too_ fat. No one
could say that now. She stole a look over her shoulder to make sure
she was not watched--it seemed an absurdly vain thing to do--and turned
back the neck of her blouse. The faintest rise of collar bone showed
under the satiny skin, fine as a magnolia petal, the color of faintly
tinted meerschaum. She ran her hand across it and it was smooth as
curds yielding with an elastic resistance over its bedding of firm
flesh. The young girl's pride in her beauty rose, bringing with it a
sense of surprise. She had thought it gone forever, and now it still
held, the one surviving sensation that connected her with that other
Susan Gillespie who had lived a half century ago in Rochester.

It was the day after this recrudescence of old coquetry that the first
tragedy of the trail, the tragedy that was hers alone, smote her.

The march that morning had been over a high level across which they
headed for a small river they would follow to the Fort. Early in the
afternoon they saw its course traced in intricate embroidery across the
earth's leathern carpet. The road dropped into it, the trail grooved
deep between ramparts of clay. On the lip of the descent the wayward
Julia, maddened with thirst, plunged forward, her obedient mates
followed, and the wagon went hurling down the slant, dust rising like
the smoke of an explosion. The men struggled for control and, seized
by the contagion of their excitement, the doctor laid hold of a wheel.
It jerked him from his feet and flung him sprawling, stunned by the
impact, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his lips. The others saw
nothing, in the tumult did not hear Susan's cry. When they came back
the doctor was lying where he had fallen, and she was sitting beside
him wiping his lips with the kerchief she had torn from her neck. She
looked up at them and said:

"It's a hemorrhage."

Her face shocked them into an understanding of the gravity of the
accident. It was swept clean of its dauntless, rosy youth, had
stiffened into an unelastic skin surface, taut over rigid muscles. But
her eyes were loopholes through which anguish escaped. Bending them on
her father a hungry solicitude suffused them, too all-pervading to be
denied exit. Turned to the men an agonized questioning took its place.
It spoke to them like a cry, a cry of weakness, a cry for succor. It
was the first admission of their strength she had ever made, the first
look upon them which had said,