im, her head thrown
back, her lips parted.

He looked down, ashamed of his emotion, murmuring:

"You don't understand. It's so sacred. Some day you will."

She did not speak to him again, but she let him hold her hand because
she thought she ought to and because she was sorry.

CHAPTER VI

The next morning the rain was pouring. The train rolled out without
picturesque circumstance, the men cursing, the oxen, with great heads
swinging under the yokes, plodding doggedly through lakes fretted with
the downpour. Breakfast was a farce; nobody's fire would burn and the
women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two
provident parties had stoves fitted up in their wagons with a joint of
pipe coming out through holes in the canvas. From these, wafts of
smoke issued with jaunty assurance, to be beaten down by the rain,
which swept them fiercely out of the landscape.

There was no perspective, the distance invisible, nearer outlines
blurred. The world was a uniform tint, walls of gray marching in a
slant across a foreground embroidered with pools. Water ran, or
dripped, or stood everywhere. The river, its surface roughened by the
spit of angry drops, ran swollen among its islands, plumed shapes seen
mistily through the veil. The road emerged in oases of mud from long,
inundated spaces. Down the gullies in the hills, following the beaten
buffalo tracks, streams percolated through the grass of the bottom,
feeling their way to the river.

Notwithstanding the weather a goodly company of mounted men rode at the
head of the train. They were wet to the skin and quite indifferent to
it. They had already come to regard the vagaries of the weather as
matters of no import. Mosquitoes and Indians were all they feared. On
such nights many of them slept in the open under a tarpaulin, and when
the water grew deep about them scooped out a drainage canal with a hand
that sleep made heavy.

When the disorder of the camping ground was still in sight, Susan, with
the desire of social intercourse strong upon her, climbed into the
wagon of her new friends. They were practical, thrifty people, and
were as comfortable as they could be under a roof of soaked canvas in a
heavily weighted prairie schooner that every now and then bumped to the
bottom of a chuck hole. The married sister sat on a pile of sacks
disposed in a form that made a comfortable seat. A blanket was spread
behind her, and thus ent