ene to the
solacing quiet of Nature, he turned from the tumult of the little town
to the West, upon whose edge he stood.

It called him like a voice in the night. The spell of its borderless
solitudes, its vast horizons, its benign silences, grew stronger as he
felt himself powerless and baffled among the fighting energies of men.
He dreamed of a life there, moving in unobstructed harmony. A man
could begin in a fresh, clean world, and be what he wanted, be a young
apostle in his own way. His boy friend who had gone to Oregon fired
his imagination with stories of Marcus Whitman and his brother
missionaries. David did not want to be a missionary, but he wanted,
with a young man's solemn seriousness, to make his life of profit to
mankind, to do the great thing without self-interest. So he had
yearned and chafed while he read law and waited for clients and been as
a man should to his mother, until in the summer of 1847 both his mother
and his uncle had died, the latter leaving him a little fortune of four
thousand dollars. Then the Emigrant Trail lay straight before him,
stretching to California.

The reins lay loose on the backs of Bess and Ben and the driver's gaze
was fixed on the line of trees that marked the course of an unseen
river. The dream was realized, he was on the trail. He lifted his
eyes to the sky where massed clouds slowly sailed and birds flew,
shaking notes of song down upon him. Joe was dead, but the world was
still beautiful, with the sun on the leaves and the wind on the grass,
with the kindliness of honest men and the gracious presence of women.

Dr. Gillespie was the first dweller in that unknown world east of the
Alleghenies whom David had met. For this reason alone it would be a
privilege to travel with him. How great the privilege was, the young
man did not know till he rode by the doctor's side that afternoon and
they talked together on the burning questions of the day; or the doctor
talked and David hungrily listened to the voice of education and
experience.

The war with Mexico was one of the first subjects. The doctor regarded
it as a discreditable performance, unworthy a great and generous
nation. The Mormon question followed, and on this he had much curious
information. Living in the interior of New York State, he had heard
Joseph Smith's history from its beginning, when he posed as "a money
digger" and a seer who could read the future through "a peek stone."
The recent p