Part 4 (2/2)

He was beginning to know Miss Gillespie--”Miss Susan” he called her--very well. It was just like his dream, riding beside her every day, and growing more friendly, the spell of her youth, and her dark bloom, and her attentive eyes--for she was an admirable listener if her answers sometimes lacked point--drawing from him secret thoughts and hopes and aspirations he had never dared to tell before. If she did not understand him she did not laugh at him, which was enough for David with the sleepy whisperings of the prairie around him, and new, strange matter stirring in his heart and making him bold.

There was only one thing about her that was disappointing. He did not admit it to himself but it kept falling on their interviews with a depressive effect. To the call of beauty she remained unmoved. If he drew up his horse to gaze on the wonders of the sunset the waiting made her impatient. He had noticed that heat and mosquitoes would distract her attention from the hazy distances drowsing in the clear yellow of noon. The sky could flush and deepen in majestic splendors, but if she was busy over the fire and her skillets she never raised her head to look. And so it was with poetry. She did not know and did not care anything about the fine frenzies of the masters. Byron?--wrinkling up her forehead--yes, she thought she'd read something in school.

Sh.e.l.ley?--”The Ode to the West Wind?” No, she'd never read that. What was an ode anyway? Once he recited the ”Lines to an Indian Air,” his voice trembling a little, for the words were almost sacred.

She pondered for a s.p.a.ce and then said:

”What are champak odors?”

David didn't know. He had never thought of inquiring.

”Isn't that odd,” she murmured. ”That would have been the first thing I would have wanted to know. Champak? I suppose it's some kind of a flower--something like a magnolia. It has a sound like a magnolia.”

A lively imagination was evidently not one of Miss Gillespie's possessions.

Late one afternoon, riding some distance in front of the train, she and David had seen an Indian loping by on his pony. It was not an unusual sight. Many Indians had visited their camp and at the crossing of the Kaw they had come upon an entire village in transit to the summer hunting grounds. But there was something in this lone figure, moving solitary through the evening glow, that put him in accord with the landscape's solemn beauty, retouched him with his lost magnificence.

In buckskins black with filth, his blanket a tattered rag, an ancient rifle across his saddle, the undying picturesqueness of the red man was his.

”Look,” said David, his imagination fired. ”Look at that Indian.”

The savage saw them and turned a face of melancholy dignity upon them, giving forth a deep ”How, How.”

”He's a very dirty Indian,” said Susan, sweeping him with a glance of disfavor.

David did not hear her. He looked back to watch the lonely figure as it rode away over the swells. It seemed to him to be riding into the past, the lordly past, when the red man owned the land and the fruits thereof.

”Look at him as he rides away,” he said. ”Can't you seem to see him coming home from a battle with his face streaked with vermilion and his war bonnet on? He'd be solemn and grand with the wet scalps dripping at his belt. When they saw him coming his squaws would come out in front of the lodges and begin to sing the war chant.”

”Squaws!” in a tone of disgust. ”That's as bad as the Mormons.”

The muse had possession of David and a regard for monogamy was not sufficient to stay his n.o.ble rage.

”And think how he felt! All this was his, the pale face hadn't come.

He'd fought his enemies for it and driven them back. In the cool of the evening when he was riding home he could look out for miles and miles, clear to the horizon, and know he was the King of it all. Just think what it was to feel like that! And far away he could see the smoke of his village and know that they were waiting for the return of the chief.”

”Chief!” with even greater emphasis, ”that poor dirty creature a _chief_!”

The muse relinquished her hold. The young man explained, not with impatience, but as one mortified by a betrayal into foolish enthusiasm:

”I didn't mean that _he_ was a chief. I was just imagining.”

”Oh,” with the falling inflexion of comprehension. ”You often imagine, don't you? Let's ride on to where the road goes down into that hollow.”

They rode on in silence, both slightly chagrined, for if David found it trying to have his fine flights checked, Susan was annoyed when she said things that made him wear a look of forbearing patience. She may not have had much imagination, but she had a very observing eye, and could have startled not only David, but her father by the shrewdness with which she read faces.

The road sloped to a hollow where the mottled trunks of cotton woods stood in a group round the dimpling face of a spring. With well-moistened roots the gra.s.s grew long and rich. Here was the place for the night's camp. They would wait till the train came up. And even as they rested on this comfortable thought they saw between the leaves the canvas top of a wagon.

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