Sometimes they were acquaintances made in the wet days at Independence, sometimes strangers who had come by way of St. Joseph. Then the encountering parties eyed one another with candid curiosity and from each came the greeting of the plains, "Be you for Oregon or California?"
The present party was for Oregon from Missouri, six weeks on the road. They were a family, traveling alone, having dropped out of the company with which they had started. The man, a gaunt and grizzled creature, with long hair and ragged beard, was unyoking his oxen, while the woman bent over the fire which crackled beneath her hands. She was as lean as he, shapeless, saffron-skinned and wrinkled, but evidently younger than she looked. The brood of tow-headed children round her ran from a girl of fourteen to a baby, just toddling, a fat, solemn-eyed cherub, almost naked, with a golden fluff of hair.
At sight of him Susan drew up, the unthinking serenity of her face suddenly concentrated into a hunger of admiration, a look which changed her, focused her careless happiness into a pointed delight.
"Look at the baby," she said quickly, "a lovely fat baby with curls," then slid off her horse and went toward them.
The woman drew back staring. The children ran to her, frightened as young rabbits, and hid behind her skirts. Only the baby, grave and unalarmed, stood his ground and Susan snatched him up. Then the mother smiled, gratified and reassured. She had no upper front teeth, and the wide toothless grin gave her a look of old age that had in it a curious suggestion of debasement.
David stood by his horse, making no move to come forward. The party repelled him. They were not only uncouth and uncomely, but they were dirty. Dirt on an Indian was, so to speak, dirt in its place—but unwashed women and children—! His gorge rose at it. And Susan, always dainty as a pink, seemed entirely indifferent to it. The children, with unkempt hair and legs caked in mud, crowded about her, and as she held the baby against her chest, her glance dwelt on the woman's face, with no more consciousness of its ugliness than when she looked over the prairie there was consciousness of Nature's supreme perfection.
On the way back to camp he asked her about it. Why, if she objected to the Indian's dirt, had she been oblivious to that of the women and the children? He put it judicially, with impersonal clearness as became a lawyer. She looked puzzled, then laughed, her fresh, unusual laugh:
"I'm sure I don't know. I don't know why I do everything or why I like this thing and don't like that. I don't always have a reason, or if I do I don't stop to think what it is. I just do things because I want to and feel them because I can't help it. I like children and so I wanted to talk to them and hear about them from their mother."
"But would your liking for them make you blind to such a thing as dirt?"
"I don't know. Maybe it would. When you're interested in anything or anybody small things don't matter."
"Small things! Those children were a sight!"
"Yes, poor little brats! No one had washed the baby for weeks. The woman said she was too tired to bother and it wouldn't bathe in the creeks with the other children, so they let it go. If we kept near them I could wash it for her. I could borrow it and wash it every morning. But there's no use thinking about it as we'll pass them to-morrow. Wasn't it a darling with little golden rings of hair and eyes like pieces of blue glass?"
She sighed, relinquishing the thought of the baby's morning bath with pensive regret. David could not understand it, but decided as Susan felt that way it must be the right way for a woman to feel. He was falling in love, but he was certainly not falling in love—as students of a later date have put it—with "a projection of his own personality."
CHAPTER VI
They had passed the Kaw River and were now bearing on toward the Vermilion. Beyond that would be the Big and then the Little Blue and soon after the Platte where "The Great Medicine way of the Pale Face" bent straight to the westward. The country continued the same and over its suave undulations the long trail wound, sinking to the hollows, threading clumps of cotton-wood and alder, lying white along the spine of bolder ridges.
Each day they grew more accustomed to their gypsy life. The prairie had begun to absorb them, cut them off from the influences of the old setting, break them to its will. They were going back over the footsteps of the race, returning to aboriginal conditions, with their backs to the social life of communities and their faces to the wild. Independence seemed a long way behind, California so remote that it was like thinking of Heaven when one was on earth, well fed and well faring. Their immediate surroundings began to make their world, they subsided into the encompassing immensity, unconsciously eliminating thoughts, words, habits, that did not harmonize with its uncomplicated design.
On Sundays they halted and "lay off" all day. This was Dr. Gillespie's wish. He had told the young men at the start and they had agreed. It would be a good thing to have a day off for washing and general "redding up." But the doctor had other intentions. In his own words, he "kept the Sabbath," and each Sunday morning read the service of the Episcopal Church. Early in their acquaintance David had discovered that his new friend was religious; "a God-fearing man" was the term the doctor had used to describe himself. David, who had only seen the hysterical, fanaticism of frontier revivals now for the first time encountered the sincere, unquestioning piety of a spiritual nature. The doctor's God was an all-pervading presence, who went before him as pillar of fire or cloud. Once speaking to the young man of the security of his belief in the Divine protection, he had quoted a line which recurred to David over and over—in the freshness of the morning, in the hot hush of midday, and in the night when the stars were out: "Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."
Overcome by shyness the young men had stayed away from the first Sunday's service. David had gone hunting, feeling that to sit near by and not attend would offer a slight to the doctor. No such scruples restrained Leff, who squatted on his heels at the edge of the creek, washing his linen and listening over his shoulder. By the second Sunday they had mastered their bashfulness and both came shuffling their hats in awkward hands and sitting side by side on a log. Leff, who had never been to church in his life, was inclined to treat the occasion as one for furtive amusement, at intervals casting a sidelong look at his companion, which, on encouragement, would have developed into a wink. David had no desire to exchange glances of derisive comment. He was profoundly moved. The sonorous words, the solemn appeal for strength under temptation, the pleading for mercy with that stern, avenging presence who had said, "I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God," awed him, touched the same chord that Nature touched and caused an exaltation less exquisite but more inspiring.
The light fell flickering through the leaves of the cotton-woods on the doctor's gray head. He looked up from his book, for he knew the words by heart, and his quiet eyes dwelt on the distance swimming in morning light. His friend, the old servant, stood behind him, a picturesque figure in fringed buckskin shirt and moccasined feet. He held his battered hat in his hand, and his head with its spare locks of grizzled hair was reverently bowed. He neither spoke nor moved. It was Susan's voice who repeated the creed and breathed out a low "We beseech thee to hear us, Good Lord."
The tents and the wagons were behind her and back of them the long green splendors of the prairie. Flecks of sun danced over her figure, shot back and forth from her skirt to her hair as whiffs of wind caught the upper branches of the cotton woods. She had been sitting on the mess chest, but when the reading of the Litany began she slipped to her knees, and with head inclined answered the responses, her hands lightly clasped resting against her breast.
David, who had been looking at her, dropped his eyes as from a sight no man should see. To admire her at this moment, shut away in the sanctuary of holy thoughts, was a sacrilege. Men and their passions should stand outside in that sacred hour when a woman is at prayer. Leff had no such high fancies. He only knew the sight of Susan made him dumb and drove away all the wits he had. Now she looked so aloof, so far removed from all accustomed things, that the sense of her remoteness added gloom to his embarrassment.