Part 42 (1/2)

”You were asleep,” she said, ”and I came down and took it twice.”

He did not look at her for he could not bear to see her humiliation.

It was his affair to lighten her self-reproach.

”Well, that was all right. You're the only woman among us, and you've got to be kept up.”

”I--I--couldn't stand it any longer,” she faltered now, wanting to justify herself. ”It was too much to bear.”

”Don't say no more,” he said tenderly. ”Ain't you only a little girl put up against things that 'ud break the spirit of a strong man?”

The pathos of his efforts to excuse her shook her guarded self-control.

She suddenly put her face against his shoulder in a lonely dreariness.

He made a backward gesture with his head that he might toss off his hat and lay his cheek on her hair.

”There, there,” he muttered comfortingly. ”Don't go worrying about that. You ain't done no harm. It's just as natural for you to have taken it as for you to go to sleep when you're tired. And there's not a soul but you and me'll ever know it, and we'll forget by to-night.”

His simple words, reminiscent of gentler days, when tragic problems lay beyond the confines of imagination, loosed the tension of her mood, and she clasped her arms about him, trembling and shaken. He patted her with his free hand, the coffee-pot in the other, thinking her agitation merely an expression of fatigue, with no more knowledge of its complex provocation than he had of the mighty throes that had once shaken the blighted land on which they stood.

David was better, much better, he declared, and proved it by helping clear the camp and pack the wagon for the night march. He was kneeling by Daddy John, who was folding the blankets, when he said suddenly:

”If I hadn't got water I think I'd have died last night.”

The old man, stopped in his folding to turn a hardening face on him.

”Water?” he said. ”How'd you get it?”

”Susan did. I told her I couldn't stand it, and she went down twice to the wagon and brought it to me. I was at the end of my rope.”

Daddy John said nothing. His ideas were readjusting themselves to a new point of view. When they were established his Missy was back upon her pedestal, a taller one than ever before, and David was once and for all in the dust at its feet.

”There's no one like Susan,” the lover went on, now with returning forces, anxious to give the mead of praise where it was due. ”She tried to talk me out of it, and then when she saw I couldn't stand it she just went quietly off and got it.”

”I guess you could have held out till the morning if you'd put your mind to it,” said the old man dryly, rising with the blankets.

For the moment he despised David almost as bitterly as Courant did. It was not alone the weakness so frankly admitted; it was that his action had made Daddy John harbor secret censure of the being dearest to him.

The old man could have spat upon him. He moved away for fear of the words that trembled on his tongue. And another and deeper pain tormented him--that his darling should so love this feeble creature that she could steal for him and take the blame of his misdeeds. This was the man to whom she had given her heart! He found himself wis.h.i.+ng that David had never come back from his search for the lost horses.

Then the other man, the real man that was her fitting mate, could have won her.

At sunset the train was ready. Every article that could be dispensed with was left, a rich find for the Indians whose watch fires winked from the hills. To the cry of ”Roll out,” and the snap of the long whip, the wagon lurched into motion, the thirst-racked animals straining doggedly as it crunched over sage stalks and dragged through powdery hummocks. The old man walked by the wheel, the long lash of his whip thrown afar, flas.h.i.+ng in the upper light and descending in a lick of flame on the mules' gray flanks. With each blow fell a phrase of encouragement, the words of a friend who wounds and wounding himself suffers. David rode at the rear with Susan. The two men had told him he must ride if he died for it, and met his offended answer that he intended to do so with sullen silence. In advance, Courant's figure brushed between the bushes, his hair a moving patch of copper color in the last light.

Darkness quickly gathered round them. The bowl of sky became an intense Prussian blue that the earth reflected. In this clear, deep color the wagon hood showed a pallid arch, and the shapes of man and beast were defined in shadowless black. In the west a band of lemon-color lingered, and above the stars began to p.r.i.c.k through, great scintillant sparks, that looked, for all their size, much farther away than the stars of the peopled places. Their light seemed caught and held in aerial gulfs above the earth, making the heavens clear, while the night clung close and undisturbed to the plain's face. Once from afar the cry of an animal arose, a long, swelling howl, but around the train all was still save for the crackling of the crushed sage stalks, and the pad of hoofs.

It was near midnight when Susan's voice summoned Daddy John. The wagon halted, and she beckoned him with a summoning arm. He ran to her, circling the bushes with a youth's alertness, and stretched up to hear her as she bent from the saddle. David must go in the wagon, he was unable to ride longer. The old man swept him with a look of inspection. The starlight showed a drooping figure, the face hidden by the shadow of his hat brim. The mules were at the limit of their strength, and the old man demurred, swearing under his breath and biting his nails.

”You've got to take him,” she said, ”if it kills them. He would have fallen off a minute ago if I hadn't put my arm around him.”

”Come on, then,” he answered with a surly look at David. ”Come on and ride, while the rest of us get along the best way we can.”

”He can't help it,” she urged in an angry whisper. ”You talk as if he was doing it on purpose.”