and his mother, one of the wives
of an elder, had forgotten her stern training, and fallen to a common
despair. Long-haired men lolled in tent doors cleaning their rifles,
and women moved between the wagons and the fires, or sat in rims of
shade sewing and talking low. Children were everywhere, their spirits
undimmed by disaster, their voices calling from the sage, little,
light, half-naked figures circling and bending in games that babies
played when men lived in cliffs and caves. At sight of the mounted
figures they fled, wild as rabbits, scurrying behind tent flaps and
women's skirts, to peep out in bright-eyed curiosity at the strangers.

The mother met them and almost dragged the doctor from his horse. She
was a toil-worn woman of middle age, a Mater Dolorosa now in her hour
of anguish. She led them to where the boy lay in a clearing in the
sage. The brush was so high that a blanket had been fastened to the
tops of the tallest blushes, and under its roof he was stretched,
gray-faced and with sharpened nose. The broken leg had been bound
between rough splints of board, and he had traveled a week in the
wagons in uncomplaining agony. Now, spent and silent, he awaited
death, looking at the newcomers with the slow, indifferent glance of
those whose ties with life are loosening. But the mother, in the
ruthless unbearableness of her pain, wanted something done, anything.
An Irishman in the company, who had served six months as a helper in a
New York hospital, had told her he could amputate the leg, as he had
seen the operation performed. Now she clamored for a doctor--a real
doctor--to do it.

He tried to persuade her of its uselessness, covering the leg in which
gangrene was far advanced, and telling her death was at hand. But her
despair insisted on action, her own suffering made her remorseless.
The clamor of their arguing voices surrounded the moribund figure lying
motionless with listless eyes as though already half initiated into new
and profound mysteries. Once, his mother's voice rising strident, he
asked her to let him rest in peace, he had suffered enough.

Unable to endure the scene Susan left them and joined a woman whom she
found sewing in the shade of a wagon. The woman seemed unmoved,
chatting as she stitched on the happenings of the journey and the
accident that had caused the delay. Here presently David joined them,
his face pallid, his lips loose and quivering. Nothing could be done
w