ose to the camp. Through the branches he saw the filmy,
diffused blueness of smoke and smelled the sharp odor of burning wood.
He quickened his pace and was about to give forth a cheerful hail when
he heard a sound that made him stop, listen with fixed eye, and then
advance cautiously, sending a questing glance through the screen of
leaves. The sound was a woman's voice detached in clear sweetness from
the deeper tones of men.

There was no especial novelty in this. Their camp was just off the
road and the emigrant women were wont to pause there and pass the time
of day. Most of them were the lean and leathern-skinned mates of the
frontiersmen, shapeless and haggard as if toil had drawn from their
bodies all the softness of feminine beauty, as malaria had sucked from
their skins freshness and color. But there were young, pretty ones,
too, who often strolled by, looking sideways from the shelter of
jealous sunbonnets.

This voice was not like theirs. It had a quality David had only heard
a few times in his life--cultivation. Experience would have
characterized it as "a lady voice." David, with none, thought it an
angel's. Very shy, very curious, he came out from the trees ready at
once and forever to worship anyone who could set their words to such
dulcet cadences.

The clearing, green as an emerald and shining with rain, showed the
hood of the wagon and the new, clean tent, white as sails on a summer
sea, against the trees' young bloom. In the middle the fire burned and
beside it stood Leff, a skillet in his hand. He was a curly-headed,
powerful country lad, twenty-four years old, who, two months before,
had come from an Illinois farm to join the expedition. The frontier
was to him a place of varied diversion, Independence a stimulating
center. So diffident that the bashful David seemed by contrast a man
of cultured ease, he was now blushing till the back of his neck was red.

On the other side of the fire a lady and gentleman stood arm in arm
under an umbrella. The two faces, bent upon Leff with grave attention,
were alike, not in feature, but in the subtly similar play of
expression that speaks the blood tie. A father and daughter, David
thought. Against the rough background of the camp, with its litter at
their feet, they had an air of being applied upon an alien surface, of
not belonging to the picture, but standing out from it in sharp and
incongruous contrast.

The gentleman was thin and tall