,
and she said, peering through the steam of the bubbling water:

"Who's that?"

"A strange man."

"From where?"

"Taos, and after that Bent's Fort," Susan repeated, and Lucy forgot him
and ran back to the tent.

There was a gray line in the east when she returned to say the child
was born dying as it entered the world, and Bella was in desperate
case. She fell beside her friend, quivering and sobbing, burying her
face in Susan's bosom. Shaken and sickened by the dreadful night they
clung together holding to each other, as if in a world where love
claimed such a heavy due, where joy realized itself at such exceeding
cost, nothing was left but the bond of a common martyrdom. Yet each of
them, knowing the measure of her pain, would move to the head of her
destiny and take up her heavy engagement without fear, obeying the
universal law.

But now, caught in the terror of the moment, they bowed their heads and
wept together while the strange man slept by the fire.

END OF PART II

PART III

The Mountains

CHAPTER I

Fort Laramie stood where the eastern roots of the mountains start in
toothed reef and low, premonitory sweep from the level of the plains.
Broken chains and spurs edged up toward 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 point, gold in the morning, purple at twilight. And the
Black Hills, rock-ribbed and somber, dwarf pines clutching their
lodges, rose in frowning ramparts to the North and West.

It was a naked country, bleak and bitter. In winter it slept under a
snow blanket, the lights of the fort encircled by the binding,
breathless cold. Then the wandering men that trapped and traded with
the Indians came seeking shelter behind the white walls, where the furs
were stacked in 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, when the spring was in waking bloom, and each
evening the light stayed longer on Laramie Peak, the Indians came in
migrating villages moving to the summer hunting grounds, and in painted
war parties, for there was a season when the red man, like the Hebrew
kings, went forth to battle.