"You feel as if you could stay here and not want to move on," Bella opined.

Glen thought perhaps you felt that way because you knew you'd come to the end and couldn't move much farther.

But the others argued him down. They all agreed there was something in the sun maybe, or the mellow warmth of the air, or the richness of wooded slope and plain, that made them feel they had found a place where they could stay, not for a few days' rest, but forever. Susan had hit upon the word "homelike," the spot on earth that seemed to you the one best fitted for a home.

The talk swung back to days on the trail and finally brought up on David. They rehea.r.s.ed the tragic story, conned over the details that had begun to form into narrative sequence as in the time-worn lay of a minstrel. Bella and Glen asked all the old questions that had once been asked by Susan and Daddy John, and heard the same answers, leaning to catch them while the firelight played on the strained attention of their faces. With the night pressing close around them, and the melancholy, sea-like song sweeping low from the forest, a chill crept upon them, and their lost comrade became invested with the unreality of a spirit. Dead in that bleak and G.o.d-forgotten land, or captive in some Indian stronghold, he loomed a tragic phantom remote from them and their homely interests like a historical figure round which legend has begun to acc.u.mulate.

The awed silence that had fallen was broken by Courant rising and walking away toward the diggings. This brought their somber pondering to an end. Bella and Glen picked up the sleeping children and went to their tent, and Susan, peering beyond the light, saw her man sitting on a stone, dark against the broken silver of the stream. She stole down to him and laid her hand on his shoulder. He started as if her touch scared him, then saw who it was and turned away with a gruff murmur.

The sound was not encouraging, but the wife, already so completely part of him that his moods were communicated to her through the hidden subways of instinct, understood that he was in some unconfessed trouble.

"What's the matter, Low?" she asked, bending to see his face.

He turned it toward her, met the penetrating inquiry of her look, and realized his dependence on her, feeling his weakness but not caring just then that he should be weak.

"Nothing," he answered. "Why do they harp so on David?"

"Don't you like them to?" she asked in some surprise.

He took a splinter from the stone and threw it into the water, a small silvery disturbance marking its fall.

"There's nothing more to be said. It's all useless talk. We can do no more than we've done."

"Shall I tell them you don't like the subject, not to speak of it again?"

He glanced at her with sudden suspicion:

"No, no, of course not. They've a right to say anything they please.

But it's a waste of time, there's nothing but guessing now. What's the use of guessing and wondering all through the winter. Are they going to keep on that way till the spring?"

"I'll tell them not to," she said as a simple solution of the difficulty. "I'll tell them it worries you."

"Don't," he said sharply. "Do you hear? Don't. Do you want to act like a fool and make me angry with you?"

He got up and moved away, leaving her staring blankly at his back. He had been rough to her often, but never before spoken with this note of peremptory, peevish displeasure. She felt an obscure sense of trouble, a premonition of disaster. She went to him and, standing close, put her hand inside his arm.

"Low," she pleaded, "what's wrong with you? You were angry that they came. Now you're angry at what they say. I don't understand. Tell me the reason of it. If there's something that I don't know let me hear it, and I'll try and straighten things out."

For a tempted moment he longed to tell her, to gain ease by letting her share his burden. The hand upon his arm was a symbol of her hold upon him that no action of his could ever loose. If he could admit her within the circle of his isolation he would have enough. He would lose the baleful consciousness of forever walking apart, separated from his kind, a spiritual Ishmaelite. She had strength enough. For the moment he felt that she was the stronger of the two, able to bear more than he, able to fortify him and give him courage for the future. He had a right to claim such a dole of her love, and once the knowledge hers, they two would stand, banished from the rest of the world, knit together by the bond of their mutual knowledge.

The temptation clutched him and his breast contracted in the rising struggle. His pain clamored for relief, his weakness for support. The lion man, broken and tamed by the first pure pa.s.sion of his life, would have cast the weight of his sin upon the girl he had thought to bear through life like a pampered mistress.

With the words on his lips he looked at her. She met the look with a smile that she tried to make brave, but that was only a surface grimace, her spirit's disturbance plain beneath it. There was pathos in its courage and its failure. He averted his eyes, shook his arm free of her hand, and, moving toward the water, said:

"Go back to the tent and go to bed."

"What are you going to do?" she called after him, her voice sounding plaintive. Its wistful note gave him strength:

"Walk for a while. I'm not tired. I'll be back in an hour," and he walked away, down the edge of the current, past the pits and into the darkness.

She watched him, not understanding, vaguely alarmed, then turned and went back to the tent.

CHAPTER III

The stretch of the river where the McMurdos had settled was richer than Courant's location. Had Glen been as mighty a man with the pick, even in the short season left to him, he might have acc.u.mulated a goodly store. But he was a slack worker. His training as a carpenter made him useful, finding expression in an improvement on Daddy John's rocker, so they overlooked his inclination to lie off in the sun with his ragged hat pulled over his eyes. In Courant's camp Bella was regarded as the best man of the two. To her multiform duties she added that of a.s.sistant in the diggings, squatting beside her husband in the mud, keeping the rocker going, and when Glen was worked out, not above taking a hand at the shovel. Her camp showed a comfortable neatness, and the children's nakedness was covered with garments fashioned by the firelight from old flour sacks.

There was no crisp coming of autumn. A yellowing of the leaf.a.ge along the river's edge was all that denoted the season's change. Nature seemed loth to lay a desecrating hand on the region's tranquil beauty.

They had been told at the Fort that they might look for the first rains in November. When October was upon them they left the pits and set to work felling trees for two log huts.

Susan saw her home rising on the knoll, a square of logs, log roofed, with a door of woven saplings over which canvas was nailed. They built a chimney of stones rounded by the water's action, and for a hearth found a slab of granite which they sunk in the earth before the fireplace. The bunk was a frame of young pines with canvas stretched across, and cushioned with spruce boughs and buffalo robes. She watched as they nailed up shelves of small, split trunks and sawed the larger ones into sections for seats. The bottom of the wagon came out and, poised on four log supports, made the table.

Her housewife's instincts rose jubilant as the sh.e.l.l took form, and she sang to herself as she st.i.tched her flour sacks together for towels.

No princess decked her palace with a blither spirit. All the little treasures that had not been jettisoned in the last stern march across the desert came from their hiding places for the adornment of the first home of her married life. The square of mirror stood on the shelf near the door where the light could fall on it, and the French gilt clock that had been her mother's ticked beside it. The men laughed as she set out on the table the silver mug of her baby days and a two-handled tankard bearing on its side a worn coat of arms, a heritage from the adventurous Poutrincourt, a drop of whose blood had given boldness and courage to hers.

It was her home--very different from the home she had dreamed of--but so was her life different from the life she and her father had planned together in the dead days of the trail. She delighted in it, gloated over it. Long before the day of installation she moved in her primitive furnishings, disposed the few pans with an eye to their effect as other brides arrange their silver and crystal, hung her flour-sack towels on the pegs with as careful a hand as though they had been tapestries, and folded her clothes neat and seemly in her father's chest. Then came a night when the air was sharp, and they kindled the first fire in the wide chimney mouth. It leaped exultant, revealing the mud-filled cracks, playing on the pans, and licking the bosses of the old tankard. The hearthstone shone red with its light, and they sat drawn back on the seats of pine looking into its roaring depths--housed, sheltered, cozily content. When Glen and Bella retired to their tent a new romance seemed to have budded in the girl's heart.

It was her bridal night--beneath a roof, beside a hearth, with a door to close against the world, and shut her away with her lover.

In these days she had many secret conferrings with Bella. They kept their heads together and whispered, and Bella crooned and fussed over her and pushed the men into the background in a masterful, aggressive manner. Susan knew now what had waked the nest-building instinct. The knowledge came with a thrilling, frightened joy. She sat apart adjusting herself to the new outlook, sometimes fearful, then uplifted in a rapt, still elation. All the charm she had once held over the hearts of men was gone. Glen told Bella she was getting stupid, even Daddy John wondered at her dull, self-centered air. She would not have cared what they had said or thought of her. Her interest in men as creatures to snare and beguile was gone with her lost maidenhood. All that she had of charm and beauty she h.o.a.rded, stored up and jealously guarded, for her husband and her child.

"It'll be best for you to go down to the town," Bella had said to her, reveling discreetly in her position as high priestess of these mysteries, "there'll be doctors in Sacramento, some kind of doctors."

"I'll stay here," Susan answered. "You're here and my husband and Daddy John. I'd die if I was sent off among strangers. I can't live except with the people I'm fond of. I'm not afraid."

And the older woman decided that maybe she was right. She could see enough to know that this girl of a higher stock and culture, plucked from a home of sheltered ease to be cast down in the rude life of the pioneer, was only a woman like all the rest, having no existence outside her own small world.

So the bright, monotonous days filed by, always sunny, always warm, till it seemed as if they were to go on thus forever, glide into a winter which was still spring. An excursion to Sacramento, a big day's clean up, were their excitements. They taught little Bob to help at the rocker, and the women sat by the cabin door sewing, long periods of silence broken by moments of desultory talk. Susan had grown much quieter. She would sit with idle hands watching the shifting lights and the remoter hills turning from the afternoon's blue to the rich purple of twilight. Bella said she was lazy, and urged industry and the need of speed in the preparation of the new wardrobe. She laughed indolently and said, time enough later on. She had grown indifferent about her looks--her hair hanging elfish round her ears, her blouse unfastened at the throat, the new boots Low had brought her from Sacramento unworn in the cabin corner, her feet clothed in the ragged moccasins he had taught her to make.

In the evening she sat on a blanket on the cabin floor, blinking sleepily at the flames. Internally she brimmed with a level content.

Life was coming to the flood with her, her being gathering itself for its ultimate expression. All the curiosity and interest she had once turned out to the multiple forms and claims of the world were now concentrated on the two lives between which hers stood. She was the primitive woman, a mechanism of elemental instincts, moving up an incline of progressive pa.s.sions. The love of her father had filled her youth, and that had given way to the love of her mate, which in time would dim before the love of her child. Outside these phases of a governing prepossession--filial, conjugal, maternal--she knew nothing, felt nothing, and could see nothing.

Low, at first, had brooded over her with an almost ferocious tenderness. Had she demanded a removal to the town he would have given way. He would have acceded to anything she asked, but she asked nothing. As the time pa.s.sed her demands of him, even to his help in small matters of the household, grew less. A slight, inscrutable change had come over her: she was less responsive, often held him with an eye whose blankness told of inner imaginings, when he spoke made no answer, concentrated in her reverie. When he watched her withdrawn in these dreams, or in a sudden attack of industry, fashioning small garments from her h.o.a.rded store of best clothes, he felt an alienation in her, and he realized with a start of alarmed divination that the child would take a part of what had been his, steal from him something of that blind devotion in the eternal possession of which he had thought to find solace.

It was a shock that roused him to a scared scrutiny of the future. He put questions to her for the purpose of drawing out her ideas, and her answers showed that all her thoughts and plans were gathering round the welfare of her baby. Her desire for its good was to end her unresisting subservience to him. She was thinking already of better things. Ambitions were awakened that would carry her out of the solitudes, where he felt himself at rest, back to the world where she would struggle to make a place for the child she had never wanted for herself.

"We'll take him to San Francisco soon"--it was always "him" in her speculations--"We can't keep him here."

"Why not?" he asked. "Look at Bella's children. Could anything be healthier and happier?"

"Bella's children are different. Bella's different. She doesn't know anything better, she doesn't care. To have them well fed and healthy is enough for her. _We're_ not like that. _Our_ child's going to have everything."

"You're content enough here by yourself and you're a different sort to Bella."

"For myself!" she gave a shrug. "I don't care any more than Bella does. But for my child--my son--I want everything. Want him a gentleman like his ancestors, French and American"--she gave his arm a propitiating squeeze for she knew he disliked this kind of talk--"want him to be educated like my father, and know everything, and have a profession."

"You're looking far ahead."