He twisted a blade of grass in his freckled hands and wished that the service would soon end.
The cotton-wood leaves made a light, dry pattering as if rain drops were falling. From the picketed animals, looping their trail ropes over the grass, came a sound of low, continuous cropping. The hum of insects swelled and sank, full of sudden life, then drowsily dying away as though the spurt of energy had faded in the hour's discouraging languor. The doctor's voice detached itself from this pastoral chorus intoning the laws that God gave Moses when he was conducting a stiff-necked and rebellious people through a wilderness:
"Thou shalt do no murder.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery.
"Thou shalt not steal."
And to each command Susan's was the only voice that answered, falling sweet and delicately clear on the silence:
"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."
Susan praying for power to resist such scarlet sins! It was fantastic and David wished he dared join his voice to hers and not let her kneel there alone as if hers was the only soul that needed strengthening. Susan, the young, the innocent-eyed, the pure.
He had come again the next Sunday—Leff went hunting that morning—and felt that some day, not so far distant, he would dare to kneel too and respond. He thought of it when alone, another port that his dreams were taking him to—his voice and Susan's, the bass and the treble, strength and sweetness, symbol of the male and the female, united in one harmonious strain that would stream upward to the throne of the God who, watching over them, neither slumbered nor slept.
It was on the afternoon of this Sunday, that David started out to walk to an Indian village, of which a passing emigrant had told him, lying in a hollow a mile to the westward. He left the camp sunk in the somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the shade of the cotton-woods, and Daddy John lying on the grass among the whiteness of the week's wash. The hour was hot and breathless, the middle distance quivering through a heat haze, and the remoter reaches of the prairie an opalescent blur.
The Indian village was deserted and he wandered through its scattered lodges of saplings wattled with the peeled bark of willows. The Indians had not long departed. The ash of their fires was still warm, tufts of buffalo hair and bright scraps of calico were caught on the bushes, yet it already had an air of desolation, the bleakness of the human habitation when the dweller has crossed the threshold and gone.
Shadows were filling the hollow like a thin cold wine rising on the edges of a cup, when he left it and gained the upper levels. Doubtful of his course he stood for a moment looking about, conscious of a curious change in the prospect, a deepening of its colors, a stillness no longer dreamy, but heavy with suspense. The sky was sapphire clear, but on the western horizon a rampart of cloud edged up, gray and ominous, against the blue. As he looked it mounted, unrolled and expanded, swelling into forms of monstrous aggression. A faint air, fresh and damp, passed across the grass, and the clouds swept, like smoke from a world on fire, over the sun.
With the sudden darkening, dread fell on the face of the land. It came first in a hush, like a holding of the breath, attentive, listening, expectant. Then this broke and a quiver, the goose-flesh thrill of fear, stirred across the long ridges. The small, close growing leafage cowered, a frightened trembling seized the trees. David saw the sweep of the landscape growing black under the blackness above. He began to run, the sky sinking lower like a lid shutting down on the earth. He thought that it was hard to get it on right, for in front of him a line of blue still shone over which the lid had not yet been pressed down. The ground was pale with the whitened terror of upturned leaves, the high branches of the cotton-woods whipping back and forth in wild agitation. He felt the first large drops, far apart, falling with a reluctant splash, and he ran, a tiny figure in the tragic and tremendous scene.
When he reached the camp the rush of the rain had begun. Through a network of boughs he caught the red eye of the fire and beyond had a vision of stampeding mules with the men in pursuit. Then crashing through the bushes he saw why the fire still burned—Susan was holding an umbrella over it, the rain spitting in the hot ash, a pan of biscuits balanced in the middle. Behind her the tent, one side concave, the other bellying out from restraining pegs, leaped and jerked at its moorings. A rumble of thunder rolled across the sky and the rain came at them in a slanting wall.
"We're going to have biscuits for supper if the skies fall," Susan shouted at him, and he had a glimpse of her face, touched with firelight, laughing under the roof of the umbrella.
A furious burst of wind cut off his answer, the blue glare of lightning suddenly drenched them, and the crackling of thunder tore a path across the sky. The umbrella was wrenched from Susan and her wail as the biscuits fell pierced the tumult with the thin, futile note of human dole. He had no time to help her, for the tent with an exultant wrench tore itself free on one side, a canvas wing boisterously leaping, while the water dived in at the blankets. As he sped to its rescue he had an impression of the umbrella, handle up, filling with water like a large black bowl and Susan groveling in the ashes for her biscuits.
"The tent's going," he cried back; "all your things will be soaked. Never mind the supper, come and help me." And it seemed in this moment of tumult, that Susan ceased to be a woman to be cared for and protected and became his equal, fighting with him against the forces of the primitive world. The traditions of her helplessness were stripped from her, and he called her to his aid as the cave man called his woman when the storm fell on their bivouac.
They seized on the leaping canvas, he feeling in the water for the tent pegs, she snatching at the ropes. He tried to direct her, shouting orders, which were beaten down in the stuttering explosion of the thunder. Once a furious gust sent her against him. The wind wrapped her damp skirts round him and he felt her body soft and pliable. The grasp of her hands was tight on his arms and close to his ear he heard her laughing. For a second the quick pulse of the lightning showed her to him, her hair glued to her cheeks, her wet bodice like a thin web molding her shoulders, and as the darkness shut her out he again heard her laughter broken by panting breaths.
"Isn't it glorious," she cried, struggling away from him. "That nearly took me off my feet. My skirts are all twined round you."
They got the tent down, writhing and leaping like a live thing frantic to escape. Conquered, a soaked mass on the ground, he pulled the bedding from beneath it and she grasped the blankets in her arms and ran for the wagon. She went against the rain, leaning forward on it, her skirts torn back and whipped up by the wind into curling eddies. Her head, the hair pressed flat to it, was sleek and wet as a seal's, and as she ran she turned and looked at him over her shoulder, a wild, radiant look that he never forgot.
They sat in the wagon and watched the storm. Soaked and tired they curled up by the rear opening while the rain threshed against the canvas and driblets of water came running down the sides. The noise made talking difficult and they drew close together exclaiming as the livid lightning saturated the scene, and holding their breaths when the thunder broke and split its furious way over their heads. They watched it, conscious each in the other of an increased comforting friendliness, a gracious reassurance where Nature's transports made man seem so small.
CHAPTER VII
The Vermilion was swollen. With a bluff on one side and a wide bottom on the other it ran a prosperous, busy stream, brown and ripple-ridged. The trail lay like a line of tape along the high land, then down the slope, and across the bottom to the river. Here it seemed to slip under the current and come up on the other side where it climbed a steep bank, and thence went on, thin and pale, rising and dropping to the ridges till the tape became a thread.
They had been waiting a day for the water to fall. Camped in the bottom under a scattering of trees with the animals grazing on the juicy river grass and the song of