by Zane Grey
The doctor, feeling the way, was to ride in the lead, his wagon following with Susan and Daddy John on the driver’s seat. It seemed an easy matter, the water chuckling round the wheels, the mules not wet above the knees. Half way across, grown unduly confident, the doctor turned in his saddle to address his daughter when his horse walked into a quicksand and unseated him. It took them half an hour to drag it out, Susan imploring that her father come back to the wagon and change his clothes. He only laughed at her which made her angry. With frowning brows she saw him mount again, and a dripping, white-haired figure, set out debonairly for the opposite bank.
The sun was low, the night chill coming on when they reached it. Their wet clothes were cold upon them and the camp pitching was hurried. Susan bending over her fire, blowing at it with expanded cheeks and, between her puffs, scolding at her father, first, for having got wet, then for having stayed wet, and now for being still wet, was to David just as charming as any of the other and milder apotheoses of the Susan he had come to know so well. It merely added a new tang, a fresh spice of variety, to a personality a less ravished observer might have thought unattractively masterful for a woman.
Her fire kindled, the camp in shape, she lay down by the little blaze with her head under a lupine plant. Her wrath had simmered to appeasement by the retirement of the doctor into his wagon, and David, glimpsing at her, saw that her eyes, a thread of observation between black-fringed lids, dwelt musingly on the sky. She looked as if she might be dreaming a maiden’s dream of love. He hazarded a tentative remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her lips. He watched her as he could when she was not looking at him. A loosened strand of her hair lay among the lupine roots, one of her hands rested, brown and upcurled, on a tiny weed its weight had broken. She turned her head with a nestling movement, drew a deep, soft breath and her eyelids drooped.
“David,” she said in a drowsy voice, “I’m going to sleep. Wake me at supper time.”
He became rigidly quiet. When she had sunk deep into sleep, only her breast moving with the ebb and flow of her quiet breath, he crept nearer and drew a blanket over her, careful not to touch her. He looked at the unconscious face for a moment, then softly dropped the blanket and stole back to his place ready to turn at the first foot fall and lift a silencing hand.
It was one of the beautiful moments that had come to him in his wooing. He sat in still reverie, feeling the dear responsibilities of his ownership. That she might sleep, sweet and soft, he would work as no man ever worked before. To guard, to comfort, to protect her—that would be his life. He turned and looked at her, his sensitive face softening like a woman’s watching the sleep of her child. Susan, all unconscious, with her rich young body showing in faint curves under the defining blanket, and her hair lying loose among the roots of the lupine bush, was so devoid of that imperious quality that marked her when awake, was so completely a tender feminine thing, with peaceful eyelids and innocent lips, that it seemed a desecration to look upon her in such a moment of abandonment. Love might transform her into this—in her waking hours when her body and heart had yielded themselves to their master.
David turned away. The sacred thought that some day he would be the owner of this complex creation of flesh and spirit, so rich, so fine, with depths unknown to his groping intelligence, made a rush of supplication, a prayer to be worthy, rise in his heart. He looked at the sunset through half-shut eyes, sending his desire up to that unknown God, who, in these wild solitudes, seemed leaning down to listen:
“Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”
The sun, falling to the horizon like a spinning copper disk, was as a sign of promise and help. The beauty of the hour stretched into the future. His glance, shifting to the distance, saw the scattered dots of the disappearing buffalo, the shadows sloping across the sand hills, and the long expanse of lupines blotting into a thick foam of lilac blue.
Susan stirred, and he woke from his musings with a start. She sat up, the blanket falling from her shoulders, and looking at him with sleep-filled eyes, smiled the sweet, meaningless smile of a half-awakened child. Her consciousness had not yet fully returned, and her glance, curiously clear and liquid, rested on his without intelligence. The woman in her was never more apparent, her seduction never more potent. Her will dormant, her bounding energies at low ebb, she looked a thing to nestle, soft and yielding, against a man’s heart.
“Have I slept long?” she said stretching, and then, “Isn’t it cold.”
“Come near the fire,” he answered. “I’ve built it up while you were asleep.”
She came, trailing the blanket in a languid hand, and sat beside him. He drew it up about her shoulders and looked into her face. Meeting his eyes she broke into low laughter, and leaning nearer to him murmured in words only half articulated:
“Oh, David, I’m so sleepy.”
He took her hand, and it stayed unresisting against his palm. She laughed again, and then yawned, lifting her shoulders with a supple movement that shook off the blanket.
“It takes such a long time to wake up,” she murmured apologetically.
David made no answer, and for a space they sat silent looking at the sunset. As the mists of sleep dispersed she became aware of his hand pressure, and the contentment that marked her awakening was marred. But she felt in a kindly mood and did not withdraw her hand. Instead, she wanted to please him, to be as she thought he would like her to be, so she made a gallant effort and said:
“What a wonderful sunset—all yellow to the middle of the sky.”
He nodded, looking at the flaming west. She went on:
“And there are little bits of gold cloud floating over it, like the melted lead that you pour through a key on all Hallowe’en.”
He again made no answer, and leaning nearer to spy into his face, she asked naïvely:
“Don’t you think it beautiful?”
He turned upon her sharply, and she drew back discomposed by his look.
“Let me kiss you,” he said, his voice a little husky.
He was her betrothed and had never kissed her but once in the moonlight. It was his right, and after all, conquering the inevitable repugnance, it did not take long. Caught thus in a yielding mood she resolved to submit. She had a comforting sense that it was a rite to which in time one became accustomed. With a determination to perform her part graciously she lowered her eyelids and presented a dusky cheek. As his shoulder touched hers she felt that he trembled and was instantly seized with the antipathy that his emotion woke in her. But it was too late to withdraw. His arms closed round her and he crushed her against his chest. When she felt their strength and the beating of his heart against the unstirred calm of her own, her good resolutions were swept away in a surge of abhorrence. She struggled for freedom, repelling him with violent, pushing hands, and exclaiming breathlessly:
“Don’t, David! Stop! I won’t have it! Don’t!”
He instantly released her, and she shrunk away, brushing off the bosom of her blouse as if he had left dust there. Her face was flushed and frowning.
“Don’t. You mustn’t,” she repeated, with heated reproof. “I don’t want you to.”
David smiled a sheepish smile, looking foolish, and not knowing what to say. At the sight of his crestfallen expression she averted her eyes, sorry that she had hurt him but not sufficiently sorry to risk a repetition of the unpleasant experience. He, too, turned his glance from her, biting his lip to hide the insincerity of his smile, irritated at her unmanageableness, and in his heart valuing her more highly that she was so hard to win. Both were exceedingly conscious, and with deepened color sat gazing in opposite directions like children who have had a quarrel.
A step behind
them broke upon their embarrassment, saving them from the necessity of speech. Daddy John’s voice came with it:
“Missy, do you know if the keg of whisky was moved? It ain’t where I put it.”
She turned with a lightning quickness.
“Whisky! Who wants whisky?”
Daddy John looked uncomfortable.
“Well, the doctor’s took sort of cold, got a shiver on him like the ague, and he thought a nip o’ whisky’d warm him up.”
She jumped to her feet.
“There!” flinging out the word with the rage of a disregarded prophet, “a chill! I knew it!”
In a moment all the self-engrossment of her bashfulness was gone. Her mind had turned on another subject with such speed and completeness that David’s kiss and her anger might have taken place in another world in a previous age. Her faculties leaped to the sudden call like a liberated spring, and her orders burst on Daddy John:
“In the back of the wagon, under the corn meal. It was moved when we crossed the Big Blue. Take out the extra blankets and the medicine chest. That’s in the front corner, near my clothes, under the seat. A chill—out here in the wilderness!”
David turned to soothe her:
“Don’t be worried. A chill’s natural enough after such a wetting.”
She shot a quick, hard glance at him, and he felt ignominiously repulsed. In its preoccupation her face had no recognition of him, not only as a lover but as a human being. Her eyes, under low-drawn brows, stared for a second into his with the unseeing intentness of inward thought. Her struggles to avoid his kiss were not half so chilling. Further solacing words died on his lips.
“It’s the worst possible thing that could happen to him. Everybody knows that”—then she looked after Daddy John. “Get the whisky at once,” she called. “I’ll find the medicines.”
“Can’t I help?” the young man implored.
Without answering she started for the wagon, and midway between it and the fire paused to cry back over her shoulder:
“Heat water, or if you can find stones heat them. We must get him warm.”
And she ran on.
David looked about for the stones. The “we” consoled him a little, but he felt as if he were excluded into outer darkness, and at a moment when she should have turned to him for the aid he yearned to give. He could not get over the suddenness of it, and watched them forlornly, gazing enviously at their conferences over the medicine chest, once straightening himself from his search for stones to call longingly:
“Can’t I do something for you over there?”
“Have you the stones?” she answered without raising her head, and he went back to his task.
In distress she had turned from the outside world, broken every lien of interest with it, and gone back to her own. The little circle in which her life had always moved snapped tight upon her, leaving the lover outside, as completely shut out from her and her concerns as if he had been a stranger camped by her fire.
CHAPTER VIII
The doctor was ill. The next day he lay in the wagon, his chest oppressed, fever burning him to the dryness of an autumn leaf. To the heads that looked upon him through the circular opening with a succession of queries as to his ailment, he invariably answered that it was nothing, a bronchial cold, sent to him as a punishment for disobeying his daughter. But the young men remembered that the journey had been undertaken for his health, and Daddy John, in the confidential hour of the evening smoke, told them that the year before an attack of congestion of the lungs had been almost fatal.
Even if they had not known this, Susan’s demeanor would have told them it was a serious matter. She was evidently wracked by anxiety which transformed her into a being so distant, and at times so cross, that only Daddy John had the temerity to maintain his usual attitude toward her. She would hardly speak to Leff, and to David, the slighting coldness that she had shown in the beginning continued, holding him at arm’s length, freezing him into stammering confusion. When he tried to offer her help or cheer her she made him feel like a foolish and tactless intruder, forcing his way into the place that was hers alone. He did not know whether she was prompted by a cruel perversity, or held in an absorption so intense she had no warmth of interest left for anybody. He tried to explain her conduct, but he could only feel its effect, wonder if she had grown to dislike him, review the last week in a search for a cause. In the daytime he hung about the doctor’s wagon, miserably anxious for a word from her. He was grateful if she asked him to hunt for medicine in the small, wooden chest, or to spread the blankets to air on the tops of the lupine bushes.
And while she thus relegated him to the outer places where strangers hovered, a sweetness, so gentle, so caressing, so all pervading that it made of her a new and lovely creature, marked her manner to the sick man. There had always been love in her bearing to her father, but this new tenderness was as though some hidden well of it, sunk deep in the recesses of her being, had suddenly overflowed. David saw the hardness of the face she turned toward him transmute into a brooding passion of affection as she bent over the doctor’s bed. The fingers he did not dare to touch lifted the sick man’s hand to her cheek and held it there while she smiled down at him, her eyes softening with a light that stirred the lover’s soul. The mystery of this feminine complexity awed him. Would she ever look at him like that? What could he do to make her? He knew of no other way than by serving her, trying unobtrusively to lighten her burden, effacing himself, as that seemed to be what she wanted. And in the night as he lay near the wagon, ready to start at her call, he thought with exalted hope that some day he might win such a look for himself.
The doctor was for going on. There was no necessity to stay in camp because one man happened to wheeze and cough, he said, and anyway, he could do that just as well when they were moving. So they started out and crossed the plateau to where the road dropped into the cleft of Ash Hollow. Here they stopped and held a conference. The doctor was worse. The interior of the wagon, the sun beating on the canvas roof, was like a furnace, where he lay sweltering, tossed this way and that by the jolting wheels. Their dust moved with them, breezes lifting it and carrying it careening back to them where it mingled with new dust, hanging dense like a segment of fog in the scene’s raw brilliancy.
Ash Hollow looked a darkling descent, the thin pulsations of the little leaves of ash trees flickering along its sides. The road bent downward in sharp zigzags, and somewhere below the North Fork ran. The plain was free, blue clothed and blue vaulted, with “the wonderful winds of God” flowing between. The conference resulted in a unanimous decision to halt where they were, and stay in camp till the doctor improved, moving him from the wagon to a tent.
For four days he lay parched with fever, each breath drawn with a stifled inner rustling, numerous fine wrinkles traced in a network on his dried cheeks. Then good care, the open air, and the medicine chest prevailed. He improved, and Susan turned her face again to the world and smiled. Such was the changefulness of her mood that her smiles were as radiant and generously bestowed as her previous demeanor had been repelling. Even Leff got some of them, and they fell on David prodigal and warming as the sunshine. Words to match went with them. On the morning of the day when the doctor’s temperature fell and he could breathe with ease, she said to her betrothed:
“Oh, David, you’ve been so good, you’ve made me so fond of you.”
It was the nearest she had yet come to the language of lovers. It made him dizzy; the wonderful look was in his mind.
“You wouldn’t let me be good,” was all he could stammer. “You didn’t seem as if you wanted me at all.”
“Stupid!” she retorted with a glance of beaming reproach, “I’m always like that when my father’s sick.”
It was noon of the fifth day that a white spot on the plain told them the New York Company was in s
ight. The afternoon was yet young when the dust of the moving column tarnished the blue-streaked distance. Then the first wagons came into view, creeping along the winding ribbon of road. As soon as the advance guard of horsemen saw the camp, pieces of it broke away and were deflected toward the little group of tents from which a tiny spiral of smoke went up in an uncoiling, milky skein. Susan had many questions to answer, and had some ado to keep the inquirers away from the doctor, who was still too weak to be disturbed. She was sharp and not very friendly in her efforts to preserve him from their sympathizing curiosity.
Part of the train had gone by when she heard from a woman who rode up on a foot-sore nag that the McMurdo’s were some distance behind. A bull boat in which the children were crossing the river had upset, and Mrs. McMurdo had been frightened and “took faint.” The children were all right—only a wetting—but it was a bad time for their mother to get such a scare.
“I’m not with the women who think it’s all right to take such risks. Stay at home then,” she said, giving Susan a sage nod out of the depths of her sunbonnet.
The news made the young girl uneasy. A new reticence, the “grown-up” sense of the wisdom of silence that she had learned on the trail, made her keep her own council. Also, there was no one to tell but her father, and he was the last person who ought to know. The call of unaided suffering would have brought him as quickly from his buffalo skins in the tent as from his bed in the old home in Rochester. Susan resolved to keep it from him, if she had to stand guard over him and fight them off. Her philosophy was primitive—her own first, and if, to save her own, others must be sacrificed, then she would aid in the sacrifice and weep over its victims, weep, but not yield.
When the train had disappeared into the shadows of Ash Hollow, curses, shouts, and the cracking of whips rising stormily over its descent, the white dot of the McMurdo’s wagon was moving over the blue and green distance. As it drew near they could see that Glen walked beside the oxen, and the small figure of Bob ran by the wheel. Neither of the women were to be seen. “Lazy and riding,” Daddy John commented, spying at them with his far-sighted old eyes. “Tired out and gone to sleep,” David suggested. Susan’s heart sank and she said nothing. It looked as if something was the matter, and she nerved herself for a struggle.