e must wait till to-morrow, then."

"Yes--mebbe there'll be one to-morrow."

"I hope so."

Then silence fell and the shadow flickered again on the canvas.

She made a struggle against Courant's hold, which for a moment he tried
to resist, but her fingers plucked against his hand, and she tore
herself free and ran to the tent opening. She entered without
speaking, threw herself at the foot of the couch, and laid her head
against her father's knees.

"Is that you, Missy?" he said, feeling for her with a groping hand.
"Daddy John couldn't find a clergyman."

"I know," she answered, and lay without moving, her face buried in the
folds of the blanket.

They said no more, and Daddy John stole out of the tent.

The next day the doctor was too ill to ask for a clergyman, to know or
to care. At nightfall he died. The Emigrant Trail had levied its
first tribute on them, taken its toll.

END OF PART III

PART IV

The Desert

CHAPTER I

They were camped on the edges of that harsh land which lay between the
Great Salt Lake and the Sierra. Behind them the still, heavy reach of
water stretched, reflecting in mirrored clearness the mountains
crowding on its southern rim. Before them the sage reached out to dim
infinities of distance. The Humboldt ran nearby, sunk in a stony bed,
its banks matted with growths of alder and willow. The afternoon was
drawing to the magical sunset hour. Susan, lying by the door of her
tent, could see below the growing western blaze the bowl of the earth
filling with the first, liquid oozings of twilight.

A week ago they had left the Fort. To her it had been a blank space of
time, upon which no outer interest had intruded. She had presented an
invulnerable surface to all that went on about her, the men's care, the
day's incidents, the setting of the way. Cold-eyed and dumb she had
moved with them, an inanimate idol, unresponsive to the observances of
their worship, aloof from them in somber uncommunicated musings.

The men respected her sorrow, did her work for her, and let her alone.
To them she was set apart in the sanctuary of her mourning, and that
her grief should express itself by hours of drooping silence was a
thing they accepted without striving to understand. Once or twice
David tried to speak to her of her father, but it seemed to rouse in
her an irritated and despairing pain. She begged him to desist and got
away from him as quickly as she could, clim