The Emigrant Trail Part 50

"Years and years ahead," and then with deprecating eyes and irrepressible laughter, "Now don't say I'm foolish, but sometimes I think of him getting married and the kind of girl I'll choose for him--not stupid like me, but one who's good and beautiful and knows all about literature and geography and science. The finest girl in the world, and I'll find her for him."

He didn't laugh, instead he looked sulkily thoughtful:

"And where will we get the money to do all this?"

"We'll make it. We have a good deal now. Daddy John told me the other day he thought we had nearly ten thousand dollars in dust beside what my father left. That will be plenty to begin on, and you can go into business down on the coast. They told Daddy John at the Fort there would be hundreds and thousands of people coming in next spring.

They'll build towns, make Sacramento and San Francis...o...b..g places with lots going on. We can settle in whichever seems the most thriving and get back into the kind of life where we belong."

It was her old song, the swan song of his hopes. He felt a loneliness more bitter than he had ever before conceived of. In the jarring tumult of a growing city he saw himself marked in his own eyes, aloof in the street and the market place, a stranger by his own fireside. In his fear he swore that he would thwart her, keep her in the wild places, crush her maternal ambitions and force her to share his chosen life, the life of the outcast. He knew that it would mean conflict, the subduing of a woman nerved by a mother's pa.s.sion. And as he worked in the ditches he thought about it, arranging the process by which he would gradually break her to his will, beat down her aspirations till she was reduced to the abject docility of a squaw. Then he would hold her forever under his hand and eye, broken as a dog to his word, content to wander with him on those lonely paths where he would tread out the measure of his days.

Toward the end of November the rains came. First in hesitant showers, then in steadier downpourings, finally, as December advanced, in torrential fury. Veils of water descended upon them, swept round their knoll till it stood marooned amid yellow eddies. The river rose boisterous, swirled into the pits, ate its way across the honey-combed reach of mud and fingered along the bottom of their hillock. They had never seen such rain. The pines bowed and wailed under its a.s.sault, and the slopes were musical with the voices of liberated streams. Moss and mud had to be pressed into the cabin's cracks, and when they sat by the fire in the evening their voices fell before the angry las.h.i.+ngs on the roof and the groaning of the tormented forest.

Daddy John and Courant tried to work but gave it up, and the younger man, hara.s.sed by the secession of the toil that kept his body wearied and gave him sleep, went abroad on the hills, roaming free in the dripping darkness. Bella saw cause for surprise that he should absent himself willingly from their company. She grumbled about it to Glen, and noted Susan's acquiescence with the amaze of the woman who holds absolute sway over her man. One night Courant came back, drenched and staggering, on his shoulders a small bear that he had shot on the heights above. The fresh bear meat placated Bella, but she shook her head over the mountain man's morose caprices, and in the bedtime hour made dismal prophecies as to the outcome of her friend's strange marriage.

The bear hunt had evil consequences that she did not foresee. It left Courant, the iron man, stricken by an ailment marked by s.h.i.+verings, when he sat crouched over the fire, and fevered burnings when their combined entreaties could not keep him from the open door and the cool, wet air. When the clouds broke and the landscape emerged from its mourning, dappled with transparent tints, every twig and leaf washed clean, his malady grew worse and he lay on the bed of spruce boughs tossing in a sickness none of them understood.

They were uneasy, came in and out with disturbed looks and murmured inquiries. He refused to answer them, but on one splendid morning, blaring life like a trumpet call, he told them he was better and was going back to work. He got down to the river bank, fumbled over his spade, and then Daddy John had to help him back to the cabin. With gray face and filmed eyes he lay on the bunk while they stood round him, and the children came peeping fearfully through the doorway. They were thoroughly frightened, Bella standing by with her chin caught in her hand and her eyes fastened on him, and Susan on the ground beside him, trying to say heartening phrases with lips that were stiff. The men did not know what to do. They pushed the children from the door roughly, as if it were their desire to hurt and abuse them. In some obscure way it seemed to relieve their feelings.

The rains came back more heavily than ever. For three days the heavens descended in a downpour that made the river a roaring torrent and isled the two log houses on their hillocks. The walls of the cabin trickled with water. The buffets of the wind ripped the canvas covering from the door, and Susan and Daddy John had to take a buffalo robe from the bed and nail it over the rent. They kept the place warm with the fire, but the earth floor was damp to their feet, and the tinkle of drops falling from the roof into the standing pans came clear through the outside tumult.

The night when the storm was at its fiercest the girl begged the old man to stay with her. Courant had fallen into a state of lethargy from which it was hard to rouse him. Her anxiety gave place to anguish, and Daddy John was ready for the worst when she shook him into wakefulness, her voice at his ear:

"You must go somewhere and get a doctor. I'm afraid."

He blinked at her without answering, wondering where he could find a doctor and not wanting to speak till he had a hope to offer. She read his thoughts and cried as she s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat and coat from a peg:

"There must be one somewhere. Go to the Fort, and if there's none there go to Sacramento. I'd go with you but I'm afraid to leave him."

Daddy John went. She stood in the doorway and saw him lead the horse from the brush shed and, with his head low against the downpour, vault into the saddle. The moaning of the disturbed trees mingled with the triumphant roar of the river. There was a shouted good-by, and she heard the clatter of the hoofs for a moment sharp and distinct, then swallowed in the storm's high clamor.

In three days he was back with a s.h.i.+p's doctor, an Englishman, who described himself as just arrived from Australia. Daddy John had searched the valley, and finally run his quarry to earth at the Porter Ranch, one of a motley crew waiting to swarm inland to the rivers. The man, a ruddy animal with some rudimentary knowledge of his profession, p.r.o.nounced the ailment "mountain fever." He looked over the doctor's medicine chest with an air of wisdom and at Susan with subdued gallantry.

"Better get the wife down to Sacramento," he said to Daddy John. "The man's not going to last and you can't keep her up here."

"Is he going to die?" said the old man.

The doctor pursed his lips.

"He oughtn't to. He's a Hercules. But the strongest of 'em go this way with the work and exposure. Think they can do anything and don't last as well sometimes as the weak ones."

"Work and exposure oughtn't to hurt him. He's bred upon it. Why should he cave in and the others of us keep up?"

"Can't say. But he's all burned out--hollow. There's no rebound.

He's half gone now. Doesn't seem to have the spirit that you'd expect in such a body."

"Would it do any good to get him out of here, down to the valley or the coast?"

"It might--change of air sometimes knocks out these fevers. You could try the coast or Hock Farm. But if you want my opinion I don't think there's much use."

Then on the first fine day the doctor rode away with some of their dust in his saddlebags, spying on the foaming river for good spots to locate when the rains should cease and he, with the rest of the world, could try his luck.

His visit had done no good, had given no heart to the anguished woman or roused no flicker of life in the failing man. Through the weakness of his wasting faculties Courant realized the approach of death and welcomed it. In his forest roamings, before his illness struck him, he had thought of it as the one way out. Then it had come to him vaguely terrible as a specter in dreams. Now bereft of the sustaining power of his strength the burden of the days to come had grown insupportable.

To live without telling her, to live beside her and remain a partial stranger, to live divorcing her from all she would desire, had been the only course he saw, and in it he recognized nothing but misery. Death was the solution for both, and he relinquished himself to it with less grief at parting from her than relief at the withdrawal from an existence that would destroy their mutual dream. What remained to him of his mighty forces went to keep his lips shut on the secret she must never know. Even as his brain grew clouded, and his senses feeble, he retained the resolution to leave her her belief in him. This would be his legacy. His last gift of love would be the memory of an undimmed happiness.

But Susan, unknowing, fought on. The doctor had not got back to the Porter Ranch before she began arranging to move Low to Sacramento and from there to the Coast. He would get better care, they would find more competent doctors, the change of air would strengthen him. She had it out with Bella, refusing to listen to the older woman's objections, pus.h.i.+ng aside all references to her own health. Bella was distracted. "For," as she said afterwards to Glen, "what's the sense of having her go? She can't do anything for him, and it's like as not the three of them'll die instead of one."

There was no reasoning with Susan. The old willfulness was strengthened to a blind determination. She plodded back through the rain to Daddy John and laid the matter before him. As of old he did not dispute with her, only stipulated that he be permitted to go on ahead, make arrangements, and then come back for her. He, too, felt there was no hope, but unlike the others he felt the best hope for his Missy was in letting her do all she could for her husband.

In the evening, sitting by the fire, they talked it over--the stage down the river, the stop at the Fort, then on to Sacramento, and the long journey to the seaport settlement of San Francisco. The sick man seemed asleep, and their voices unconsciously rose, suddenly dropping to silence as he stirred and spoke:

"Are you talking of moving me? Don't. I've had twelve years of it.

Let me rest now."

Susan went to him and sat at his feet.

"But we must get you well," she said, trying to smile. "They'll want you in the pits. You must be back there working with them by the spring."

He looked at her with a wide, cold gaze, and said:

"The spring. We're all waiting for the spring. Everything's going to happen then."

A silence fell. The wife sat with drooped head, unable to speak.

Daddy John looked into the fire. To them both the Angel of Death seemed to have paused outside the door, and in the stillness they waited for his knock. Only Courant was indifferent, staring at the wall with eyes full of an unfathomable unconcern.

The next day Daddy John left. He was to find the accommodations, get together such comforts as could be had, and return for them. He took a sack of dust and the fleetest horse, and calculated to be back inside two days. As he clattered away he turned for a last look at her, standing in the suns.h.i.+ne, her hand over her eyes. Man or devil would not stop him, he thought, as he buckled to his task, and his seventy years sat as light as a boy's twenty, the one pa.s.sion of his heart beating life through him.

Two days later, at sundown, he came back. She heard the ringing of hoofs along the trail and ran forward to meet him, catching the bridle as the horse, a white lather of sweat, came to a panting halt. She did not notice the lined exhaustion of the old man's face, had no care for anything but his news.

"I've got everything fixed," he cried, and then slid off holding to the saddle for he was stiff and spent. "The place is ready and I've found a doctor and got him nailed. It'll be all clean and s.h.i.+pshape for you.

How's Low?"

An answer was unnecessary. He could see there were no good tidings.

"Weaker a little," she said. "But if it's fine we can start to-morrow."

He thought of the road he had traveled and felt they were in G.o.d's hands. Then he stretched a gnarled and tremulous claw and laid it on her shoulder.

"And there's other news, Missy. Great news. I'm thinking that it may help you."

There was no news that could help her but news of Low. She was so fixed in her preoccupation that her eye was void of interest, as his, bright and expectant, held it:

"I seen David."

He was rewarded. Her face flashed into excitement and she grabbed at him with a wild hand:

"David! Where?"

"In Sacramento. I seen him and talked to him."