Part 20 (1/2)

”And look,” came the voice again, ”there are the emigrants.”

A long column of wagons had crested the summit and was rolling down the slope. They were in single file, hood behind hood, the drivers, bearded as cave men, walking by the oxen. The line moved steadily, without sound or hurry, as if directed by a single intelligence possessed of a single idea. It was not a congeries of separated particles, but a connected whole. As it wound down the face of the hill, it suggested a vast Silurian monster, each wagon top a vertebra, crawling forward with definite purpose.

”That's the way they're coming,” said the voice of the strange man.

”Slow but steady, an endless line of them.”

”Who?” said Susan, answering him for the first time.

”The white men. They're creeping along out of their country into this, pus.h.i.+ng the frontier forward every year, and going on ahead of it with their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scattered and broken, going every way like a lot of gla.s.s beads rolling down the hill. This comes slow, but it's steady and sure as fate.”

She thought for a moment, watching the emigrants, and then said:

”It moves like soldiers.”

”Conquerors. That's what they are. They're going to roll over everything--crush them out.”

”Over the Indians?”

”That's it. Drive 'em away into the cracks of the mountains, wipe them out the way the trappers are wiping out the beaver.”

”Cruel!” she said hotly. ”I don't believe it.”

”Cruel?” he gave her a look of half-contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt. ”Maybe so, but why should you blame them for that? Aren't you cruel when you kill an antelope or a deer for supper? They're not doing you any harm, but you just happen to be hungry. Well, those fellers are hungry--land hungry--and they've come for the Indian's land. The whole world's cruel. You know it, but you don't like to think so, so you say it isn't. You're just lying because you're afraid of the truth.”

She looked angrily at him and met the gray eyes. In the center of each iris was a dot of pupil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to Susan like the heads of black pins. ”That's exactly what he'd say,”

she thought; ”he's no better than a savage.” What she said was:

”I don't agree with you at all.”

”I don't expect you to,” he answered, and making an ironical bow turned on his heel and swung off.

The next morning, in the pallor of the dawn, they started, rolling out into a gray country with the keen-edged cold of early day in the air, and Laramie Peak, gold tipped, before them. As the sky brightened and the prospect began to take on warmer hues, they looked ahead toward the profiles of the mountains and thought of the journey to come. At this hour of low vitality it seemed enormous, and they paced forward a silent, lifeless caravan, the hoof beats sounding hollow on the beaten track.

Then from behind them came a sound of singing, a man's voice caroling in the dawn. Both girls wheeled and saw Zavier Leroux ambling after them on his rough-haired pony, the pack horse behind. He waved his hand and shouted across the silence:

”I come to go with you as far as South Pa.s.s,” and then he broke out again into his singing. It was the song Courant had sung, and as he heard it he lifted up his voice at the head of the train, and the two strains blending, the old French chanson swept out over the barren land:

”A la claire fontaine!

M'en allant promener J'ai trouve l'eau si belle Que je me suis baigne!”

Susan waved a beckoning hand to the voyageur, then turned to Lucy and said joyously:

”What fun to have Zavier! He'll keep us laughing all the time. Aren't you glad he's coming?”

Lucy gave an unenthusiastic ”Yes.” After the first glance backward she had bent over her horse smoothing its mane her face suddenly dyed with a flood of red.

CHAPTER II