n who lay beneath.

Four days before his friend, Joe Linley, had died of cholera. Three of
them--Joe, himself, and George Leffingwell, Joe's cousin--had been in
camp less than a week when it had happened. Until then their life had
been like a picnic there in the clearing by the roadside, with the
thrill of the great journey stirring in their blood. And then Joe had
been smitten with such suddenness, such awful suddenness! He had been
talking to them when David had seen a suspension of something, a
stoppage of a vital inner spring, and with it a whiteness had passed
across his face like a running tide. The awe of that moment, the hush
when it seemed to David the liberated spirit had paused beside him in
its outward flight, was with him now as he walked through the rustling
freshness of the wood.

The rain had begun to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter
among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air
play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already
longer than city fashions dictated, and a first stubble of black beard
was hiding the lines of a chin perhaps a trifle too sensitive and
pointed. Romantic good looks and an almost poetic refinement were the
characteristics of the face, an unusual type for the frontier. With
thoughtful gray eyes set deep under a jut of brows and a nose as finely
cut as a woman's, it was of a type that, in more sophisticated
localities, men would have said had risen to meet the Byronic ideal of
which the world was just then enamored. But there was nothing Byronic
or self-conscious about David Crystal. He had been born and bred in
what was then the Far West, and that he should read poetry and regard
life as an undertaking that a man must face with all honor and
resoluteness was not so surprising for the time and place. The West,
with its loneliness, its questioning silences, its solemn sweep of
prairie and roll of slow, majestic rivers, held spiritual communion
with those of its young men who had eyes to see and ears to hear.

The trees grew thinner and he saw the sky pure as amber beneath the
storm pall. The light from it twinkled over wet twigs and glazed the
water in the crumplings of new leaves. Across the glow the last
raindrops fell in slanting dashes. David's spirits rose. The weather
was clearing and they could start--start on the trail, the long trail,
the Emigrant Trail, two thousand miles to California!

He was cl