hub, spread an engirdling encampment. It was
scattered over plain and bottom in dottings of white, here drawn close
in clustering agglomerations, there detached in separate spatterings.
Coming nearer the white spots grew to wagon hoods and tent roofs, and
among them, less easy to discern, were the pointed summits of the
lodges with the bunched poles bristling through the top. The air was
very still, and into it rose the straight threads of smoke from
countless fires, aspiring upwards in slender blue lines to the bluer
sky. They lifted and dispersed the smell of burning wood that comes to
the wanderer with a message of home, a message that has lain in his
blood since the first man struck fire and turned the dry heap of sticks
to an altar to be forever fixed as the soul of his habitation.

They camped in the bottom withdrawn from the closer herding of tents.
It was a slow settling, as noiseless as might be, for two at least of
their number knew that the doctor was dying. That afternoon Daddy John
and Courant had seen the shadow of the great change. Whether Susan saw
it they neither knew. She was full of a determined, cold energy,
urging them at once to go among the camps and search for a doctor.
They went in different directions, leaving her sitting by her father's
feet at the raised flap of the tent. Looking back through the
gathering dusk Courant could see her, a dark shape, her body drooping
in relaxed lines. He thought that she knew.

When they came back with the word that there was no doctor to be found,
darkness was closing in. Night came with noises of men and the
twinkling of innumerable lights. The sky, pricked with stars, looked
down on an earth alive with answering gleams, as though a segment of
its spark-set shield had fallen and lay beneath it, winking back
messages in an aerial telegraphy. The fires leaped high or glowed in
smoldering mounds, painting the sides of tents, the flanks of
ruminating animals, the wheels of wagons, the faces of men and women.
Coolness, rest, peace brooded over the great bivouac, with the guardian
shape of the Fort above it and the murmur of the river at its feet.

A lantern, standing on a box by the doctor's side, lit the tent.
Through the opening the light from the fire outside poured in, sending
shadows scurrying up the canvas walls. Close within call David sat by
it, his chin on his knees, his eyes staring at the tongues of flames as
they licked the fresh wood.