Fort Laramie stood where the eastern roots of the mountains start in toothed reef and low, premonitory sweep from the level of the plains. Broken chains and spurs edged up toward it. Far beyond, in a faint aerial distance, the soaring solidity of vast ranges hung on the horizon, cloudy crests painted on the sky. Laramie Peak loomed closer, a bold, bare point, gold in the morning, purple at twilight. And the Black Hills, rock-ribbed and somber, dwarf pines clutching their lodges, rose in frowning ramparts to the North and West.
It was a naked country, bleak and bitter. In winter it slept under a snow blanket, the lights of the fort encircled by the binding, breathless cold. Then the wandering men that trapped and traded with the Indians came seeking shelter behind the white walls, where the furs were stacked in storerooms, and the bourgeois' table was hospitable with jerked meat and meal cakes. When the streams began to stir under the ice, and a thin green showed along the bottoms, it opened its gates and the men of the mountains went forth with their traps rattling at the saddle horn. Later, when the spring was in waking bloom, and each evening the light stayed longer on Laramie Peak, the Indians came in migrating villages moving to the summer hunting grounds, and in painted war parties, for there was a season when the red man, like the Hebrew kings, went forth to battle.
It was midsummer now, the chalk-white walls of the fort were bathed in a scorching sunshine, and the nomads of the wilderness met and picked up dropped threads in its courtyard. It stood up warlike on a rise of ground with the brown swiftness of a stream hurrying below it. Once the factors had tried to cultivate the land, but had given it up, as the Indians carried off the maize and corn as it ripened. So the short-haired grass grew to the stockade. At this season the surrounding plain was thick with grazing animals, the fort's own supply, the ponies of the Indians, and the cattle of the emigrants. Encampments were on every side, clustering close under the walls, whence a cannon poked its nose protectingly from the bastion above the gate. There was no need to make the ring of wagons here. White man and red camped together, the canvas peaks of the tents showing beside the frames of lodge poles, covered with dried skins. The pale face treated his red brother to coffee and rice cakes, and the red brother offered in return a feast of boiled dog.
Just now the fort was a scene of ceaseless animation. Its courtyard was a kaleidoscopic whirl of color, shifting as the sun shifted and the shadow of the walls offered shade. Indians with bodies bare above the dropped blankets, moved stately or squatted on their heels watching the emigrants as they bartered for supplies. Trappers in fringed and beaded leather played cards with the plainsmen in shady corners or lounged in the cool arch of the gateway looking aslant at the emigrant girls. Their squaws, patches of color against the walls, sat docile, with the swarthy, half-breed children playing about their feet. There were French Canadians, bearded like pirates, full of good humor, filling the air with their patois, and a few Mexicans, who passed the days sprawled on serapes and smoking sleepily. Over all the bourgeois ruled, kindly or crabbedly, according to his make, but always absolutely the monarch of a little principality.
The doctor's train had reached the fort by slow stages, and now lay camped outside the walls. Bella's condition had been serious, and they had crawled up the valley of the North Platte at a snail's pace. The gradual change in the country told them of their advance—the intrusion of giant bluffs along the river's edge, the disappearance of the many lovely flower forms, the first glimpses of parched areas dotted with sage. From the top of Scotts Bluffs they saw the mountains, and stood, a way-worn company, looking at those faint and formidable shapes that blocked their path to the Promised Land. It was a sight to daunt the most high-hearted, and they stared, dropping ejaculations that told of the first decline of spirit. Only the sick woman said nothing. Her languid eye swept the prospect indifferently, her spark of life burning too feebly to permit of any useless expenditure. It was the strange man who encouraged them. They would pass the mountains without effort, the ascent was gradual, South Pass a plain.
The strange man had stayed with them, and all being well, would go on to Fort Bridger, probably to California, in their company. It was good news. He was what they needed, versed in the lore of the wilderness, conversant with an environment of which they were ignorant. The train had not passed Ash Hollow when he fell into command, chose the camping grounds, went ahead in search of springs, and hunted with Daddy John, bringing back enough game to keep them supplied with fresh meat. They began to rely upon him, to defer to him, to feel a new security when they saw his light, lean-flanked figure at the head of the caravan.
One morning, as the doctor rode silently beside him, he broke into a low-toned singing. His voice was a mellow baritone, and the words he sung, each verse ending with a plaintive burden, were French:
"Il y a longtemps que je t'ai aimé jamais je ne t'oublierai."
Long ago the doctor had heard his wife sing the same words, and he turned with a start:
"Where did you learn that song?"
"From some voyageur over yonder," nodding toward the mountains. "It's one of their songs."
"You have an excellent accent, better than the Canadians."
The stranger laughed and addressed his companion in pure and fluent French.
"Then you're a Frenchman?" said the elder man, surprised.
"Not I, but my people were. They came from New Orleans and went up the river and settled in St. Louis. My grandfather couldn't speak a sentence in English when he first went there."
When the doctor told his daughter this he was a little triumphant. They had talked over Courant and his antecedents, and had some argument about them, the doctor maintaining that the strange man was a gentleman, Susan quite sure that he was not. Dr. Gillespie used the word in its old-fashioned sense, as a term having reference as much to birth and breeding as to manners and certain, ineradicable instincts. The gentleman adventurer was not unknown on the plains. Sometimes he had fled from a dark past, sometimes taken to the wild because the restraints of civilization pressed too hard upon the elbows of his liberty.
"He's evidently of French Creole blood," said the doctor. "Many of those people who came up from New Orleans and settled in St. Louis were of high family and station."
"Then why should he be out here, dressed like an Indian and wandering round with all sorts of waifs and strays? I believe he's just the same kind of person as old Joe, only younger. Or, if he does come from educated people, there's something wrong about him, and he's had to come out here and hide."
"Oh, what a suspicious little Missy! Nothing would make me believe that. He may be rough, but he's not crooked. Those steady, straight-looking eyes never belonged to any but an honest man. No, my dear, there's no discreditable past behind him, and he's a gentleman."
"Rubbish!" she said pettishly. "You'll be saying Leff's a gentleman next."
From which it will be seen that Low Courant had not been communicative about himself. Such broken scraps of information as he had dropped, when pieced together made a scanty narrative. His grandfather had been one of the early French settlers of St. Louis, and his father a prosperous fur trader there. But why he had cut loose from them he did not vouchsafe to explain. Though he was still young—thirty perhaps—it was evident that he had wandered far and for many years. He knew the Indian trails of the distant Northwest, and spoke the language of the Black Feet and Crows. He had passed a winter in the old Spanish town of Santa Fé, and from there joined a regiment of United States troops and done his share of fighting in the Mexican War. Now the wanderlust was on him, he was going to California.
"Maybe to settle," he told the doctor. "If I don't wake up some morning and feel the need to move once more."
When they reached the fort he was hailed joyously by the bourgeois himself. The men clustered about him, and there were loud-voiced greetings and much questioning, a rumor having filtered to his old stamping ground that he had been killed in the siege of the Alamo. The doctor told the bourgeois that Courant was to go with his train to California, and the apple-cheeked factor grinned and raised his eyebrows:
"Vous avez de la chance! He's a good guide. Even Kit Carson, who conducted the General Fremont, is no better."
The general satisfaction did not extend to Susan. The faint thrill of antagonism that the man had roused in her persisted. She knew he was a gain to the party, and said nothing. She was growing rapidly in this new, toughening life, and could set her own small prejudices aside in the wider view that each day's experience was teaching her. The presence of such a man would lighten the burden of work and responsibility that lay on her father, and whatever was beneficial to the doctor was accepted by his daughter. But she did not like Low Courant. Had anyone asked her why she could have given no reason. He took little notice of any of the women, treating them alike with a brusque indifference that was not discourteous, but seemed to lump them as necessary but useless units in an important whole.
The train was the focus of his interest. The acceleration of its speed, the condition of the cattle, the combination of lightness and completeness in its make-up were the matters that occupied him. In the evening hour of rest these were the subjects he talked of, and she noticed that Daddy John was the person to whom he talked most. With averted eyes, her head bent to David's murmurings, she was really listening to the older men. Her admiration was reluctantly evoked by the stranger's dominance and vigor of will, his devotion to the work he had undertaken. She felt her own insignificance and David's also, and chafed under the unfamiliar sensation.
The night after leaving Ash Hollow, as they sat by the fire, David at her side, the doctor had told Courant of the betrothal. His glance passed quickly over the two conscious faces, he gave a short nod of comprehension, and turning to Daddy John, inquired about the condition of the mules' shoes. Susan reddened. She saw something of disparagement, of the slightest gleam of mockery, in that short look, which touched both faces and then turned from them as from the faces of children playing at a game. Yes, she disliked him, disliked his manner to Lucy and herself, which set them aside as beings of a lower order, that had to go with them and be taken care of like the stock, only much less important and necessary. Even to Bella he was off-hand and unsympathetic, unmoved by her weakness, as he had been by her sufferings the night he came. Susan had an idea that he thought Bella's illness a misfortune, not so much for Bella as for the welfare of the train.
They had been at the fort now for four days and were ready to move on. The wagons were repaired, the mules and horses shod, and Bella was mending, though still unable to walk. The doctor had promised to keep beside the McMurdos till she was well, then his company would forge ahead.
In the heat of the afternoon, comfortable in a rim of shade in the courtyard, the men were arranging for the start the next morning. The sun beat fiercely on the square opening roofed by the blue of the sky and cut by the black shadow of walls. In the cooling shade the motley company lay sprawling on the ground or propped against the doors of the store rooms. The open space was brilliant with the blankets of Indians, the bare limbs of brown children, and the bright serapes of the Mexicans, who were too lazy to move out of the sun. In a corner the squaws played a game with polished cherry stones which they tossed in a shallow, saucerlike basket and let drop on the ground.
Susan, half asleep on a buffalo skin, watched them idly. The game reminded her of the jack-stones of her childhood. Then her eye slanted to where Lucy stood by the gate talking with a trapper called Zavier Leroux. The sun made Lucy's splendid hair shine like a flaming nimbus, and the dark men of the mountains and the plain watched her with immovable looks. She was laughing, her head drooped sideways. Above the collar of her blouse a strip of neck, untouched by tan, showed in a milk-white band. Conscious of the admiring observation, she instinctively relaxed her muscles into lines of flowing grace, and lowered her eyes till her lashes shone in golden points against her freckled cheeks. With entire innocence she spread her little lure, following an elemental instinct, that, in the normal surroundings of her present life, released from artificial restraints, was growing stronger.
Her companion was a voyageur, a half-breed, with coarse black hair hanging from a scarlet handkerchief bound smooth over his head. He was of a sinewy, muscular build, his coppery skin, hard black eyes, and high cheek bones showing the blood of his mother, a Crow squaw. His father, long forgotten in the obscurity of mountain history, had evidently bequeathed him the French Canadian's good-humored gayety. Zavier was a light-hearted and merry fellow, and where he came laughter sprang up. He spoke English well, and could sing French songs that were brought to his father's country by the adventurers who crossed the seas with Jacques Cartier.
The bourgeois, who was aloft on the bastion sweeping the distance with a field glass, suddenly threw an announcement down on the courtyard:
"Red Feather's village is coming and an emigrant train."
The space between the four walls immediately seethed into a whirlpool of excitement. It eddied there for a moment, then poured through the gateway into the long drainlike entrance passage and spread over the grass outside.
Down the face of the opposite hill, separated from the fort by a narrow river, came the Indian village, streaming forward in a broken torrent. Over its barbaric brightness, beads and glass caught the sun, and the nervous fluttering of eagle feathers that fringed the upheld lances played above its shifting pattern of brown and scarlet. It descended the slope in a broken rush, spreading out fanwise, scattered, disorderly, horse and foot together. On the river bank it paused, the web of color thickening, then rolled over the edge and plunged in. The current, beaten into sudden whiteness, eddied round the legs of horses, the throats of swimming dogs, and pressed up to the edges of the travaux where frightened children sat among litters of puppies. Ponies bestrode by naked boys struck up showers of spray, squaws with lifted blankets waded stolidly in, mounted warriors, feathers quivering in their inky hair, indifferently splashing them. Here a dog, caught by the current, was seized by a sinewy hand; there a horse, struggling under the weight of a travaux packed with puppies and old women, was grasped by a lusty brave and dragged to shore. The water round them frothing into silvery turmoil, the air above rent with their cries, they climbed the bank and made for the camping ground near the fort.
Among the first came a young squaw. Her white doeskin dress was as clean as snow, barbarically splendid with cut fringes and work of bead and porcupine quills. Her mien was sedate, and she swayed to her horse lightly and flexibly as a boy, holding aloft a lance edged with a flutter of feathers, and bearing a round shield of painted skins. Beside her rode the old chief, his blanket falling away from his withered body, his face expressionless and graven deep with wrinkles.
"That's Red Feather and his favorite squaw," said the voice of Courant at Susan's elbow.
She made no answer, staring at the Indian girl, who was handsome and young, younger than she.
"And look," came the voice again, "there are the emigrants."
A long column of wagons had crested the summit and was rolling down the slope. They were in single file, hood behind hood, the drivers, bearded as cave men, walking by the oxen. The line moved steadily, without sound or hurry, as if directed by a single intelligence possessed of a single idea. It was not a congeries of separated particles, but a connected whole. As it wound down the face of the hill, it suggested a vast Silurian monster, each wagon top a vertebra, crawling forward with definite purpose.
"That's the way they're coming," said the voice of the strange man. "Slow but steady, an endless line of them."
"Who?" said Susan, answering him for the first time.
"The white men. They're creeping along out of their country into this, pushing the frontier forward every year, and going on ahead of it with their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scattered and broken, going every way like a lot of glass beads rolling down the hill. This comes slow, but it's steady and sure as fate."
She thought for a moment, watching the emigrants, and then said:
"It moves like soldiers."
"Conquerors. That's what they are. They're going to roll over everything—crush them out."
"Over the Indians?"
"That's it. Drive 'em away into the cracks of the mountains, wipe them out the way the trappers are wiping out the beaver."
"Cruel!" she said hotly. "I don't believe it."
"Cruel?" he gave her a look of half-contemptuous amusement. "Maybe so, but why should you blame them for that? Aren't you cruel when you kill an antelope or a deer for supper? They're not doing you any harm, but you just happen to be hungry. Well, those fellers are hungry—land hungry—and they've come for the Indian's land. The whole world's cruel. You know it, but you don't like to think so, so you say it isn't. You're just lying because you're afraid of the truth."
She looked angrily at him and met the gray eyes. In the center of each iris was a dot of pupil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to Susan like the heads of black pins. "That's exactly what he'd say," she thought; "he's no better than a savage." What she said was:
"I don't agree with you at all."
"I don't expect you to," he answered, and making an ironical bow turned on his heel and swung off.
The next morning, in the pallor of the dawn, they started, rolling out into a gray country with the keen-edged cold of early day in the air, and Laramie Peak, gold tipped, before them. As the sky brightened and the prospect began to take on warmer hues, they looked ahead toward the profiles of the mountains and thought of the journey to come. At this hour of low vitality it seemed enormous, and they paced forward a silent, lifeless caravan, the hoof beats sounding hollow on the beaten track.
Then from behind them came a sound of singing, a man's voice caroling in the dawn. Both girls wheeled and saw Zavier Leroux ambling after them on his rough-haired pony, the pack horse behind. He waved his hand and shouted across the silence:
"I come to go with you as far as South Pass," and then he broke out again into his singing. It was the song Courant had sung, and as he heard it he lifted up his voice at the head of the train, and the two strains blending, the old French chanson swept out over the barren land:
"A la claire fontaine!M'en allant promenerJ'ai trouvé l'eau si belleQue je me suis baigné!"
Susan waved a beckoning hand to the voyageur, then turned to Lucy and said joyously:
"What fun to have Zavier! He'll keep us laughing all the time. Aren't you glad he's coming?"
Lucy gave an unenthusiastic "Yes." After the first glance backward she had bent over her horse smoothing its mane her face suddenly dyed with a flood of red.
Everybody was glad Zavier had come. He brought a spirit of good cheer into the party which had begun to feel the pressure of the long march behind them, and the still heavier burden that was to come. His gayety was irrepressible, his high spirits unflagging. When the others rode silent in the lifeless hours of the afternoon or drooped in the midday heats, Zavier, a dust-clouded outline on his shaggy pony, lifted up his voice in song. Then the chanted melody of French verses issued from the dust cloud, rising above the rattling of the beaver traps and the creaking of the slow wheels.
He had one especial favorite that he was wont to sing when he rode between the two girls. It recounted the adventures oftrois cavalières, and had so many verses that Zavier assured them neither he nor any other man had ever arrived at the end of them. Should he go to California with them and sing a verse each day, he thought there would still be some left over to give away when he got there. Susan learned the first two stanzas, and Lucy picked up the air and a few words. When the shadows began to slant and the crisp breath of the mountains came cool on their faces, they sang, first Zavier and Susan, then Lucy joining in in a faint, uncertain treble, and finally from the front of the train the strange man, not turning his head, sitting straight and square, and booming out the burden in his deep baritone:
"Dans mon chemin j'ai recontréTrois cavalières bien montées,L'on, ton laridon danéeL'on, ton laridon dai.
"Trois cavalières bien montéesL'une a cheval, l'autre a piedL'on, ton, laridon danéeL'on ton laridon dai."
Zavier furnished another diversion in the monotony of the days, injected into the weary routine, a coloring drop of romance, for, as he himself would have said, he wasdiablement épriswith Lucy. This was regarded as one of the best of Zavier's jokes. He himself laughed at it, and his extravagant compliments and gallantries were well within the pale of the burlesque. Lucy laughed at them, too. The only one that took the matter seriously was Bella. She was not entirely pleased.
"Talk about it's being just a joke," she said to Susan in the bedtime hour of confidences. "You can joke too much about some things. Zavier's a man just the same as the others, and Lucy's a nice-looking girl when she gets rested up and the freckles go off. But he's an Indian if he does speak French, and make good money with his beaver trapping."
"He's notallIndian," Susan said soothingly. "He's half white. There are only a few Indian things about him, his dark skin and something high and flat about his cheek bones and the way he turns in his toes when he walks."
"Indian enough," Bella fumed. "And nobody knows anything about his father. We're respectable people and don't want a man with no name hanging round. I've no doubt he was born in a lodge or under a pine tree. What right's that kind of man to come ogling after a decent white girl whose father and mother were married in the Presbyterian Church?"
Susan did not take it so much to heart. What was the good when Lucy obviously didn't care? As for Zavier, she felt sorry for him, for those keen observing faculties of hers had told her that the voyageur's raillery hid a real feeling. Poor Zavier was in love. Susan was pensive in the contemplation of his hopeless passion. He was to leave the train near South Pass and go back into the mountains, and there, alone, camp on the streams that drained the Powder River country. In all probability he would never see one of them again. His trapping did not take him West to the great deserts, and he hated the civilization where man became a luxurious animal of many needs. Like the buffalo and the red man he was restricted to the wild lands that sloped away on either side of the continent's mighty spine. His case was sad, and Susan held forth on the subject to Lucy, whom she thought callous and unkind.
"It's terrible to think you'll never see him again," she said, looking for signs of compassion. "Don't you feel sorry?"
Lucy looked down. She had been complaining to her friend of Zavier's follies of devotion.
"There are lots of other men in the world," she said indifferently.
Susan fired up. If not yet the authorized owner of a man, she felt her responsibilities as a coming proprietor. The woman's passion for interference in matters of sentiment was developing in her.
"Lucy, you're the most hard-hearted girl! Poor Zavier, who's going off into the mountains and may be killed by the Indians. Don't you feel any pity for him? And he's in love with you—truly in love. I've watched him and I know."
She could not refrain from letting a hint of superior wisdom, of an advantage over the unengaged Lucy, give solemnity to her tone.
Lucy's face flushed.
"He's half an Indian," she said with an edge on her voice. "Doesn't everyone in the train keep saying that every ten minutes? Do you want me to fall in love with a man like that?"
"Why no, of course not. You couldn't. That's the sad part of it. He seems as much like other men as those trappers in the fort who were all white. Just because he had a Crow mother it seems unjust that he should be so sort of on the outside of everything. But of course you couldn't marry him. Nobody ever heard of a girl marrying a half-breed."
Lucy bent over the piece of deer meat that she was cutting apart. They were preparing supper at the flaring end of a hot day, when the wagons had crawled through a loose alkaline soil and over myriads of crickets that crushed sickeningly under the wheels. Both girls were tired, their throats parched, their hair as dry as hemp, and Lucy was irritable, her face unsmiling, her movement quick and nervous.
"What's it matter what a man's parents are if he's kind to you?" she said, cutting viciously into the meat. "It's a lot to have some one fill the kettles for you and help you get the firewood, and when you're tired tell you to go back in the wagon and go to sleep. Nobody does that for me but Zavier."
It was the first time she had shown any appreciation of her swain's attentions. She expressed the normal, feminine point of view that her friend had been looking for, and as soon as she heard it Susan adroitly vaulted to the other side:
"But, Lucy, youcan'tmarry him!"
"Who says I'm going to?" snapped Lucy. "Do I have to marry every Indian that makes eyes at me? All the men in the fort were doing it. They hadn't a look for anyone else."
Susan took this with reservations. A good many of the men in the fort had made eyes at her. It was rather grasping of Lucy to take it all to herself, and in her surprise at the extent of her friend's claims she was silent.
"As for me," Lucy went on, "I'm dead sick of this journey. I wish we could stop or go back or do something. But we've got to keep on and on to the end of nowhere. It seems as if we were going forever in these tiresome old wagons or on horses that get lame every other day, and then you have to walk. I don't mind living in a tent. I like it. But I hate always going on, never having a minute to rest, getting up in the morning when I'm only half awake, and having to cook at night when I'm so tired I'd just like to lie down on the ground without taking my clothes off and go to sleep there. I wish I'd never come. I wish I'd married the man in Cooperstown that I wouldn't have wiped my feet on then."
She slapped the frying pan on the fire and threw the meat into it. Her voice and lips were trembling. With a quick, backward bend she stooped to pick up a fork, and Susan saw her face puckered and quivering like a child's about to cry.
"Oh, Lucy," she cried in a burst of sympathy. "I didn't know you felt like that," and she tried to clasp the lithe uncorseted waist that flinched from her touch. Lucy's elbow, thrown suddenly out, kept her at a distance, and she fell back repulsed, but with consolations still ready to be offered.
"Let me alone," said Lucy, her face averted. "I'm that tired I don't know what I'm saying. Go and get the children for supper, and don't let them stand round staring at me or they'll be asking questions."
She snatched the coffee pot and shook it upside down, driblets of coffee running out. With her other hand she brushed the tears off her cheeks.
"Don't stand there as if you never saw a girl cry before," she said, savagely. "I don't do it often, and it isn't such a wonderful sight. Get the children, and if you tell anyone that I feel this way I'll murder you."
The children were at some distance lying on the ground. Such unpromising materials as dust and sage brush had not quenched their inventive power or hampered their imaginations. They played with as an absorbed an industry here as in their own garden at home. They had scraped the earth into mounded shapes marked with the print of baby fingers and furrowed with paths. One led to a central mound crowned with a wild sunflower blossom. Up the path to this Bob conducted twigs of sage, murmuring the adventures that attended their progress. When they reached the sunflower house he laid them carefully against its sides, continuing the unseen happenings that befell them on their entrance. The little girl lay beside him, her cheek resting on an outflung arm, her eyes fixed wistfully on the personally conducted party. Her creative genius had not risen to the heights of his, and her fat little hands were awkward and had pushed the sunflower from its perch. So she had been excluded from active participation, and now looked on, acquiescing in her exclusion, a patient and humble spectator.
"Look," Bob cried as he saw Susan approaching. "I've builded a house and a garden, and these are the people," holding up one of the sage twigs, "they walk fru the garden an' then go into the house and have coffee and buf'lo meat."
Susan admired it and then looked at the baby, who was pensively surveying her brother's creation.
"And did the baby play, too?" she asked.
"Oh, no, she couldn't. She doesn't know nuffing, she's too small," with the scorn of one year's superiority.
The baby raised her solemn eyes to the young girl and made no attempt to vindicate herself. Her expression was that of subdued humility, of one who admits her short-comings. She rose and thrust a soft hand into Susan's, and maintained her silence as they walked toward the camp. The only object that seemed to have power to rouse her from her dejected reverie were the broken sage stalks in the trail. At each of these she halted, hanging from Susan's sustaining grasp, and stubbed her toe accurately and carefully against the protruding root.
They would have been silent that evening if it had not been for Zavier. His mood was less merry than usual, but a stream of frontier anecdote and story flowed from him, that held them listening with charmed attention. His foreign speech interlarded with French words added to the picturesqueness of his narratives, and he himself sitting crosslegged on his blanket, his hair hanging dense to his shoulders, his supple body leaning forward in the tension of a thrilling climax, was a fitting minstrel for these lays of the wild.
His final story was that of Antoine Godin, one of the classics of mountain history. Godin was the son of an Iroquois hunter who had been brutally murdered by the Blackfeet. He had become a trapper of the Sublette brothers, then mighty men of the fur trade, and in the expedition of Milton Sublette against the Blackfeet in 1832 joined the troop. When the two bands met, Godin volunteered to hold a conference with the Blackfeet chief. He chose as his companion an Indian of the Flathead tribe, once a powerful nation, but almost exterminated by wars with the Blackfeet. From the massed ranks of his warriors the chief rode out for the parley, a pipe of peace in his hand. As Godin and the Flathead started to meet him, the former asked the Indian if his piece was charged, and when the Flathead answered in the affirmative told him to cock it and ride alongside.
Midway between the two bands they met. Godin clasped the chief's hand, and as he did so told the Flathead to fire. The Indian levelled his gun, fired, and the Blackfeet chief rolled off his horse. Godin snatched off his blanket and in a rain of bullets fled to the Sublette camp.
"And so," said the voyageur with a note of exultation in his voice, "Godin got revenge on those men who had killed his father."
For a moment his listeners were silent, suffering from a sense of bewilderment, not so much at the story, as at Zavier's evident approval of Godin's act.
It was Susan who first said in a low tone, "What an awful thing to do!" This loosened Bella's tongue, who lying in the opening of her tent had been listening and now felt emboldened to express her opinion, especially as Glen, stretched on his face nearby, had emitted a snort of indignation.
"Well, of all the wicked things I've heard since I came out here that's the worst."
Zavier shot a glance at them in which for one unguarded moment, race antagonism gleamed.
"Why is it wicked?" he said gently.
David answered heatedly, the words bursting out:
"Why, the treachery of it, the meanness. The chief carried the pipe of peace. That's like our flag of truce. You never heard of any civilized man shooting another under the flag of truce."
Zavier looked stolid. It was impossible to tell whether he comprehended their point of view and pretended ignorance, or whether he was so restricted to his own that he could see no other.
"The Blackfeet had killed his father," he answered. "They were treacherous too. Should he wait to be murdered? It was his chance and he took it."
Sounds of dissent broke out round the circle. All the eyes were trained on him, some with a wide, expectant fixity, others bright with combative fire. Even Glen sat up, scratching his head, and remarking sotto voce to his wife:
"Ain't I always said he was an Indian?"
"But the Blackfeet chief wasn't the man who killed his father," said the doctor.
"No, he was chief of the tribe who did."
"But why kill an innocent man who probably had nothing to do with it?"
"It was for vengeance," said Zavier with unmoved patience and careful English. "Vengeance for his father's death."
Several pairs of eyes sought the ground giving up the problem. Others continued to gaze at him either with wonder, or hopeful of extracting from his face some clew to his involved and incomprehensible moral attitude. They suddenly felt as if he had confessed himself of an alien species, a creature as remote from them and their ideals as a dweller in the moon.
"He had waited long for vengeance," Zavier further explained, moving his glittering glance about the circle, "and if he could not find the right man, he must take such man as he could. The chief is the biggest man, and he comes where Godin has him. 'My father is avenged at last,' he says, and bang!"—Zavier levelled an imaginary engine of destruction at the shadows—"it is done and Godin gets the blanket."
The silence that greeted this was one of hopelessness; the blanket had added the final complication. It was impossible to make Zavier see, and this new development in what had seemed a boyish and light-hearted being, full to the brim with the milk of human kindness, was a thing to sink before in puzzled speechlessness. Courant tried to explain:
"You can't see it Zavier's way because it's a different way from yours. It comes out of the past when there weren't any laws, or you had to make 'em yourself. You've come from where the courthouse and the police take care of you, and if a feller kills your father, sees to it that he's caught and strung up. It's not your business to do it, and so you've got to thinking that the man that takes it into his own hands is a desperate kind of criminal. Out here in those days you wiped out such scores yourself or no one did. It seems to you that Godin did a pretty low down thing, but he thought he was doing the right thing for him. He'd had a wrong done him and he'd got to square it. And it didn't matter to him that the chief wasn't the man. Kill an Indian and it's the tribe's business to settle the account. The Blackfeet killed his father and it was Godin's business to kill a Blackfeet whenever he got the chance. I guess when he saw the chief riding out to meet him what he felt most was, that it was the best chance he'd ever get."
The faces turned toward Courant—a white man like themselves! So deep was their disapproving astonishment that nobody could say anything. For a space they could only stare at him as though he, too, were suddenly dropping veils that had hidden unsuspected, baleful depths.
Then argument broke out and the clamor of voices was loud on the night. Courant bore the brunt of the attack, Zavier's ideas being scanty, his mode of procedure a persistent, reiteration of his original proposition. Interruptions were furnished in a sudden, cracked laugh from Daddy John, and phrases of dissent or approval from Glen and Bella stretching their ears from the front of the tent. Only Lucy said nothing, her head wrapped in a shawl, her face down-drooped and pale.
Late that night Susan was waked by whispering sounds which wound stealthily through her sleep feeling for her consciousness. At first she lay with her eyes shut, breathing softly, till the sounds percolated through the stupor of her fatigue and she woke, disentangling them from dreams. She threw back her blankets and sat alert thinking of Indians.
The moon was full, silver tides lapping in below the tent's rim. She stole to the flap listening, then drew it softly open. Her tent had been pitched beneath a group of trees which made a splash of shadow broken with mottlings of moonlight. In the depths of this shadow she discerned two figures, the white flecks and slivers sliding along the dark oblong of their shapes as they strayed with loitering steps or stood whispering. The straight edge of their outline, the unbroken solidity of their bulk, told her they were wrapped in the same blanket, a custom in the Indian lover's courtship. Their backs were toward her, the two heads rising from the blanket's folds, showing as a rounded pyramidal finish. As she looked they paced beyond the shadow into the full unobscured light, and she saw that the higher head was dark, the other fair, crowned with a circlet of shining hair.
Her heart gave an astounded leap. Her first instinct was to draw back, her second to stand where she was, seemly traditions overwhelmed in amazement. The whispering ceased, the heads inclined to each other, the light one drooping backward, the dark one leaning toward it, till they rested together for a long, still moment. Then they separated, the woman drawing herself from the blanket and with a whispered word stealing away, a furtive figure flitting through light and shade to the McMurdo tents. The man turned and walked to the fire, and Susan saw it was Zavier. He threw on a brand and in its leaping ray stood motionless, looking at the flame, a slight, fixed smile on his lips.
She crept back to her bed and lay there with her heart throbbing and her eyes on the edges of moonlight that slipped in over the trampled sage leaves. Zavier was on sentry duty that night, and she could hear the padding of his step as he moved back and forth through the sleeping camp. On the dark walls of the tent the vision she had seen kept repeating itself, and as it returned upon her mental sight, new questions surged into her mind. A veil had been raised, and she had caught a glimpse of something in life, a new factor in the world, she had never known of. The first faint comprehension of it, the first stir of sympathy with it, crept toward her understanding and tried to force an entrance. She pushed it out, feeling frightened, feeling as if it were an intruder, that once admitted would grow dominant and masterful, and she would never be her own again.
The next morning Susan could not help stealing inquiring looks at Lucy. Surely the participant in such a nocturnal adventure must bear some signs of it upon her face. Lucy had suddenly become a disturbing and incomprehensible problem. In trying to readjust her conception of the practical and energetic girl, Susan found herself confronted with the artifices of a world-old, feminine duplicity that she had never before encountered, and knew no more of than she did of the tumult that had possession of poor Lucy's tormented soul. Here was the heroine of a midnight rendezvous going about her work with her habitual nervous capability, dressing the children, preparing the breakfast, seeing that Bella was comfortably disposed on her mattress in the wagon. She had not a glance for Zavier. Could a girl steal out to meet and kiss a man in the moonlight and the next morning look at him with a limpid, undrooping eye as devoid of consciousness as the eye of a preoccupied cat?
The standards of the doctor's daughter were comparative and their range limited. All she had to measure by was herself. Her imagination in trying to compass such a situation with Susan Gillespie as the heroine, could picture nothing as her portion but complete abasement and, of course, a confession to her father. And how dreadful that would have been! She could feel humiliation stealing on her at the thought of the doctor's frowning displeasure. But Lucy had evidently told no one. Why had she not? Why had she pretended not to like Zavier? Why? Why? Susan found her thoughts trailing off into a perspective of questions that brought up against a wall of incomprehension above which Lucy's clear eyes looked at her with baffling secretiveness.
It was a warm morning, and the two girls sat in the doctor's wagon. Lucy was knitting one of the everlasting stockings. In the heat she had unfastened the neck of her blouse and turned the edges in, a triangle of snowy skin visible below her sunburned throat. She looked thin, her arms showing no curve from wrist to elbow, the lines of her body delicately angular under the skimpy dress of faded lilac cotton. The sun blazing through the canvas cast a tempered yellow light over her that toned harmoniously with the brown coating of freckles and the copper burnish of her hair. Her hands, vibrating over her work with little hovering movements like birds about to light, now and then flashing out a needle which she stabbed into her coiffure, were large-boned and dexterous, the strong, unresting hands of the frontierswoman.
Susan was lazy, leaning back on the up-piled sacks, watching the quick, competent movements and the darts of light that leaped along the needles. Before they had entered the wagon she had decided to speak to Lucy of what she had overseen. In the first place she felt guilty and wanted to confess. Besides that the need to give advice was strong upon her, and the natural desire to interfere in a matter of the heart was another impelling impulse. So she had determined to speak for conscience, for friendship, for duty, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility, for curiosity.
But it was a hard subject to approach, and she was uncomfortable. Diplomacy had not been one of the gifts the fairies gave her when they gathered at her cradle. Looking at the quivering needles she tried to think of a good beginning, and like most direct and candid people concluded there was no better one than that of the initial fact, before the complicating intrusion of inference:
"I woke up in the middle of the night last night."
Lucy knit unmoved.
"The moonlight was as bright as day. Out beyond the shadow where my tent was I could see the weeds and little bunches of grass."
"How could you see them when you were in your tent?" This without stopping her work or raising her head.
Susan, feeling more uncomfortable than ever, answered, her voice instinctively dropping, "I got up and looked out of my tent."
She kept her eyes on the busy hands and saw that the speed of their movements slackened.
"Got up and looked out? What did you do that for?"
The time for revelation had come. Susan was a little breathless.
"I heard people whispering," she said.
The hands came to a stop. But the knitter continued to hold them in the same position, a suspended, waiting expectancy in their attitude.
"Whispering?" she said. "Who was it?"
"Oh, Lucy, you know."
There was a pause. Then Lucy dropped her knitting and, raising her head, looked at the anxious face opposite. Her eyes were quiet and steady, but their look was changed from its usual frankness by a new defiance, hard and wary.
"No, I don't know. How should I?"
"Why, why"—Susan now was not only breathless but pleading—"it was you."
"Who was me?"
"The woman—Lucy don't look at me like that, as if you didn't understand. I saw you, you and Zavier, wrapped in the blanket. You walked out into the moonlight and Isaw."
Lucy's gaze continued unfaltering and growing harder. Under the freckles she paled, but she stood her ground.
"What do you mean? Saw me and Zavier? Where?"
"Under the trees first and then you went out into the moonlight with the blanket wrapped round your shoulders."
"You didn't see me," the hardness was now in her voice. "It was some one else."
A feeling of alarm rose in the other girl. It was not the lie alone, it was the force behind it, the force that made it possible, that gave the teller will to hold her glance steady and deny the truth. A scaring sense of desperate powers in Lucy that were carrying her outside the familiar and established, seized her friend. It was all different from her expectations. Her personal repugnance and fastidiousness were swept aside in the menace of larger things. She leaned forward and clasped Lucy's knee.
"Don't say that. I saw you. Lucy, don't say I didn't. Don't bother to tell me a lie. What did it mean? Why did you meet him? What are you doing?"
Lucy jerked her knee away. Her hands were trembling. She took up the knitting, tried to direct the needles, but they shook and she dropped them. She made a sharp movement with her head in an effort to avert her face, but the light was merciless, there was no shade to hide in.
"Oh, don't bother me," she said angrily. "It's not your affair."
Susan's dread rose higher. In a flash of vision she had a glimpse into the storm-driven depths. It was as if a child brought up in a garden had unexpectedly looked into a darkling mountain abyss.
"What are you going to do?" she almost whispered. "You mustn't. You must stop. I thought you didn't care about him. You only laughed and everybody thought it was a joke. Don't go on that way. Something dreadful will happen."
Lucy did not answer. With her back pressed against the roof arch and her hands clinched in her lap—she sat rigid, looking down. She seemed gripped in a pain that stiffened her body and made her face pinched and haggard. Under the light cotton covering her breast rose and fell. She was an embodiment of tortured indecision.
Susan urged: "Let me tell my father and he'll send Zavier away."
Lucy raised her eyes and tried to laugh. The unnatural sound fell with a metallic harshness on the silence. Her mouth quivered, and putting an unsteady hand against it, she said brokenly,
"Oh, Missy, don't torment me. I feel bad enough already."
There was a longer pause. Susan broke it in a low voice:
"Then you're going to marry him?"
"No," loudly, "no. What a question!"
She made a grab at her knitting and started feverishly to work, the needles clicking, stitches dropping, the stocking leg trembling as it hung.
"Why, he's an Indian," she cried suddenly in a high, derisive key.
"But"—the questioner had lost her moment of vision and was once again floundering between ignorance and intuition—"Why did you kiss him then?"
"I didn't. He kissed me."
"You let him. Isn't that the same thing?"
"No, no. You're so silly. You don't know anything." She gave a hysterical laugh and the bonds of her pride broke in a smothered cry: "I couldn't help it. I didn't want to. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to go out and meet him and I went. I—" she gathered up the stocking and, needles and all, buried her face in it. It was the only thing she could find to hide behind. "I'm so miserable," she sobbed. "You don't know. It's such a terrible thing first feeling one way and then the other. I'm so mixed up I don't know what I feel. I wish I was dead."
There was a sound of men's voices outside, and the wagon came to a jolting halt. Daddy John, on the driver's seat, silhouetted against the circle of sky, slipped the whip into its ring of leather and turned toward the girls. Lucy threw herself backward and lay with her face on the sacks, stifling her tears.
"What are you two girls jawing about in there?" he asked, squinting blindly from the sun dazzle into the clear, amber light of the canvas cavern.
"We're just telling stories and things," said Susan.
The old man peered at Lucy's recumbent figure.
"Ain't she well?" he queried. "Thought I heard crying."
"Her head aches, it's so hot."
"Let her stay there. We'll do her cooking for her. Just stay where you are, Lucy, and don't worrit about your work."
But the voices outside demanded her. It was the noon halt and Lucy was an important factor in the machinery of the train. Glen's call for her was mingled with the fresh treble of Bob's and Bella's at a farther distance, rose in a plaintive, bovine lowing. She stretched a hand sideways and gripped Susan's skirt.
"I can't go," she gasped in a strangled whisper. "I can't seem to get a hold on myself. Ask Zavier to build the fire and cook. He'll do it, and Courant will help him. And tell the others I'm sick."
Lucy's headache lasted all through the dinner hour, and when the train started she still lay in the back of the doctor's wagon. For once she seemed indifferent to the comfort of her relatives. The clamor that rose about their disorderly fire and unsavory meal came to her ears through the canvas walls, and she remained deaf and unconcerned. When Susan crept in beside her and laid a cool cheek on hers, and asked her if she wanted anything, she said no, she wanted to rest that was all. Daddy John turned his head in profile and said:
"Let her alone, Missy. She's all tuckered out. They've put too much work on her sence her sister took sick. You let her lie there and I'll keep an eye to her."
Then he turned away and spat, as was his wont when thoughtful. He had seen much of the world, and in his way was a wise old man, but he did not guess the secret springs of Lucy's trouble. Women on the trail should be taken care of as his Missy was. Glen McMurdo was the kind of man who let the women take care of him, and between him and the children and the sick woman they'd half killed the girl with work. Daddy John had his opinion of Glen, but like most of his opinions he kept it to himself.
Susan had no desire for talk that afternoon. She wanted to be alone to muse on things. As the train took the road for the second stage, she drew her horse back among the sage and let the file of wagons pass her. She saw hope gleaming in Leff's eye, and killed it with a stony glance, then called to her father that she was going to ride behind. David was hunting in the hills with Courant, Zavier driving in his stead. The little caravan passed her with the dust hovering dense around it and the slouching forms of the pack horses hanging fringe-like in its rear.
They were nearing the end of their passage by the river, shrunk to a clear, wild stream which they came upon and lost as the trail bore westward. Their route lay through an interminable sequence of plains held together by channels of communication that filtered through the gaps in hills. The road was crossed by small streams, chuckling at the bottom of gullies, the sides of which were cracked open like pale, parched lips gasping for air. The limpid transparency of the prospect was blotted by the caravan's moving dust cloud. Beyond this the plain stretched, empty as the sky, a brown butte rising here and there.
Susan heard hoof beats behind her and turned. Courant was riding toward her, his rifle across his saddle. She made a motion of recognition with her hand and turned away thinking how well he matched the surroundings, his buckskins melting into the fawn-colored shading of the earth, his red hair and bronzed face toning with the umber buttes and rustlike stains across the distance. He was of a piece with it, even in its suggestion of an unfeeling, confidant hardness.
He joined her and they paced forward. It was the first time he had ever sought any conversation with her and she was conscious and secretly shy. Heretofore it had been his wont to speak little to her, to sweep an indifferent eye over her which seemed to include her in the unimportant baggage that went to the making of the train. Now, though his manner was brusque, he spoke simply and not discourteously of the hunt in the hills. He had got nothing, but David had killed a black-tailed deer, and possessed by the passion of the chase, was following the tracks of a second. The girl flushed with pleasure.
"David's a very good shot," she said complacently, not at all sure of her statement, for David did not excel in the role of Nimrod. "He kept us supplied with buffalo meat all the way up the Platte."
This was a falsehood. Daddy John and Leff had been the hunters of the party. But Susan did not care. Courant had never said a word in her hearing derogatory to David, but she had her suspicions that the romantic nature of her betrothed was not of the stuff the mountain man respected.
"First rate," he said heartily. "I didn't know it. I thought he generally rode with you or drove the wagon."
To an outsider the tone would have seemed all that was frank and open. But Susan read irony into it. She sat her horse a little squarer and allowed the muse to still further possess her:
"David can shoot anything, an antelope even. He constantly brought them in when we were on the Platte. It was quite easy for him. Daddy John, who's been in all sorts of wild places, says he's never seen a better shot."
A slight uneasiness disturbed the proud flow of her imagination at the thought that Daddy John, questioned on this point, might show a tendency to contradict her testimony. But it didn't matter. The joy of proving David's superiority compensated. And she was setting Courant in his place which had a separate and even rarer charm.
His answer showed no consciousness of the humbling process:
"You think a lot of David, don't you?"
Susan felt her color rising. This time she not only sat squarer in her saddle, but raised her shoulders and chin a trifle.
"Yes. I am engaged to be married to him."
"When will you be married?" said the uncrushable man.
She inclined her head from its haughty pose just so far that she could command his face from an austere eye. Words were ready to go with the quelling glance, but they died unspoken. The man was regarding her with grave, respectful attention. It is difficult to suddenly smite a proud crest when the owner of the crest shows no consciousness of its elevation.
"When we get to California," she said shortly.
"Not till then? Oh, I supposed you were going to marry him at Bridger or along the road if we happened to meet a missionary."
The suggestion amazed, almost appalled her. It pierced through her foolish little play of pride like a stab, jabbing down to her secret, sentient core. Her anger grew stronger, but she told herself she was talking to one of an inferior, untutored order, and it was her part to hold herself in hand.
"We will be married when we get to California," she said, seeing to it that her profile was calm and carried high. "Sometime after we get there and have a home and are settled."
"That's a long time off."
"I suppose so—a year or two."
"A year or two!" he laughed with a careless jovial note. "Oh, you belong to the old towns back there," with a jerk of his head toward the rear. "In the wilderness we don't have such long courtships."
"We? Who are we?"
"The mountain men, the trappers, the voyageurs."
"Yes," she said, her tone flashing into sudden scorn, "they marry squaws."
At this the man threw back his head and burst into a laugh, so deep, so rich, so exuberantly joyous, that it fell upon the plain's grim silence with the incongruous contrast of sunshine on the dust of a dungeon. She sat upright with her anger boiling toward expression. Before she realized it he had leaned forward and laid his hand on the pommel of her saddle, his face still red and wrinkled with laughter.
"That's all right, little lady, but you don't know quite all about us."
"I know enough," she answered.
"Before you get to California you'll know more. There's a mountain man and a voyageur now in the train. Do you think Zavier and I have squaw wives?"
With the knowledge that Zavier was just then so far from contemplating union with a squaw, she could not say the contemptuous "yes" that was on her tongue. As for the strange man—she shot a glance at him and met the gray eyes still twinkling with amusement. "Savage!" she thought, "I've no doubt he has"—and she secretly felt a great desire to know. What she said was, "I've never thought of it, and I haven't the least curiosity about it."
They rode on in silence, then he said,
"What's made you mad?"
"Mad? I'm not mad."
"Not at all?"
"No. Why should I be?"
"That's what I want to know. You don't like me, little lady, is that it?"
"I neither like nor dislike you. I don't think of you."
She immediately regretted the words. She was so completely a woman, so dowered with the instinct of attraction, that she realized they were not the words of indifference.
"My thoughts are full of other people," she said hastily, trying to amend the mistake, and that was spoiled by a rush of color that suddenly dyed her face.
She looked over the horse's head, her anger now turned upon herself. The man made no answer, but she knew that he was watching her. They paced on for a silent moment then he said:
"Why are you blushing?"
"I am not," she cried, feeling the color deepening.
"You've told two lies," he answered. "You said you weren't angry, and you're mad all through, and now you say you're not blushing, and your face is as pink as one of those little flat roses that grow on the prairie. It's all right to get mad and blush, but I'd like to know why you do it. I made you mad someway or other, I don't know how. HaveImade you blush, too?" he leaned nearer trying to look at her. "How'd I do that?"
She had a sidelong glimpse of his face, quizzical, astonished, full of piqued interest. She struggled with the mortification of a petted child, suddenly confronted by a stranger who finds its caprices only ridiculous and displeasing. Under the new sting of humiliation she writhed, burning to retaliate and make him see the height of her pedestal.
"Yes, Ihavetold two lies," she said. "I was angry and Iamblushing, and it's because I'm in a rage with you."
The last touch was given when she saw that his surprise contained the bitter and disconcerting element of amusement.
"Isn't that just what I said, and you denied it?" he exclaimed. "Nowwhyare you in a rage with me?"
"Because—because—well, if you're too stupid to know why, or are just pretending, I won't explain. I don't intend to ride with you any more. Please don't try and keep up with me."
She gave her reins a shake and her horse started on a brisk canter. As she sped away she listened for his following hoof beats, for she made no doubt he would pursue her, explain his conduct, and ask her pardon. The request not to keep up with her he would, of course, set aside. David would have obeyed it, but this man of the mountains, at once domineering and stupid, would take no command from any woman. She kept her ear trained for the rhythmic beat in the distance and decided when she heard it she would increase her speed and not let him catch her till she was up with the train. Then she would coldly listen to his words of apology and have the satisfaction of seeing him look small, and probably not know what to say.
Only it didn't happen that way. He made no attempt to follow. As she galloped across the plain he drew his horse to a walk, his face dark and frowning. Her scorn and blush had left his blood hot. Her last words had fired his anger. He had known her antagonism, seen it in her face on the night when Bella was sick, felt its sting when she turned from him to laugh with the others. And it had stirred him to a secret irritation. For he told himself she was only a baby, but a pretty baby, on whose brown and rosy face and merry slits of eyes a man might like to look. Now he gazed after her swearing softly through his beard and holding his horse to its slowest step. As her figure receded he kept his eyes upon it. They were long-sighted eyes, used to great distances, and they watched, intent and steady, to see if she would turn her head.
"Damn her," he said, when the dust of the train absorbed her. "Does she think she's the only woman in the world?"
After supper that evening Susan called David over to sit on the edge of her blanket. This was a rare favor. He came hurrying, all alight with smiles, cast himself down beside her and twined his fingers in her warm grasp. She answered his hungry glance with a sidelong look, glowingly tender, and David drew the hand against his cheek. Nobody was near except Daddy John and Courant, smoking pipes on the other side of the fire.
"Do you love me?" he whispered, that lover's text for every sermon which the unloving find so irksome to answer, almost to bear.
But now she smiled and whispered,
"Of course, silly David."
"Ah, Susan, you're awakening," he breathed in a shaken undertone.
She again let the soft look touch his face, sweet as a caress. From the other side of the fire Courant saw it, and through the film of pipe smoke, watched. David thought no one was looking, leaned nearer, and kissed her cheek. She gave a furtive glance at the man opposite, saw the watching eyes, and with a quick breath like a runner, turned her face to her lover and let him kiss her lips.
She looked back at the fire, quiet, unflurried, then slowly raised her lids. Courant had moved his pipe and the obscuring film of smoke was gone. Across the red patch of embers his eyes gazed steadily at her with the familiar gleam of derision. Her tenderness died as a flame under a souse of water, and an upwelling of feeling that was almost hatred, rose in her against the strange man.