ing about it as we'll pass them
to-morrow. Wasn't it a darling with little golden rings of hair and
eyes like pieces of blue glass?"

She sighed, relinquishing the thought of the baby's morning bath with
pensive regret. David could not understand it, but decided as Susan
felt that way it must be the right way for a woman to feel. He was
falling in love, but he was certainly not falling in love--as students
of a later date have put it--with "a projection of his own personality."

CHAPTER VI

They had passed the Kaw River and were now bearing on toward the
Vermilion. Beyond that would be the Big and then the Little Blue and
soon after the Platte where "The Great Medicine way of the Pale Face"
bent straight to the westward. The country continued the same and over
its suave undulations the long trail wound, sinking to the hollows,
threading clumps of cotton-wood and alder, lying white along the spine
of bolder ridges.

Each day they grew more accustomed to their gypsy life. The prairie
had begun to absorb them, cut them off from the influences of the old
setting, break them to its will. They were going back over the
footsteps of the race, returning to aboriginal conditions, with their
backs to the social life of communities and their faces to the wild.
Independence seemed a long way behind, California so remote that it was
like thinking of Heaven when one was on earth, well fed and well
faring. Their immediate surroundings began to make their world, they
subsided into the encompassing immensity, unconsciously eliminating
thoughts, words, habits, that did not harmonize with its uncomplicated
design.

On Sundays they halted and "lay off" all day. This was Dr. Gillespie's
wish. He had told the young men at the start and they had agreed. It
would be a good thing to have a day off for washing and general
"redding up." But the doctor had other intentions. In his own words,
he "kept the Sabbath," and each Sunday morning read the service of the
Episcopal Church. Early in their acquaintance David had discovered
that his new friend was religious; "a God-fearing man" was the term the
doctor had used to describe himself. David, who had only seen the
hysterical, fanaticism of frontier revivals now for the first time
encountered the sincere, unquestioning piety of a spiritual nature.
The doctor's God was an all-pervading presence, who went before him as
pillar of fire or cloud. Once speaking to the young man o