outskirts of the camp. Here she stood
watching, heard Daddy John lounge up behind her and, turning, caught
his hand.

"Is she there?" she said in an eager whisper.

"I can't see her."

They both scrutinized the figures, small as toy horsemen, loping over
the leathern distance.

"Ain't there only four?" he said. "You can see better'n I."

"Yes," she cried. "Four. I can count them. She isn't there. Oh, I'm
glad!"

The old man looked surprised:

"Glad! Why?"

"I don't know. Oh, don't tell, Daddy John, but I wanted her to get
away. I don't know why, I suppose it's very wicked. But--but--it
seemed so--so--as if she was a slave--so unfair to drag her away from
her own life and make her lead some one else's."

Lucy gone, lost as by shipwreck in the gulfs and windings of the
mountains, was a fact that had to be accepted. The train moved on, for
on the Emigrant Trail there was no leisure for fruitless repining.
Only immediate happenings could fill the minds of wanderers struggling
across the world, their energies matched against its primal forces.

The way was growing harder, the animals less vigorous, and the strain
of the journey beginning to tell. Tempers that had been easy in the
long, bright days on the Platte now were showing sharp edges. Leff had
become surly, Glen quarrelsome. One evening Susan saw him strike Bob a
blow so savage that the child fell screaming in pain and terror. Bella
rushed to her first born, gathered him in her arms and turned a
crimsoned face of battle on her spouse. For a moment the storm was
furious, and Susan was afraid that the blow would be repeated on the
mother. She tried to pacify the enraged woman, and David and the
doctor coaxed Glen away. The child had struck against an edge of stone
and was bleeding, and after supper the father rocked him to sleep
crooning over him in remorseful tenderness. But the incident left an
ugly impression.

They were passing up the Sweetwater, a mountain stream of busy
importance with a current that was snow-cold and snow-pure. It wound
its hurrying way between rock walls, and then relaxed in lazy coils
through meadows where the grass was thick and juicy and the air musical
with the cool sound of water. These were the pleasant places. Where
the rocks crowded close about the stream the road left it and sought
the plain again, splinding away into the arid desolation. The wheels
ground over myriads of crickets that caked in the