"No, never!"

"But where--where to?"

"I don't know. In the mountains somewhere. There's a trail here he knows. It branches off to the north and goes up to the places where they get the skins."

"I don't believe you."

"It's true. The horses are waiting outside."

"Lucy, you've gone crazy. Don't--don't"-- She clung to the hand she held, grasped upward at the arm. Both were cold and resistant. Her pleading struck back from the hardness of the mind made up, the irrevocable resolution.

"But he's not your husband."

Even at this moment, keyed to an act of lawlessness that in the sheltered past would have been as impossible as murder, the great tradition held fast. Lucy's answer came with a sudden flare of shocked repudiation:

"He will be. There are priests and missionaries up there among the Indians. The first one we meet will marry us. It's all right. He loves me and he's promised."

Nothing of her wild courage came to the other girl, no echo of the call of life and pa.s.sion. It was a dark and dreadful fate, and Susan strained her closer as if to hold her back from it.

"It's been fixed for two days. We had to wait till we got here and crossed the trail. We're going right into the mountains and it's summer, and there's plenty of game."

"The Indians?"

"We'll be in the Crow's country, and Zavier's mother was a Crow."

The words proved the completeness of her estrangement--the acceptance of the alien race as no longer alien.

"Oh, Lucy, don't, don't. Wait till we get to Fort Bridger and marry him there. Make him come to California with us. Don't do such an awful thing--run away into the mountains with a half-breed."

"I don't care what he is. There's no one else for me but him. He's my man and I'll go with him wherever he wants to take me."

"Wait and tell Bella."

"She wouldn't let me go. There'd be nothing but fighting and misery.

When you've made up your mind to do a thing you've got to do it yourself, not go by what other people think."

There was a silence and they hung upon each other. Then Lucy put her face against her friend's and kissed her.

"Good-by," she whispered, loosening her arms.

"I can't let you go. I won't. It'll kill you."

"I must. He's waiting."

She struggled from the embrace, pulling away the clasping hands noiselessly, but with purpose. There was something of coldness, of the semblance but not the soul of affection, in the determined softness with which she sought release. She stole to the tent flap and peered out. Her thoughts were already outside, flown to the shape hiding in the shadow like birds darting from a cage. She did not turn at Susan's strangled whisper.

"We'll never see you again, Bella, nor I, nor the children."

"Perhaps, some day, in California. He's there. I must go."

"Lucy!" She leaped after her. In the tent opening they once more clasped each other.

"I can't let you go," Susan moaned.

But Lucy's kiss had not the fervor of hers. The strength of her being had gone to her lover. Friendship, home, family, all other claims hung loose about her, the broken trappings of her maidenhood. The great primal tie had claimed her.

A black figure against the pallor of the night, she turned for a last word.

"If you tell them and they come after us, Zavier'll fight them. He'll fight if he kills them. They'll know to-morrow. Good-by," and she was gone, a noiseless shadow, flitting toward the denser group of shadow where her heart was.

Susan, crouched at the tent flap, saw her melt into the waiting blackness, and then heard the m.u.f.fled hoof beats growing thinner and fainter as the silence absorbed them.

She sat thus till the dawn came. Once or twice she started up to give the alarm, but fell back. Under the tumult of her thoughts a conviction lay that Lucy must follow her own wild way. In the welter of confused emotion it was all that was clear. It may have come from that sense of Lucy's detachment, that consciousness of cords and feelers stretching out to a new life which commanded and held closer than the old had ever done. All she knew was that Lucy was obeying some instinct that was law to her, that was true for her to obey. If they caught her and brought her back it would twist her life into a broken form. Was it love? Was that what had drawn her over all obstacles, away from the established joys and comforts, drawn her like a magnet to such a desperate course? With wide eyes the girl saw the whiteness of the dawn, and sat gripped in her resolution of silence, fearful at the thought of what that mighty force must be.

CHAPTER V

The cross, drowsy bustle of the camp's uprising was suddenly broken by a piercing cry. It came from Bella, who, standing by the mess chest, was revealed to her astonished companions with a buffalo skull in her hands, uttering as dolorous sounds as ever were emitted by that animal in the agony of its death throes. Her words were unintelligible, but on taking the skull from her the cause of her disturbance was made known. Upon the frontal bone were a few words scrawled in pencil--Lucy's farewell.

It came upon them like a thunderbolt, and they took it in different ways--amazed silence, curses, angry questionings. The skull pa.s.sed from hand to hand till Courant dropped it and kicked it to one side where Leff went after it, lifted it by the horns and stood spelling out the words with a grin. The children, at first rejoicing in the new excitement, soon recognized the note of dole, lifted up their voices and filled the air with cries for Lucy upon whom, in times at tribulation, they had come to look. Glen broke into savage anger, called down curses on his sister-in-law, applying to her certain terms of a scriptural simplicity till the doctor asked him to go afield and vent his pa.s.sion in the seclusion of the sage. Bella, sunk in heavy, uncorseted despair upon the mess chest, gripped her children to her knees as though an army of ravishers menaced the house of McMurdo. Her words flowed with her tears, both together in a choked and bitter flood of wrath, sorrow, and self-pity. She bewailed Lucy, not only as a vanished relative but as a necessary member of the McMurdo escort. And doubts of Zavier's lawful intentions shook her from the abandon of her grief, to furious invective against the red man of all places and tribes whereso'er he be.

"The dirty French-Indian," she wailed, "to take her off where he knows fast enough there's no way of marrying her."

Courant tried to console her by telling her there was a good chance of the fugitives meeting a Catholic missionary, but that, instead of a.s.suaging, intensified her woe.

"A Catholic!" she cried, raising a drenched face from her ap.r.o.n. "And ain't that just as bad? My parents and hers were decent Presbyterians.

Does their daughter have to stand up before a priest? Why don't you say a Mormon elder at once?"

The McMurdos' condition of grief and rage was so violent, that the doctor suggested following the runaways. Bella rose in glad a.s.sent to this. Catch Lucy and bring her back! She was cheered at the thought and shouted it to Glen, who had gone off in a sulky pa.s.sion and stood by his oxen swearing to himself and kicking their hoofs. The men talked it over. They could lay off for a day and Courant, who knew the trails, could lead the search party. He was much against it, and Daddy John was with him. Too much time had been lost. Zavier was an experienced mountain man and his horses were good. Besides, what was the use of bringing them back? They'd chosen each other, they'd taken their own course. It wasn't such a bad lookout for Lucy. Zavier was a first-rate fellow and he'd treat her well. What was the sense of interfering? Bella was furious, and shouted,

"The sense is to get her back here and keep her where it's civilized, since she don't seem to know enough to keep there herself."

Daddy John, who had been listening, flashed out:

"It don't seem to me so d--d civilized to half kill her with work."

Then Bella wept and Glen swore, and the men had pulled up the picket stakes, cinched their girths tight and started off in Indian file toward the distant spurs of the hills.

Susan had said little. If it did not violate her conscience to keep silent, it did to pretend a surprise that was not hers. She sat at her tent door most of the day watching for the return of the search party.

She was getting supper when she looked up and saw them, gave a low exclamation, and ran to the outskirts of the camp. Here she stood watching, heard Daddy John lounge up behind her and, turning, caught his hand.

"Is she there?" she said in an eager whisper.

"I can't see her."

They both scrutinized the figures, small as toy hors.e.m.e.n, loping over the leathern distance.