time at the Fort, conferring with others en route to the river bed below Sutter's mill. When they came back to the camp there was lively talk under the old tree. The silence of the trail was at an end. The pendulum swung far, and now they were garrulous, carried away by the fever of speculation. The evening came and found them with scattered stores and uncleaned camp, their voices loud against the low whisperings of leaves and water.
Courant returned from these absences aglow with fortified purpose. Reestablished contact with the world brightened and humanized him, acting with an eroding effect on a surface hardened by years of lawless roving. In his voluntary exile he had not looked for or wanted the company of his fellows. Now he began to soften under it, shift his viewpoint from that of the all-sufficing individual to that of the bonded mass from which he had so long been an alien. The girl's influence had revivified a side almost atrophied by disuse. Men's were aiding it. As her sympathies narrowed under the obsession of her happiness, his expanded, awaked by a reversion to forgotten conditions.
One night, lying beside her under the tent's roof, he found himself wakeful. It was starless and still, the song of the river fusing in a continuous flow of low sound with the secret, self-communings of the tree. The girl's light breathing was at his ear, a reminder of his ownership and its responsibilities. In the idleness of the unoccupied mind he mused on the future they were to share till death should come between. It was pleasant thinking, or so it began. Then, gradually, something in the darkness and the lowered vitality of night caused it to lose its joy, become suffused by a curious, doubting uneasiness. He lay without moving, given up to the strange feeling, not knowing what induced it or from whence it came. It grew in poignancy, clearer and stronger, till it led him like a clew to the body of David.
For the first time that savage act came back to him with a surge of repudiation, of scared denial. He had a realizing sense of how it would look to other men—the men he had met at the Fort. Distinctly, as if their mental attitude were substituted for his, he saw it as they would see it, as the world he was about to enter would see it. His heart began to thump with something like terror and the palms of his hands grew moist. Turning stealthily that he might not wake her, he stared at the triangle of paler darkness that showed through the tent's raised flap. He had no fear that Susan would find out. Even if she did, he knew her securely his, till the end of time, her thoughts to take their color from him, her fears to be lulled at his wish. But the others—the active, busy, practical throng into which he would be absorbed. His action, in the heat of a brutal passion, had made him an outsider from the close-drawn ranks of his fellows. He had been able to do without them, defied their laws, scorned their truckling to public opinion—but now?
The girl turned in her sleep, pressing her head against his shoulder and murmuring drowsily. He edged away from her, flinching from the contact, feeling a grievance against her. She was the link between him and them. Hers was the influence that was sapping the foundations of his independence. She was drawing him back to the place of lost liberty outside which he had roamed in barbarous content. His love was riveting bonds upon him, making his spirit as water. He felt a revolt, a resistance against her power, which was gently impelling him toward home, hearth, neighbors—the life in which he felt his place was gone.
The next day the strange mood seemed an ugly dream. It was not he who had lain wakeful and questioned his right to bend Fate to his own demands. He rode beside his wife at the head of the train as they rolled out in the bright, dry morning on the road to the river. There were men behind them, and in front the dust rose thick on the rear of pack trains. They filed across the valley, watching the foot hills come nearer and the muffling robe of the chaparral separate into checkered shadings where the manzanita glittered and the faint, bluish domes of small pines rose above the woven greenery.
Men were already before them, scattered along the river's bars, waist high in the pits. Here and there a tent showed white, but a blanket under a tree, a pile of pans by a blackened heap of fire marked most of the camps. Some of the gold-hunters had not waited to undo their packs which lay as they had been dropped, and the owners, squatting by the stream's lip, bent over their pans round which the water sprayed in a silver fringe. There were hails and inquiries, answering cries of good or ill luck. Many did not raise their eyes, too absorbed by the hope of fortune to waste one golden moment.
These were the vanguard, the forerunners of next year's thousands, scratching the surface of the lower bars. The sound of their voices was soon left behind and the river ran free of them. Pack trains dropped from the line, spreading themselves along the rim of earth between the trail and the shrunken current. Courant's party moved on, going higher, veiled in a cloud of brick-colored dust. The hills swept up into bolder lines, the pines mounted in sentinel files crowding out the lighter leafage. At each turn the vista showed a loftier uprise, crest peering above crest, and far beyond, high and snow-touched, the summits of the Sierra. The shadows slanted cool from wall to wall, the air was fresh and scented with the forest's resinous breath. Across the tree tops, dense as the matted texture of moss, the winged shadows of hawks floated, and paused, and floated again.
Here on a knoll under a great pine they pitched the tent. At its base the river ran, dwindled to a languid current, the bared mud banks waiting for their picks. The walls of the cañon drew close, a drop of naked granite opposite, and on the slopes beyond were dark-aisled depths, golden-moted, and stirred to pensive melodies. The girl started to help, then kicked aside the up-piled blankets, dropped the skillets into the mess chest, and cried:
"Oh, I can't, I want to look and listen. Keep still—" The men stopped their work, and the music of the murmurous boughs and the gliding water filled the silence. She turned her head, sniffing the forest's scents, her glance lighting on the blue shoulders of distant hills.
"And look at the river, yellow, yellow with gold! I can't work now, I want to see it all—and feel it too," and she ran to the water's edge where she sat down on a rock and gazed up and down the cañon.
When the camp was ready Courant joined her. The rock was wide enough for two and he sat beside her.
"So you like it, Missy?" he said, sending a side-long glance at her flushed face.
"Like it!" though there was plenty of room she edged nearer to him, "I'm wondering if it really is so beautiful or if I just think it so after the trail."
"You'll be content to stay here with me till we've made our pile?"
She looked at him and nodded, then slipped her fingers between his and whispered, though there was no one by to hear, "I'd be content to stay anywhere with you."
He was growing accustomed to this sort of reply. Deprived of it he would have noticed the omission, but it had of late become so common a feature in the conversation he felt no necessity to answer in kind. He glanced at the pine trunks about them and said:
"If the claim's good, we'll cut some of those and build a cabin. You'll see how comfortable I can make you, the way they do on the frontier."
She pressed his fingers for answer and he went on:
"When the winter comes we can move farther down. Up here we may get snow. But there'll be time between now and then to put up something warm and waterproof."
"Why should we move down? With a good cabin we can be comfortable here. The snow won't be heavy this far up. They told Daddy John all about it at the Fort. And you and he can ride in there sometimes when we want things."
These simple words gratified him more than she guessed. It was as if she had seen into the secret springs of his thought and said what he was fearful she would not say. That was why—in a spirit of testing a granted boon to prove its genuineness—he asked with tentative questioning:
"You won't be lonely? There are no people here."
She made the bride's answer and his contentment increased, for again it was what he would have wished her to say. When he answered he spoke almost sheepishly, with something of uneasy confession in his look:
"I'd like to live in places like this always. I feel choked and stifled where there are walls shutting out the air and streets full of people. Even in the Fort I felt like a trapped animal. I want to be where there's room to move about and nobody bothering with different kinds of ideas. It's only in the open, in places without men, that I'm myself."
For the first time he had dared to give expression to the mood of the wakeful night. Though it was dim in the busy brightness of the present—a black spot on the luster of cheerful days—he dreaded that it might come again with its scaring suggestions. With a nerve that had never known a tremor at any menace from man, he was frightened of a thought, a temporary mental state. In speaking thus to her, he recognized her as a help-meet to whom he could make a shamed admission of weakness and fear no condemnation or diminution of love. This time, however, she made the wrong reply:
"But we'll go down to the coast after a while, if our claim's good and we get enough dust out of it. I think of it often. It will be so nice to live in a house again, and have some one to do the cooking, and wear pretty clothes. It will be such fun living where there are people and going about among them, going to parties and maybe having parties of our own."
He withdrew his hand from hers and pushed the hair back from his forehead. Though he said nothing she was conscious of a drop in his mood. She bent forward to peer into his face and queried with bright, observing eyes:
"You don't seem to like the thought of it."
"Oh, it's not me," he answered. "I was just wondering at the queer way women talk. A few minutes ago you said you'd be content anywhere with me. Now you say you think it would be such fun living in a city and going to parties."
"With you, too," she laughed, pressing against his shoulder. "I don't want to go to the parties alone."
"Well, I guess if you ever go it'll have to be alone," he said roughly.
She understood now that she had said something that annoyed him, and not knowing how she had come to do it, felt aggrieved and sought to justify herself:
"But we can't live here always. If we make money we'll want to go back some day where there are people, and comforts and things going on. We'll want friends, everybody has friends. You don't mean for us always to stay far away from everything in these wild, uncivilized places?"
"Why not?" he said, not looking at her, noting her rueful tone and resenting it.
"But we're not that kind of people. You're not a real mountain man. You're not like Zavier or the men at Fort Laramie. You're Napoleon Duchesney just as I'm Susan Gillespie. Your people in St. Louis and New Orleans were ladies and gentlemen. It was just a wild freak that made you run off into the mountains. You don't want to go on living that way. That part of your life's over. The rest will be with me."
"And you'll want the cities and the parties?"
"I'll want to live the way Mrs. Duchesney should live, and you'll want to, too." He did not answer, and she gave his arm a little shake and said, "Won't you?"
"I'm more Low Courant than I am Napoleon Duchesney," was his answer.
"Well, maybe so, but whichever you are, you've got a wife now andthatmakes a great difference."
She tried to infuse some of her old coquetry into the words, but the eyes, looking sideways at him, were troubled, for she did not yet see where she had erred.
"I guess it does," he said low, more as if speaking to himself than her.
This time she said nothing, feeling dashed and repulsed. They continued to sit close together on the rock, the man lost in morose reverie, the girl afraid to move or touch him lest he should show further annoyance.
The voice of Daddy John calling them to supper came to both with relief. They walked to the camp side by side, Low with head drooped, the girl at his elbow stealing furtive looks at him. As they approached the fire she slid her hand inside his arm and, glancing down, he saw the timid questioning of her face and was immediately contrite. He laid his hand on hers and smiled, and she caught her breath in a deep sigh and felt happiness come rushing back. Whatever it was she had said that displeased him she would be careful not to say it again, for she had already learned that the lion in love is still the lion.