d it. Far beyond, in a faint aerial distance, the soaring solidity of vast ranges hung on the horizon, cloudy crests painted on the sky. Laramie Peak loomed closer, a bold, bare

n storerooms, and the bourgeois' table was hospitable with jerked meat and meal cakes. When the streams began to stir under the ice, and a thin green showed along the bottoms, it opened its gates and the men of the mountains went forth with their traps rattling at the saddle horn. Later

Indians carried off the maize and corn as it ripened. So the short-haired grass grew to the stockade. At this season the surrounding plain was thick with grazing animals, the fort's own supply, the ponies of the Indians, and the cattle of the emigrants. Encampments were on every side, clustering close under the walls, whence a cannon poked its nose p

supplies. Trappers in fringed and beaded leather played cards with the plainsmen in shady corners or lounged in the cool arch of the gateway looking aslant at the emigrant girls. Their squaws, patches of color against the walls, sat docile, with the swarthy, half-breed children playing about their feet. There we

the many lovely flower forms, the first glimpses of parched areas dotted with sage. From the top of Scotts Bluffs they saw the mountains, and stood, a way-worn company, looking at those faint and formidable shapes that blocked their path to the Promised Land. It was a sight to daunt the most high-hearted, and they stared, dropping ejacula

conversant with an environment of which they were ignorant. The train had not passed Ash Hollow when he fell into command, chose the camping grounds, went ahead in search of springs, and hunted with Daddy Joh

a low-toned singing. His voice was a mellow baritone, and the wor

e je t'ai aimé jamai

his wife sing the same words

you learn

r," nodding toward the mountai

ent accent, better

addressed his companion i

chman?" said the el

ent up the river and settled in St. Louis. My grandfather co

man, Susan quite sure that he was not. Dr. Gillespie used the word in its old-fashioned sense, as a term having reference as much to birth and breeding as to manners and certain, ineradicable instincts. The

r. "Many of those people who came up from New Orleans a

and strays? I believe he's just the same kind of person as old Joe, only younger. Or, if he does c

, but he's not crooked. Those steady, straight-looking eyes never belonged to any but an

ishly. "You'll be saying

ther a prosperous fur trader there. But why he had cut loose from them he did not vouchsafe to explain. Though he was still young-thirty perhaps-it was evident that he had wandered far and for many years. He knew the Indian trails of the distant Northwest, and spoke

r. "If I don't wake up some morning

tings and much questioning, a rumor having filtered to his old stamping ground that he had been killed in the siege of the Alamo. The do

guide. Even Kit Carson, who conduct

ces aside in the wider view that each day's experience was teaching her. The presence of such a man would lighten the burden of work and responsibility that lay on her father, and whatever was beneficial to the doctor was accepted by his daughter. But she did not lik

of rest these were the subjects he talked of, and she noticed that Daddy John was the person to whom he talked most. With averted eyes, her head bent to David's murmurings, she was really listening to the older men. He

something of disparagement, of the slightest gleam of mockery, in that short look, which touched both faces and then turned from them as from the faces of children playing at a game. Yes, she disliked him, disliked his manner to Lucy and herself, which set them aside as beings of a lower order, that had to go with them

d, the mules and horses shod, and Bella was mending, though still unable to walk. The doctor h

k shadow of walls. In the cooling shade the motley company lay sprawling on the ground or propped against the doors of the store rooms. The open space was brilliant with the blankets of Indians, the bare limbs of brown childre

the mountains and the plain watched her with immovable looks. She was laughing, her head drooped sideways. Above the collar of her blouse a strip of neck, untouched by tan, showed in a milk-white band. Conscious of the admiring observation, she instinctively relaxed her muscles into lines of fl

ek bones showing the blood of his mother, a Crow squaw. His father, long forgotten in the obscurity of mountain history, had evidently bequeathed him the French Canadian's good-humored gayety. Zavier was a light-he

eeping the distance with a field glass, sudden

lage is coming and

xcitement. It eddied there for a moment, then poured through the gateway i

ot together. On the river bank it paused, the web of color thickening, then rolled over the edge and plunged in. The current, beaten into sudden whiteness, eddied round the legs of horses, the throats of swimming dogs, and pressed up to the edges of the travaux where frightened children sat among litters of puppies. Ponies bestrode by naked boys struck up showers of spray, squaws with lifted blankets waded stolidly in, mounted warri

. Her mien was sedate, and she swayed to her horse lightly and flexibly as a boy, holding aloft a lance edged with a flutter of feathers, and bearing a round

avorite squaw," said the voic

the Indian girl, who was handso

voice again, "there

he 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 particl

the voice of the strange man. "Slow

, answering him f

it with their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scatt

ent, watching the emi

s like s

are. They're going to roll o

the In

s of the mountains, wipe them out the way

id hotly. "I do

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 In

pil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to Susan like the heads of black pins. "Th

gree with

ered, and making an ironical bow

ipped, 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 jo

n. Both girls wheeled and saw Zavier Leroux ambling after them on his rough-hair

It was the song Courant had sung, and as he heard it he lifted up his voice at the head of t

laire f

llant

uvé l'ea

me suis

to the voyageur, then turne

l keep us laughing all the tim

lance backward she had bent over her horse smoothing