was till
their lips met--and long then. But he heard her whisper "Good-by," saw
her frank tears, felt her slowly, a little by a little, draw away from
him.

"Good-by," she said. "Good-by. I would not dare, any more, ever again.
Oh, Will Banion, why did you take away my heart? I had but one!"

"It is mine!" he cried savagely. "No other man in all the world shall
ever have it! Molly!"

But she now was gone.

He did not know how long he stood alone, his head bowed on his saddle.
The raucous howl of a great gray wolf near by spelled out the lonesome
tragedy of his future life for him.

Quaint and sweet philosopher, and bold as she but now had been in one
great and final imparting of her real self, Molly Wingate was only a
wet, weary and bedraggled maid when at length she entered the desolate
encampment which stood for home. She found her mother sitting on a box
under a crude awning, and cast herself on her knees, her head on that
ample bosom that she had known as haven in her childhood. She wept now
like a little child.

"It's bad!" said stout Mrs. Wingate, not knowing. "But you're back and
alive. It looks like we're wrecked and everything lost, and we come nigh
about getting all burned up, but you're back alive to your ma! Now,
now!"

That night Molly turned on a sodden pallet which she had made down
beside her mother in the great wagon. But she slept ill. Over and over
to her lips rose the same question:

"Oh, Will Banion, Will Banion, why did you take away my heart?"

CHAPTER XV

THE DIVISION

The great wagon train of 1848 lay banked along the Vermilion in utter
and abject confusion. Organization there now was none. But for Banion's
work with the back fires the entire train would have been wiped out. The
effects of the storm were not so capable of evasion. Sodden, wretched,
miserable, chilled, their goods impaired, their cattle stampeded, all
sense of gregarious self-reliance gone, two hundred wagons were no more
than two hundred individual units of discontent and despair. So far as
could be prophesied on facts apparent, the journey out to Oregon had
ended in disaster almost before it was well begun.

Bearded men at smoking fires looked at one another in silence, or would
not look at all. Elan, morale, esprit de corps were gone utterly.

Stout Caleb Price walked down the wagon lines, passing fourscore men
shaking in their native agues, not yet conquered. Women, pale, gaunt,
grim, looked at him