Part 14 (2/2)
I'm so sorry.”
Being a man, he never fathomed her mind at all. But being a man, slowly, gently, he took her in his arms, drew her tight. Long, long it was till their lips met--and long then. But he heard her whisper ”Good-by,” saw her frank tears, felt her slowly, a little by a little, draw away from him.
”Good-by,” she said. ”Good-by. I would not dare, any more, ever again.
Oh, Will Banion, why did you take away my heart? I had but one!”
”It is mine!” he cried savagely. ”No other man in all the world shall ever have it! Molly!”
But she now was gone.
He did not know how long he stood alone, his head bowed on his saddle.
The raucous howl of a great gray wolf near by spelled out the lonesome tragedy of his future life for him.
Quaint and sweet philosopher, and bold as she but now had been in one great and final imparting of her real self, Molly Wingate was only a wet, weary and bedraggled maid when at length she entered the desolate encampment which stood for home. She found her mother sitting on a box under a crude awning, and cast herself on her knees, her head on that ample bosom that she had known as haven in her childhood. She wept now like a little child.
”It's bad!” said stout Mrs. Wingate, not knowing. ”But you're back and alive. It looks like we're wrecked and everything lost, and we come nigh about getting all burned up, but you're back alive to your ma! Now, now!”
That night Molly turned on a sodden pallet which she had made down beside her mother in the great wagon. But she slept ill. Over and over to her lips rose the same question:
”Oh, Will Banion, Will Banion, why did you take away my heart?”
CHAPTER XV
THE DIVISION
The great wagon train of 1848 lay banked along the Vermilion in utter and abject confusion. Organization there now was none. But for Banion's work with the back fires the entire train would have been wiped out. The effects of the storm were not so capable of evasion. Sodden, wretched, miserable, chilled, their goods impaired, their cattle stampeded, all sense of gregarious self-reliance gone, two hundred wagons were no more than two hundred individual units of discontent and despair. So far as could be prophesied on facts apparent, the journey out to Oregon had ended in disaster almost before it was well begun.
Bearded men at smoking fires looked at one another in silence, or would not look at all. Elan, morale, esprit de corps were gone utterly.
Stout Caleb Price walked down the wagon lines, pa.s.sing fourscore men shaking in their native agues, not yet conquered. Women, pale, gaunt, grim, looked at him from limp sunbonnets whose stays had been half dissolved. Children whimpered. Even the dogs, curled nose to tail under the wagons, growled surlily. But Caleb Price found at last the wagon of the bugler who had been at the wars and shook him out.
”Sound, man!” said Caleb Price. ”Play up Oh, Susannah! Then sound the a.s.sembly. We've got to have a meeting.”
They did have a meeting. Jesse Wingate scented mutiny and remained away.
”There's no use talking, men,” said Caleb Price, ”no use trying to fool ourselves. We're almost done, the way things are. I like Jess Wingate as well as any man I ever knew, but Jess Wingate's not the man. What shall we do?”
He turned to Hall, but Hall shook his head; to Kelsey, but Kelsey only laughed.
”I could get a dozen wagons through, maybe,” said he. ”Here's two hundred. Woodhull's the man, but Woodhull's gone--lost, I reckon, or maybe killed and lying out somewhere on these prairies. You take it, Cale.”
Price considered for a time.
”No,” said he at length. ”It's no time for one of us to take on what may be done better by someone else, because our women and children are at stake. The very best man's none too good for this job, and the more experience he has the better. The man who thinks fastest and clearest at the right time is the man we want, and the man we'd follow--the only man. Who'll he be?”
”Oh, I'll admit Banion had the best idea of crossing the Kaw,” said Kelsey. ”He got his own people over, too, somehow.”
<script>