by Zane Grey
They made a clamor of welcome, Bob running to her and making delighted leaps up at her face, the little girl standing aloof for the first bashful moment, then sidling nearer with mouth upheld for kisses. Bella heard them and came to the tent door, gave a great cry, and ran to them. There were tears on her cheeks as she clasped Susan, held her oft and clutched her again, with panted ejaculations of “Deary me!” and “Oh, Lord, Missy, is it you?”
It was like a meeting on the other side of the grave. They babbled their news, both talking at once, not stopping to finish sentences, or wait for the answer to questions of the marches they had not shared. Over the clamor they looked at each other with faces that smiled and quivered, the tie between them strengthened by the separation when each had longed for the other, closer in understanding by the younger’s added experience, both now women.
Glen was at the Fort and Daddy John rolled off to meet him there. The novelty of the moment over, the children returned sedately to their play, and the women sat together under the canopy of the tree. Bella’s adventures had been few and tame, Susan’s was the great story. She was not discursive about her marriage. She was still shy on the subject and sensitively aware of the disappointment that Bella was too artlessly amazed to conceal. She passed over it quickly, pretending that she did not hear Bella’s astonished:
“But why did you get married at Humboldt? Why didn’t you wait till you got here?”
It was the loss of David that she made the point of her narrative, anxiously impressing on her listener their need of going on. She stole quick looks at Bella, watchful for the first shade of disapprobation, with all Low’s arguments ready to sweep it aside. But Bella, with maternal instincts in place of a comprehensive humanity, agreed that Low had done right. Nature, in the beginning, combined with the needs of the trail, had given her a viewpoint where expediency counted for more than altruism. She with two children and a helpless man would have gone on and left anyone to his fate. She did not say this, but Susan, with intelligence sharpened by a jealous passion, felt that there was no need to defend her husband’s action. As for the rest of the world—deep in her heart she had already decided it should never know.
“You couldn’t have done anything else,” said Bella. “I’ve learned that when you’re doing that sort of thing, you can’t have the same feelings you can back in the States, with everything handy and comfortable. You can be fair, but you got to fight for your own. They got to come first.”
She had neither seen nor heard anything of David. No rumor of a man held captive by the Indians had reached their train. She tried not to let Susan see that she believed the worst. But her melancholy headshake and murmured “Poor David—and him such a kind, whole-hearted man” was as an obituary on the dead.
“Well,” she said in pensive comment when Susan had got to the end of her history, “you can’t get through a journey like that without some one coming to grief. It’s not in human nature. But your father—that grand man! And then the young feller that would have made you such a good husband—” Susan moved warningly—“Not but what I’m sure you’ve got as good a one as it is. And we’ve got to take what we can get in this world,” she added, spoiling it all by the philosophical acceptance of what she evidently regarded as a make-shift adjusting to Nature’s needs.
When the men came back Glen had heard all about the gold in the river and was athirst to get there. Work at his trade could wait, and, anyway, he had been in Sacramento and found, while his services were in demand on every side, the materials wherewith he was to help raise a weatherproof city were not to be had. Men were content to live in tents and cloth shacks until the day of lumber and sawmills dawned, and why wait for this millennium when the river called from its golden sands?
No one had news of David. Daddy John had questioned the captains of two recently arrived convoys, but learned nothing. The men thought it likely he was dead. They agreed as to the possibility of the Indian abduction and his future reappearance. Such things had happened. But it was too late now to do anything. No search party could be sent out at this season when at any day the mountain trails might be neck high in snow. There was nothing to do but wait till the spring.
Susan listened with lowered brows. It was heavy news. She did not know how she had hoped till she heard that all hope must lie in abeyance for at least six months. It was a long time to be patient. She was selfishly desirous to have her anxieties at rest, for, as she had told her husband, they were the only cloud on her happiness, and she wanted that happiness complete. It was not necessary for her peace to see David again. To know he was safe somewhere would have satisfied her.
The fifth day after leaving the camp they sighted the pitted shores of their own diggings. Sitting in the McMurdos’ wagon they had speculated gayly on Low’s surprise. Susan, on the seat beside Glen, had been joyously full of the anticipation of it, wondered what he would say, and then fell to imagining it with closed lips and dancing eyes. When the road reached the last concealing buttress she climbed down and mounted beside Daddy John, whose wagon was some distance in advance.
“It’s going to be a surprise for Low,” she said in the voice of a mischievous child. “You mustn’t say anything. Let me tell him.”
The old man, squinting sideways at her, gave his wry smile. It was good to see his Missy this way again, in bloom like a refreshed flower.
“Look,” she cried, as her husband’s figure came into view kneeling by the rocker. “There he is, and he doesn’t see us. Stop!”
Courant heard their wheels and, turning, started to his feet and came forward, the light in his face leaping to hers. She sprang down and ran toward him, her arms out. Daddy John, slashing the wayside bushes with his whip, looked reflectively at the bending twigs while the embrace lasted. The McMurdos’ curiosity was not restrained by any such inconvenient delicacy. They peeped from under the wagon hood, grinning appreciatively, Bella the while maintaining a silent fight with the children, who struggled for an exit. None of them could hear what the girl said, but they saw Courant suddenly look with a changed face, its light extinguished, at the second wagon.
“He don’t seem so terrible glad to see us,” said Glen. “I guess he wanted to keep the place for himself.”
Bella noted the look and snorted.
“He’s a cross-grained thing,” she said; “I don’t see what got into her to marry him when she could have had David.”
“She can’t have him when he ain’t round to be had,” her husband answered. “Low’s better than a man that’s either a prisoner with the Indians or dead somewhere. David was a good boy, but I don’t seem to see he’d be much use to her now.”
Bella sniffed again, and let the squirming children go to get what good they could out of the unpromising moment of the surprise.
What Low had said to Susan was an angry,
“Why did you bring them?”
She fell back from him not so crestfallen at his words as at his dark frown of disapproval.
“Why, I wanted them,” she faltered, bewildered by his obvious displeasure at what she thought would be welcome news, “and I thought you would.”
“I’d rather you hadn’t. Aren’t we enough by ourselves?”
“Yes, of course. But they’re our friends. We traveled with them for days and weeks, and it’s made them like relations. I was so glad to see them I cried when I saw Bella. Oh, do try and seem more as if you liked it. They’re here and I’ve brought them.”
He slouched forward to greet them. She was relieved to see that he made an effort to banish his annoyance and put some warmth of welcome into his voice. But the subtlety with which he could conceal his emotions when it behooved him had deserted him, and Bella and Glen saw the husband did not stand toward them as the wife did.
It was Susan who infused into the meeting a fevered and fictitious friendliness, chattering over the
pauses that threatened to fall upon it, leaving them a reunited company only in name. She presently swept Bella to the camp, continuing her nervous prattle as she showed her the tent and the spring behind it, and told of the log house they were to raise before the rains came. Bella was placated. After all, it was a lovely spot, good for the children, and if Glen could do as well on a lower bend of the river as they had done here, it looked as if they had at last found the Promised Land.
After supper they sat by Daddy John’s fire, which shot an eddying column of sparks into the plumed darkness of the pine. It was like old times only—with a glance outward toward the water and the star-strewn sky—so much more—what was the word? Not quiet; they could never forget the desert silence. “Homelike,” Susan suggested, and they decided that was the right word.
“You feel as if you could stay here and not want to move on,” Bella opined.
Glen thought perhaps you felt that way because you knew you’d come to the end and couldn’t move much farther.
But the others argued him down. They all agreed there was something in the sun maybe, or the mellow warmth of the air, or the richness of wooded slope and plain, that made them feel they had found a place where they could stay, not for a few days’ rest, but forever. Susan had hit upon the word “homelike,” the spot on earth that seemed to you the one best fitted for a home.
The talk swung back to days on the trail and finally brought up on David. They rehearsed the tragic story, conned over the details that had begun to form into narrative sequence as in the time-worn lay of a minstrel. Bella and Glen asked all the old questions that had once been asked by Susan and Daddy John, and heard the same answers, leaning to catch them while the firelight played on the strained attention of their faces. With the night pressing close around them, and the melancholy, sea-like song sweeping low from the forest, a chill crept upon them, and their lost comrade became invested with the unreality of a spirit. Dead in that bleak and God-forgotten land, or captive in some Indian stronghold, he loomed a tragic phantom remote from them and their homely interests like a historical figure round which legend has begun to accumulate.
The awed silence that had fallen was broken by Courant rising and walking away toward the diggings. This brought their somber pondering to an end. Bella and Glen picked up the sleeping children and went to their tent, and Susan, peering beyond the light, saw her man sitting on a stone, dark against the broken silver of the stream. She stole down to him and laid her hand on his shoulder. He started as if her touch scared him, then saw who it was and turned away with a gruff murmur. The sound was not encouraging, but the wife, already so completely part of him that his moods were communicated to her through the hidden subways of instinct, understood that he was in some unconfessed trouble.
“What’s the matter, Low?” she asked, bending to see his face.
He turned it toward her, met the penetrating inquiry of her look, and realized his dependence on her, feeling his weakness but not caring just then that he should be weak.
“Nothing,” he answered. “Why do they harp so on David?”
“Don’t you like them to?” she asked in some surprise.
He took a splinter from the stone and threw it into the water, a small silvery disturbance marking its fall.
“There’s nothing more to be said. It’s all useless talk. We can do no more than we’ve done.”
“Shall I tell them you don’t like the subject, not to speak of it again?”
He glanced at her with sudden suspicion:
“No, no, of course not. They’ve a right to say anything they please. But it’s a waste of time, there’s nothing but guessing now. What’s the use of guessing and wondering all through the winter. Are they going to keep on that way till the spring?”
“I’ll tell them not to,” she said as a simple solution of the difficulty. “I’ll tell them it worries you.”
“Don’t,” he said sharply. “Do you hear? Don’t. Do you want to act like a fool and make me angry with you?”
He got up and moved away, leaving her staring blankly at his back. He had been rough to her often, but never before spoken with this note of peremptory, peevish displeasure. She felt an obscure sense of trouble, a premonition of disaster. She went to him and, standing close, put her hand inside his arm.
“Low,” she pleaded, “what’s wrong with you? You were angry that they came. Now you’re angry at what they say. I don’t understand. Tell me the reason of it. If there’s something that I don’t know let me hear it, and I’ll try and straighten things out.”
For a tempted moment he longed to tell her, to gain ease by letting her share his burden. The hand upon his arm was a symbol of her hold upon him that no action of his could ever loose. If he could admit her within the circle of his isolation he would have enough. He would lose the baleful consciousness of forever walking apart, separated from his kind, a spiritual Ishmaelite. She had strength enough. For the moment he felt that she was the stronger of the two, able to bear more than he, able to fortify him and give him courage for the future. He had a right to claim such a dole of her love, and once the knowledge hers, they two would stand, banished from the rest of the world, knit together by the bond of their mutual knowledge.
The temptation clutched him and his breast contracted in the rising struggle. His pain clamored for relief, his weakness for support. The lion man, broken and tamed by the first pure passion of his life, would have cast the weight of his sin upon the girl he had thought to bear through life like a pampered mistress.
With the words on his lips he looked at her. She met the look with a smile that she tried to make brave, but that was only a surface grimace, her spirit’s disturbance plain beneath it. There was pathos in its courage and its failure. He averted his eyes, shook his arm free of her hand, and, moving toward the water, said:
“Go back to the tent and go to bed.”
“What are you going to do?” she called after him, her voice sounding plaintive. Its wistful note gave him strength:
“Walk for a while. I’m not tired. I’ll be back in an hour,” and he walked away, down the edge of the current, past the pits and into the darkness.
She watched him, not understanding, vaguely alarmed, then turned and went back to the tent.
CHAPTER III
The stretch of the river where the McMurdos had settled was richer than Courant’s location. Had Glen been as mighty a man with the pick, even in the short season left to him, he might have accumulated a goodly store. But he was a slack worker. His training as a carpenter made him useful, finding expression in an improvement on Daddy John’s rocker, so they overlooked his inclination to lie off in the sun with his ragged hat pulled over his eyes. In Courant’s camp Bella was regarded as the best man of the two. To her multiform duties she added that of assistant in the diggings, squatting beside her husband in the mud, keeping the rocker going, and when Glen was worked out, not above taking a hand at the shovel. Her camp showed a comfortable neatness, and the children’s nakedness was covered with garments fashioned by the firelight from old flour sacks.
There was no crisp coming of autumn. A yellowing of the leafage along the river’s edge was all that denoted the season’s change. Nature seemed loth to lay a desecrating hand on the region’s tranquil beauty. They had been told at the Fort that they might look for the first rains in November. When October was upon them they left the pits and set to work felling trees for two log huts.
Susan saw her home rising on the knoll, a square of logs, log roofed, with a door of woven saplings over which canvas was nailed. They built a chimney of stones rounded by the water’s action, and for a hearth found a slab of granite which they sunk in the earth before the fireplace. The bunk was a frame of young pines with canvas stretched across, and cushioned with spruce boughs and buffalo robes. She watched as they nailed up shelves of small, split tru
nks and sawed the larger ones into sections for seats. The bottom of the wagon came out and, poised on four log supports, made the table.
Her housewife’s instincts rose jubilant as the shell took form, and she sang to herself as she stitched her flour sacks together for towels. No princess decked her palace with a blither spirit. All the little treasures that had not been jettisoned in the last stern march across the desert came from their hiding places for the adornment of the first home of her married life. The square of mirror stood on the shelf near the door where the light could fall on it, and the French gilt clock that had been her mother’s ticked beside it. The men laughed as she set out on the table the silver mug of her baby days and a two-handled tankard bearing on its side a worn coat of arms, a heritage from the adventurous Poutrincourt, a drop of whose blood had given boldness and courage to hers.
It was her home—very different from the home she had dreamed of—but so was her life different from the life she and her father had planned together in the dead days of the trail. She delighted in it, gloated over it. Long before the day of installation she moved in her primitive furnishings, disposed the few pans with an eye to their effect as other brides arrange their silver and crystal, hung her flour-sack towels on the pegs with as careful a hand as though they had been tapestries, and folded her clothes neat and seemly in her father’s chest. Then came a night when the air was sharp, and they kindled the first fire in the wide chimney mouth. It leaped exultant, revealing the mud-filled cracks, playing on the pans, and licking the bosses of the old tankard. The hearthstone shone red with its light, and they sat drawn back on the seats of pine looking into its roaring depths—housed, sheltered, cozily content. When Glen and Bella retired to their tent a new romance seemed to have budded in the girl’s heart. It was her bridal night—beneath a roof, beside a hearth, with a door to close against the world, and shut her away with her lover.