t
that I know who all is with her. One young man--two. Well"--with
maternal pride--"Molly ain't never lacked for beaus!

"But look at the wagons come!" she added. "All the country's going West
this spring, it certainly seems like."

It was the spring gathering of the west-bound wagon-trains, stretching
from old Independence to Westport Landing, the spot where that very year
the new name of Kansas City was heard among the emigrants as the place
of the jump-off. It was now an hour by sun, as these Western people
would have said, and the low-lying valley mists had not yet fully risen,
so that the atmosphere for a great picture did not lack.

It was a great picture, a stirring panorama of an earlier day, which now
unfolded. Slow, swaying, stately, the ox teams came on, as though
impelled by and not compelling the fleet of white canvas sails. The
teams did not hasten, did not abate their speed, but moved in an
unagitated advance that gave the massed column something irresistibly
epochal in look.

The train, foreshortened to the watchers at the rendezvous, had a
well-spaced formation--twenty wagons, thirty, forty, forty-seven--as
Jesse Wingate mentally counted them. There were outriders; there were
clumps of driven cattle. Along the flanks walked tall men, who flung
over the low-headed cattle an admonitory lash whose keen report
presently could be heard, still faint and far off. A dull dust cloud
arose, softening the outlines of the prairie ships. The broad gestures
of arm and trunk, the monotonous soothing of commands to the
sophisticated kine as yet remained vague, so that still it was properly
a picture done on a vast canvas--that of the frontier in '48; a picture
of might, of inevitableness. Even the sober souls of these waiters rose
to it, felt some thrill they themselves had never analyzed.

A boy of twenty, tall, blond, tousled, rode up from the grove back of
the encampment of the Wingate family.

"You, Jed?" said his father. "Ride on out and see if Molly's there."

"Sure she is!" commented the youth, finding a plug in the pocket of his
jeans. "That's her. Two fellers, like usual."

"Sam Woodhull, of course," said the mother, still hand over eye. "He
hung around all winter, telling how him and Colonel Doniphan whipped all
Mexico and won the war. If Molly ain't in a wagon of her own, it ain't
his fault, anyways! I'll rest assured it's account of Molly's going out
to Oregon that he's going too! Well!" And again,