by Zane Grey
When Daddy John emerged from the tent she leaped to her feet.
“Well?” she said with low eagerness.
“Go back to him. He wants you,” answered the old man. “I’ve got something to do for him.”
He made no attempt to touch her, his words and voice were brusque, yet David saw that she responded, softened, showed the ragged wound of her pain to him as she did to no one else. It was an understanding that went beneath all externals. Words were unnecessary between them, heart spoke to heart.
She returned to the tent and sunk on the skin beside her father. He smiled faintly and stretched a hand for hers, and her fingers slipped between his, cool and strong against the lifeless dryness of his palm. She gave back his smile bravely, her eyes steadfast. She had no desire for tears, no acuteness of sensation. A weight as heavy as the world lay on her, crushing out struggle and resistance. She knew that he was dying. When they told her there was no doctor in the camp her flickering hope had gone out. Now she was prepared to sit by him and wait with a lethargic patience beyond which was nothing.
He pressed her hand and said: “I’ve sent Daddy John on a hunt. Do you guess what for?”
She shook her head feeling no curiosity.
“The time is short, Missy.”
The living’s instinct to fight against the acquiescence of the dying prompted her to the utterance of a sharp “No.”
“I want it all arranged and settled before it’s too late. I sent him to see if there was a missionary here.”
She was leaning against the couch of robes, resting on the piled support of the skins. In the pause after his words she slowly drew herself upright, and with her mouth slightly open inhaled a deep breath. Her eyes remained fixed on him, gleaming from the shadow of her brows, and their expression, combined with the amaze of the dropped underlip, gave her a look of wild attention.
“Why?” she said. The word came obstructed and she repeated it.
“I want you to marry David here to-night.”
The doctor’s watch on a box at the bed head ticked loudly in the silence. They looked at each other unconscious of the length of the pause. Death on the one hand, life pressing for its due on the other, were the only facts they recognized. Hostility, not to the man but to the idea, drove the amazement from her face and hardened its softness to stone.
“Here, to-night?” she said, her comprehension stimulated by an automatic repetition of his words.
“Yes. I may not be able to understand tomorrow.”
She moved her head, her glance touching the watch, the lantern, then dropping to the hand curled round her own. It seemed symbolic of the will against which hers was rising in combat. She made an involuntary effort to withdraw her fingers but his closed tighter on them.
“Why?” she whispered again.
“Some one must take care of you. I can’t leave you alone.”
She answered with stiffened lips: “There’s Daddy John.”
“Some one closer than Daddy John. I want to leave you with David.”
Her antagonism rose higher, sweeping over her wretchedness. Worn and strained she had difficulty to keep her lips shut on it, to prevent herself from crying out her outraged protests. All her dormant womanhood, stirring to wakefulness in the last few weeks, broke into life, gathering itself in a passion of revolt, abhorrent of the indignity, ready to flare into vehement refusal. To the dim eyes fastened on her she was merely the girl, reluctant still. He watched her down-drooped face and said:
“Then I could go in peace. Am I asking too much?”
She made a negative movement with her head and turned her face away from him.
“You’ll do this for my happiness now?”
“Anything,” she murmured.
“It will be also for your own.”
He moved his free hand and clasped it on the mound made by their locked fingers. Through the stillness a man’s voice singing Zavier’s Canadian song came to them. It stopped at the girl’s outer ear, but, like a hail from a fading land, penetrated to the man’s brain and he stirred.
“Hist!” he said raising his brows, “there’s that French song your mother used to sing.”
The distant voice rose to the plaintive burden and he lay motionless, his eyes filmed with memories. As the present dimmed the past grew clearer. His hold on the moment relaxed and he slipped away from it on a tide of recollection, muttering the words.
The girl sat mute, her hand cold under his, her being passing in an agonized birth throe from unconsciousness to self-recognition. Her will—its strength till now unguessed—rose resistant, a thing of iron. Love was too strong in her for open opposition, but the instinct to fight, blindly but with caution, for the right to herself was stronger.
His murmuring died into silence and she looked at him. His eyes were closed, the pressure of his fingers loosened. A light sleep held him, and under its truce she softly withdrew her hand, then stole to the tent door and stood there a waiting moment, stifling her hurried breathing. She saw David lying by the fire, gazing into its smoldering heart. With noiseless feet she skirted the encircling ropes and pegs, and stood, out of range of his eye, on the farther side. Here she stopped, withdrawn from the light that came amber soft through the canvas walls, slipping into shadow when a figure passed, searching the darkness with peering eyes.
Around her the noises of the camp rose, less sharp than an hour earlier, the night silence gradually hushing them. The sparks and shooting gleams of fires still quivered, imbued with a tenacious life. She had a momentary glimpse of a naked Indian boy flinging loose his blanket, a bronze statue glistening in a leap of flame. Nearer by a woman’s figure bent over a kettle black on a bed of embers, then a girl’s fire-touched form, with raised arms, shaking down a snake of hair, which broke and grew cloudy under her disturbing hands. A resounding smack sounded on a horse’s flank, a low ripple of laughter came tangled with a child’s querulous crying, and through the walls of tents and the thickness of smoke the notes of a flute filtered.
Her ear caught the pad of a footstep on the grass, and her eyes seized on a shadow that grew from dusky uncertainty to a small, bent shape. She waited, suffocated with heartbeats, then made a noiseless pounce on it.
“Daddy John,” she gasped, clutching at him.
The old man staggered, almost taken off his feet.
“Is he worse?” he said.
“He’s told me. Did you find anyone?”
“Yes—two. One’s Episcopal—in a train from St. Louis.”
A sound came from her that he did not understand. She gripped at his shoulders as if she were drowning. He thought she was about to swoon and put his arm around her saying:
“Come back to the tent. You’re all on a shake as if you had ague.”
“I can’t go back. Don’t bring him. Don’t bring him. Don’t tell father. Not now. I will later, some other time. When we get to California, but not now—not to-night.”
The sentences were cut apart by breaths that broke from her as if she had been running. He was frightened and tried to draw her to the light and see her face.
“Why, Missy!” he said with scared helplessness, “Why, Missy! What’s got you?”
“Don’t get the clergyman. Tell him there isn’t any. Tell him you’ve looked all over. Tell him a lie.”
He guessed the trouble was something more than the grief of the moment, and urged in a whisper:
“What’s the matter now? Go ahead and tell me. I’ll stick by you.”
She bent her head back to look into his face.
“I don’t want to marry him now. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
Her hands on his shoulders shook him with each repetition. The force of the words was heightened by the suppressed tone. They should have been screamed. In these whispered
breaths they burst from her like blood from a wound. With the last one her head bowed forward on his shoulder with a movement of burrowing as though she would have crawled up and hidden under his skin, and tears, the most violent he had ever seen her shed, broke from her. They came in bursting sobs, a succession of rending throes that she struggled to stifle, swaying and quivering under their stress.
He thought of nothing now but this new pain added to the hour’s tragedy, and stroked her shoulder with a low “Keep quiet—keep quiet,” then leaned his face against her hair and breathed through its tangles.
“It’s all right, I’ll do it. I’ll say I couldn’t find anyone. I’ll lie for you, Missy.”
She released him at once, dropped back a step and, lifting a distorted face, gave a nod. He passed on, and she fell on the grass, close to the tent ropes and lay there, hidden by the darkness.
She did not hear a step approaching from the herded tents. Had she been listening it would have been hard to discern, for the feet were moccasin shod, falling noiseless on the muffling grass. A man’s figure with fringes wavering along its outline came round the tent wall. The head was thrust forward, the ear alert for voices. Faring softly his foot struck her and he bent, stretching down a feeling hand. It touched her shoulder, slipped along her side, and gripped at her arm. “What’s the matter?” came a deep voice, and feeling the pull on her arm she got to her knees with a strangled whisper for silence. When the light fell across her, he gave a smothered cry, jerked her to her feet and thrust his hand into her hair, drawing her head back till her face was uplifted to his.
There was no one to see, and he let his eyes feed full upon it, a thief with the coveted treasure in his hands. She seemed unconscious of him, a broken thing without sense or volition, till a stir came from the tent. Then he felt her resist his grasp. She put a hand on his breast and pressed herself back from him.
“Hush,” she breathed. “Daddy John’s in there.”
A shadow ran up the canvas wall, bobbing on it, huge and wavering. She turned her head toward it, the tears on her cheeks glazed by the light. He watched her with widened nostrils and immovable eyes. In the mutual suspension of action that held them he could feel her heart beating.
“Well?” came the doctor’s voice.
The old servant answered:
“There weren’t no parsons anywhere, I’ve been all over and there’s not one.”
“Parsons?” Courant breathed.
She drew in the fingers spread on his breast with a clawing movement and emitted an inarticulate sound that meant “Hush.”
“Not a clergyman or missionary among all these people?”
“Not one.”
“We must wait till to-morrow, then.”
“Yes—mebbe there’ll be one to-morrow.”
“I hope so.”
Then silence fell and the shadow flickered again on the canvas.
She made a struggle against Courant’s hold, which for a moment he tried to resist, but her fingers plucked against his hand, and she tore herself free and ran to the tent opening. She entered without speaking, threw herself at the foot of the couch, and laid her head against her father’s knees.
“Is that you, Missy?” he said, feeling for her with a groping hand. “Daddy John couldn’t find a clergyman.”
“I know,” she answered, and lay without moving, her face buried in the folds of the blanket.
They said no more, and Daddy John stole out of the tent.
The next day the doctor was too ill to ask for a clergyman, to know or to care. At nightfall he died. The Emigrant Trail had levied its first tribute on them, taken its toll.
PART IV
The Desert
CHAPTER I
They were camped on the edges of that harsh land which lay between the Great Salt Lake and the Sierra. Behind them the still, heavy reach of water stretched, reflecting in mirrored clearness the mountains crowding on its southern rim. Before them the sage reached out to dim infinities of distance. The Humboldt ran nearby, sunk in a stony bed, its banks matted with growths of alder and willow. The afternoon was drawing to the magical sunset hour. Susan, lying by the door of her tent, could see below the growing western blaze the bowl of the earth filling with the first, liquid oozings of twilight.
A week ago they had left the Fort. To her it had been a blank space of time, upon which no outer interest had intruded. She had presented an invulnerable surface to all that went on about her, the men’s care, the day’s incidents, the setting of the way. Cold-eyed and dumb she had moved with them, an inanimate idol, unresponsive to the observances of their worship, aloof from them in somber uncommunicated musings.
The men respected her sorrow, did her work for her, and let her alone. To them she was set apart in the sanctuary of her mourning, and that her grief should express itself by hours of drooping silence was a thing they accepted without striving to understand. Once or twice David tried to speak to her of her father, but it seemed to rouse in her an irritated and despairing pain. She begged him to desist and got away from him as quickly as she could, climbing into the wagon and lying on the sacks, with bright, unwinking eyes fastened on Daddy John’s back. But she did not rest stunned under an unexpected blow as they thought. She was acutely alive, bewildered, but with senses keen, as if the world had taken a dizzying revolution and she had come up panting and clutching among the fragments of what had been her life.
If there had been some one to whom she could have turned, relieving herself by confession, she might have found solace and set her feet in safer ways. But among the three men she was virtually alone, guarding her secret with that most stubborn of all silences, a girl’s in the first wakening of sex. She had a superstitious hope that she could regain peace and self-respect by an act of reparation, and at such moments turned with expiatory passion to the thought of David. She would go to California, live as her father had wished, marry her betrothed, and be as good a wife to him as man could have. And for a space these thoughts brought her ease, consoled her as a compensating act of martyrdom.
She shunned Courant, rarely addressing him, keeping her horse to the rear of the train where the wagon hood hid him from her. But when his foot fell on the dust beside her, or he dropped back for a word with Daddy John, a stealthy, observant quietude held her frame. She turned her eyes from him as from an unholy sight, but it was useless, for her mental vision called up his figure, painted in yellow and red upon the background of the sage. She knew the expression of the lithe body as it leaned from the saddle, the gnarled hand from which the rein hung loose, the eyes, diamond hard and clear, living sparks set in leathery skin wrinkled against the glare of the waste. She did not lie to herself any more. No delusions could live in this land stripped of all conciliatory deception.
The night before they left the Fort the men had had a consultation. Sitting apart by the tent she had watched them, David and Daddy John between her and the fire, Courant beyond it. His face, red lit between the hanging locks of hair, his quick eyes, shifting from one man to the other, was keen with a furtive anxiety. At a point in the murmured interview, he had looked beyond them to the darkened spot where she sat. Then Daddy John and David had come to her and told her that if she wished they would turn back, take her home to Rochester, and stay there with her always. There was money enough they said. The doctor had left seven thousand dollars in his chest, and David had three to add to it. It would be ample to live on till the men could set to work and earn a maintenance for them. No word was spoken of her marriage, but it lay in the offing of their argument as the happy finale that the long toil of the return journey and the combination of resources were to prelude.
The thought of going back had never occurred to her, and shocked her into abrupt refusal. It would be an impossible adaptation to outgrown conditions. She could not conjure up the idea of herself refitted into th
e broken frame of her girlhood. She told them she would go on, there was nothing now to go back for. Their only course was to keep to the original plan, emigrate to California and settle there. They returned to the fire and told Courant. She could see him with eager gaze listening. Then he smiled and, rising to his feet, sent a bold, exultant glance through the darkness to her. She drew her shawl over her head to shut it out, for she was afraid.
They rested now on the lip of the desert, gathering their forces for the last lap of the march. There had been no abatement in the pressure of their pace, and Courant had told them it must be kept up. He had heard the story of the Donner party two years before, and the first of September must see them across the Sierra. In the evenings he conferred with Daddy John on these matters and kept a vigilant watch on the animals upon whose condition the success of the journey depended.
David was not included in these consultations. Both men now realized that he was useless when it came to the rigors of the trail. Of late he had felt a physical and spiritual impairment, that showed in a slighted observance of his share of the labor. He had never learned to cord his pack, and day after day it turned under his horse’s belly, discharging its cargo on the ground. The men, growling with irritation, finally took the work from him, not from any pitying consideration, but to prevent further delay.
He was, in fact, coming to that Valley of Desolation where the body faints and only the spirit’s dauntlessness can keep it up and doing. What dauntlessness his spirit once had was gone. He moved wearily, automatically doing his work and doing it ill. The very movements of his hands, slack and fumbling, were an exasperation to the other men, setting their strength to a herculean measure, and giving of it without begrudgment. David saw their anger and did not care. Fatigue made him indifferent, ate into his pride, brought down his self-respect. He plodded on doggedly, the alkali acrid on his lips and burning in his eyeballs, thinking of California, not as the haven of love and dreams, but as a place where there was coolness, water, and rest. When in the dawn he staggered up to the call of “Catch up,” and felt for the buckle of his saddle girth, he had a vision of a place under trees by a river where he could sleep and wake and turn to sleep again, and go on repeating the performance all day with no one to shout at him if he was stupid and forgot things.