The Emigrant Trail Part 51

"Oh, Daddy John, how wonderful! Was he well?"

"Well and hearty, same as he used to be. Plumped up considerable."

"How had he got there?"

"A train behind us picked him up, found him lyin' by the spring where he'd crawled lookin' for us."

"Then, it wasn't Indians? Had he got lost?"

"That's what I says to him first-off--'Well, gol darn yer, what happened to yer?' and before he answers me he says quick, 'How's Susan?' It ain't no use settin' on bad news that's bound to come out so I give it to him straight that you and Low was married at Humboldt.

And he took it very quiet, whitened up a bit, and says no words for a spell, walkin' off a few steps. Then he turns back and says, 'Is she happy?'"

Memory broke through the sh.e.l.l of absorption and gave voice to a forgotten sense of guilt:

"Oh, poor David! He always thought of me first."

"I told him you was. That you and Low was almighty sot on each other and that Low was sick. And he was quiet for another spell, and I could see his thoughts was troublesome. So to get his mind off it I asked him how it all happened. He didn't answer for a bit, standin' thinkin'

with his eyes lookin' out same as he used to look at the sunsets before he got broke down. And then he tells me it was a fall, that he clum up to the top of the rock and thinks he got a touch o' sun up there. For first thing he knew he was all dizzy and staggerin' round, goin' this side and that, till he got to the edge where the rock broke off and over he went. He come to himself lying under a ledge alongside some bushes, with a spring tricklin' over him. He guessed he rolled there and that's why we couldn't find him. He don't know how long it was, or how long it took him to crawl round to the camp--maybe a day, he thinks, for he was 'bout two thirds dead. But he got there and saw we was gone. The Indians hadn't come down on the place, and he seen the writing on the rock and found the cache. The food and the water kep'

him alive, and after a bit a big train come along, the finest train he even seen--eighteen wagons and an old Ashley man for pilot. They was almighty good to him; the women nursed him like Christians, and he rid in the wagons and come back slow to his strength. The reason we didn't hear of him before was because they come by a southern route that took 'em weeks longer, moving slow for the cattle. They was fine people, he says, and he's thick with one of the men who's a lawyer, and him and David's goin' to the coast to set up a law business there."

The flicker of outside interest was dying. "Thank Heaven," she said on a rising breath, then cast a look at the cabin and added quickly:

"I'll go and tell Low. Maybe it'll cheer him up. He was always so worried about David. You tell Bella and then come to the cabin and see how you think he is."

There was light in the cabin, a leaping radiance from the logs on the hearth, and a thin, pale twilight from the uncovered doorway. She paused there for a moment, making her step light and composing her features into serener lines. The gaunt form under the blanket was motionless. The face, sunk away to skin clinging on sharp-set bones, was turned in profile. He might have been sleeping but for the glint of light between the eyelids. She was accustomed to seeing him thus, to sitting beside the inanimate shape, her hand curled round his, her eyes on the face that took no note of her impa.s.sioned scrutiny. Would her tidings of David rouse him? She left herself no time to wonder, hungrily expectant.

"Low," she said, bending over him, "Daddy John's been to Sacramento and has brought back wonderful news."

He turned his head with an effort and looked at her. His glance was vacant as if he had only half heard, as if her words had caught the outer edges of his senses and penetrated no farther.

"He has seen David."

Into the dull eyes a slow light dawned, struggling through their apathy till they became the eyes of a live man, hanging on hers, charged with a staring intelligence. He made an attempt to move, lifted a wavering hand and groped for her shoulder.

"David!" he whispered.

The news had touched an inner nerve that thrilled to it. She crouched on the edge of the bunk, her heart beating thickly:

"David, alive and well."

The fumbling hand gripped on her shoulder. She felt the fingers pressing in stronger than she had dreamed they could be. It pulled her down toward him, the eyes fixed on hers, searching her face, glaring fearfully from blackened hollows, riveted in a desperate questioning.

"What happened to him?" came the husky whisper.

"He fell from the rock; thinks he had a sunstroke up there and then lost his balance and fell over and rolled under a ledge. And after a few days a train came by and found him."

"Is that what he said?"

Her answering voice began to tremble, for the animation of his look grew wilder and stranger. It was as if all the life in his body was burning in those hungry eyes. The hand on her shoulder clutched like a talon, the muscles informed with an unnatural force. Was it the end coming with a last influx of strength and fire? Her tears began to fall upon his face, and she saw it through them, ravaged and fearful, with new life struggling under the ghastliness of dissolution. There was an awfulness in this rekindling of the spirit where death had set its stamp that broke her fort.i.tude, and she forgot the legend of her courage and cried in her agony:

"Oh, Low, don't die, don't die! I can't bear it. Stay with me!"

The hand left her shoulder and fumblingly touched her face, feeling blindly over its tear-washed surface.

"I'm not going to die," came the feeble whisper. "I can live now."

Half an hour later when Daddy John came in he found her sitting on the side of the bunk, a hunched, dim figure against the firelight. She held up a warning hand, and the old man tiptoed to her side and leaned over her to look. Courant was sleeping, his head thrown back, his chest rising in even breaths. Daddy John gazed for a moment, then bent till his cheek was almost against hers.

"Pick up your heart, Missy," he whispered. "He looks to me better."

CHAPTER IV

From the day of the good news Courant rallied. At first they hardly dared to hope. Bella and Daddy John talked about it together and wondered if it were only a pause in the progress of his ailment. But Susan was confident, nursing her man with a high cheerfulness that defied their anxious faces.

She had none of their fear of believing. She saw their doubts and angrily scouted them. "Low will be all right soon," she said, in answer to their gloomily observing looks. In her heart she called them cowards, ready to join hands with death, not rise up and fight till the final breath. Her resolute hope seemed to fill the cabin with light and life. It transformed her haggardness, made her a beaming presence, with eyes bright under tangled locks of hair, and lips that hummed s.n.a.t.c.hes of song. He was coming back to her like a child staggering to its mother's outheld hands. While they were yet unconvinced "when Low gets well" became a constant phrase on her tongue. She began to plan again, filled their ears with speculations of the time when she and her husband would move to the coast. They marveled at her, at the dauntlessness of her spirit, at the desperate courage that made her grip her happiness and wrench it back from the enemy.

They marveled more when they saw she had been right--Susan who had been a child so short a time before, knowing more than they, wiser and stronger in the wisdom and strength of her love.

There was a great day when Low crept out to the door and sat on the bench in the sun with his wife beside him. To the prosperous pa.s.serby they would have seemed a sorry pair--a skeleton man with uncertain feet and powerless hands, a worn woman, ragged and unkempt. To them it was the halcyon hour, the highest point of their mutual adventure. The cabin was their palace, the soaked prospect a pleasance decked for their delight. And from this rude and ravaged outlook their minds reached forward in undefined and unrestricted visioning to all the world that lay before them, which they would soon advance on and together win.

Nature was with them in their growing gladness. The spring was coming.

The river began to fall, and Courant's eyes dwelt longingly on the expanding line of mud that waited for his pick. April came with a procession of cloudless days, with the tinkling of streams shrinking under the triumphant sun, with the pines exhaling scented breaths, and a first, faint sprouting of new green. The great refreshed landscape unveiled itself, serenely brooding in a vast, internal energy of germination. The earth was coming to life as they were, gathering itself for the expression of its ultimate purpose. It was rising to the rite of rebirth and they rose with it, with faces uplifted to its kindling glory and hearts in which joy was touched by awe.

On a May evening, when the shadows were congregating in the canon, Susan lay on the bunk with her son in the hollow of her arm. The children came in and peeped fearfully at the little hairless head, pulling down the coverings with careful fingers and eying the newcomer dubiously, not sure that they liked him. Bella looked over their shoulders radiating proud content. Then she shooed them out and went about her work of "redding up," pacing the earthen floor with the proud tread of victory. Courant was sitting outside on the log bench. She moved to the door and smiled down at him over the tin plate she was scouring.

"Come in and sit with her while I get the supper," she said. "Don't talk, just sit where she can see you."

He came and sat beside her, and she drew the blanket down from the tiny, crumpled face. They were silent, wondering at it, looking back over the time when it had cried in their blood, inexorably drawn them together, till out of the heat of their pa.s.sion the spark of its being had been struck. Both saw in it their excuse and their pardon.

She recovered rapidly, all her being revivified and reinforced, coming back glowingly to a mature beauty. Glimpses of the Susan of old began to reappear. She wanted her looking-gla.s.s, and, sitting up in the bunk with the baby against her side, arranged her hair in the becoming knot and twisted the locks on her temples into artful tendrils. She would sew soon, and kept Bella busy digging into the trunks and bringing out what was left of her best things. They held weighty conferences over these, the foot of the bunk littered with wrinkled skirts and jackets that had fitted a slimmer and more elegant Susan. A trip to Sacramento was talked of, in which Daddy John was to shop for a lady and baby, and buy all manner of strange articles of which he knew nothing.

"Calico, that's a pretty color," he exclaimed testily. "How am I to know what's a pretty color? Now if it was a sack of flour or a spade--but I'll do my best, Missy," he added meekly, catching her eye in which the familiar imperiousness gleamed through softening laughter.

Soon the day came when she walked to the door and sat on the bench.

The river was settling decorously into its bed, and in the sunlight the drenched sh.o.r.es shone under a tracery of pools and rillets as though a silvery gauze had been rudely torn back from them, catching and tearing here and there. The men were starting the spring work. The rocker was up, and the spades and picks stood propped against the rock upon which she and Low had sat on that first evening. He sat there now, watching the preparations soon to take part again. His lean hand fingered among the picks, found his own, and he walked to the untouched sh.o.r.e and struck a tentative blow. Then he dropped the pick, laughing, and came back to her.

"I'll be at it in a week," he said, sitting down on the bench. "It'll be good to be in the pits again and feel my muscles once more."

"It'll be good to see you," she answered.

In a week he was back, in two weeks he was himself again--the mightiest of those mighty men who, sixty years ago, measured their strength along the American River. The diggings ran farther upstream and were richer than the old ones. The day's takings were large, sometimes so large that the men's elation beat like a fever in their blood. At night they figured on their wealth, and Susan listened startled to the sums that fell so readily from their lips. They were rich, rich enough to go to the coast and for Courant to start in business there.

It was he who wanted this. The old shrinking and fear of the city were gone. Now, with a wife and child, he turned his face that way. He was longing to enter the fight for them, to create and acquire for them, to set them as high as the labor of his hands and work of his brain could compa.s.s. New ambitions possessed him. As Susan planned for a home and its comforts, he did for his work in the market place in compet.i.tion with those who had once been his silent accusers.

But there was also a strange humbleness in him. It did not weaken his confidence or clog his aspiration, but it took something from the hard arrogance that had recognized in his own will the only law. He had heard from Daddy John of that interview with David, and he knew the reason of David's lie. He knew, too, that David would stand to that lie forever. Of the two great pa.s.sions that the woman had inspired the one she had relinquished was the finer. He had stolen her from David, and David had shown that for love of her he could forego vengeance.

Once such an act would have been inexplicable to the mountain man. Now he understood, and in his humility he vowed to make the life she had chosen as perfect as the one that might have been. Through this last, and to him, supremest sacrifice, David ceased to be the puny weakling and became the hero, the thought of whom would make Courant "go softly all his days."