Part 27 (1/2)

She leaned her lips to his ear.

”It was gold!”

He stood, the magic name of that metal which shows the color in the shade electrifying even his ignorance of the truth.

”Gold?”

She told him then, breaking her own promise magnificently, as a woman will.

”Go, ride with Bridger,” she went on. ”Don't tell him you ever knew me.

He'll not be apt to speak of me. But they found it, in California, the middle of last winter--gold! Gold! Carson's here in our camp--Kit Carson. He's the first man to bring it to the Valley of the Platte. He was sworn to keep it secret; so was Bridger, and so am I. Not to Oregon, Will--California! You can live down your past. If we die, G.o.d bless the man I do love. That's you, Will! And I'm going to marry--him. Ten days!

On the trail! And he'll kill you, Will! Oh, keep away!”

She paused, breathless from her torrent of incoherent words, jealous of the pa.s.sing moments. It was vague, it was desperate, it was crude. But they were in a world vague, desperate and crude.

”I've promised my men I'd not leave them,” he said at last. ”A promise is a promise.”

”Then G.o.d help us both! But one thing--when I'm married, that's the end between us. So good-by.”

He leaned his head back on his saddle for a time, his tired horse turning back its head. He put out his hand blindly; but it was the muzzle of his horse that had touched his shoulder. The girl was gone.

The Indian drums at Laramie thudded through the dark. The great wolf in the breaks lifted his hoa.r.s.e, raucous roar once more. The wilderness was afoot or bedding down, according to its like.

CHAPTER XXVIII

WHEN A MAID MARRIES

Carson, Bridger and Jackson, now reunited after years, must pour additional libations to Auld Lang Syne at Laramie, so soon were off together. The movers sat around their thrifty cooking fires outside the wagon corral. Wingate and his wife were talking heatedly, she in her nervousness not knowing that she fumbled over and over in her fingers the heavy bit of rock which Molly had picked up and which was in her handkerchief when it was requisitioned by her mother to bathe her face just now. After a time she tossed the nugget aside into the gra.s.s. It was trodden by a hundred feet ere long.

But gold will not die. In three weeks a prowling Gros Ventre squaw found it and carried it to the trader, Bordeaux, asking, ”Shoog?”

”Non, non!” replied the Laramie trader. ”Pas de shoog!” But he looked curiously at the thing, so heavy.

”How, cola!” wheedled the squaw. ”Shoog!” She made the sign for sugar, her finger from her palm to her lips. Bordeaux tossed the thing into the tin can on the shelf and gave her what sugar would cover a spoon.

”Where?” He asked her, his fingers loosely shaken, meaning, ”Where did you get it?”

The Gros Ventre lied to him like a lady, and told him, on the South Fork, on the Creek of Bitter Cherries--near where Denver now is; and where placers once were. That was hundreds of miles away. The Gros Ventre woman had been there once in her wanderings and had seen some heavy metal.

Years later, after Fort Laramie was taken over by the Government, Bordeaux as sutler sold much flour and bacon to men hurrying down the South Fork to the early Colorado diggings. Meantime in his cups he often had told the mythical tale of the Gros Ventre woman--long after California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana were all afire. But one of his halfbreed children very presently had commandeered the tin cup and its contents, so that to this day no man knows whether the child swallowed the nugget or threw it into the Laramie River or the Platte River or the sagebrush. Some depose that an emigrant bought it of the baby; but no one knows.

What all men do know is that gold does not die; nay, nor the news of it.

And this news now, like a multiplying germ, was in the wagon train that had started out for Oregon.

As for Molly, she asked no questions at all about the lost nugget, but hurried to her own bed, supperless, pale and weeping. She told her father nothing of the nature of her meeting with Will Banion, then nor at any time for many weeks.

”Molly, come here, I want to talk to you.”