From the West to the West

CONTENTS

FROM THE WEST TO THE WEST

I A REMOVAL IS PLANNED

On the front veranda of a rectangular farmhouse, somewhat pretentious for its time and place, stood a woman in expectant attitude. The bleak wind of a spent March day played rudely with the straying ends of her bright, abundant red-brown hair, which she brushed frequently from her careworn face as she peered through the thickening shadows of approaching night. The ice-laden branches of a leafless locust swept the latticed corner behind which she had retreated for protection from the wind. A great white-and-yellow watch-dog crouched expectantly at her feet, whining and wagging his tail.

Indoors, the big living-room echoed with the laughter and prattle of many voices. At one end of a long table, littered with books and slates and dimly lighted by flickering tallow dips, sat the older children of the household, busy with their lessons for the morrow’s recitations. A big fire of maple logs roared on the hearth in harmony with the roaring of the wind outside.

“Yes, Rover, he’s coming,” exclaimed the watcher on the veranda, as the dog sprang to his feet with a noisy proclamation of welcome.

A shaggy-bearded horseman, muffled to the ears in a tawny fur coat, tossed his bridle to a stable-boy and, rushing up the icy steps, caught the gentle woman in his arms. “It’s all settled, mother. I’ve made terms with Lije. He’s to take my farm and pay me as he can. I’ve made a liberal discount for the keep of the old folks; and we’ll sell off the stock, the farming implements, the household stuff, and the sawmill, and be off in less than a month for the Territory of Oregon.”

Mrs. Ranger shrank and shivered. “Oregon is a long way off, John,” she said, nestling closer to his side and half suppressing a sob. “There’s the danger and the hardships of the journey to be considered, you know.”

“I will always protect you and the children under all circumstances, Annie. Can’t you trust me?”

“Haven’t I always trusted you, John? But—”

“What is it, Annie? Don’t be afraid to speak your mind.”

“I was thinking, dear,—you know we’ve always lived on the frontier, and civilization is just now beginning to catch up with us,—mightn’t it be better for us to stay here and enjoy it? Illinois is still a new country, you know. We’ve never had any advantages to speak of, and none of the children, nor I, have ever seen a railroad.”

“Don’t be foolish, Annie! We’ll take civilization with us wherever we go, railroads or no railroads.”

“But we’ll be compelled to leave our parents behind, John. They’re old and infirm now, and we’ll be going so far away that we’ll never see them again. At least, I sha’n’t.”

The husband cleared his throat, but did not reply. The wife continued her protest.

“Just think of the sorrow we’ll bring upon ’em in their closing days, dear! Then there’s that awful journey for us and the children through more than two thousand miles of unsettled country, among wild beasts and wilder Indians. Hadn’t we better let well-enough alone, and remain where we are comfortable?”

“A six months’ journey across the untracked continent, with ox teams and dead-ax wagons, won’t be a summer picnic; I’ll admit that. But the experience will come only one day at a time, and we can stand it. It will be like a whipping,—it will feel good when it is over and quits hurting.”

“You are well and strong, John, but you know I have never been like myself since that awful time when your brother Joe got into that trouble. It was at the time of Harry’s birth, you know. You didn’t mean to neglect me, dear, but you had to do it.”

“There, there, little wife!” placing his hand over her mouth. “Let the dead past bury its dead. Never mention Joe to me again. And never fear for a minute that you and the children won’t be taken care of.”

“I beg your pardon, John!” and the wife shrank back against the lattice and shivered. The protruding thorn of a naked locust bough scratched her cheek, and the red blood trickled down.

“I need your encouragement, in this time of all times, Annie. You mustn’t fail me now,” he said, speaking in an injured tone.

“Have I ever failed you yet, my husband?”

“I can’t say that you have, Annie. But you worry too much; you bore a fellow so. Just brace up; don’t anticipate trouble. It’ll come soon enough without your meeting it halfway. You ought to consider the welfare of the children.”

“Have I ever lived for myself, John?”

“No, no; but you fret too much. I suppose it’s a woman’s way, though, and I must stand it. There’s the chance of a lifetime before us, Annie.” He added after a pause, “The Oregon Donation Land Law that was passed by Congress nearly two years ago won’t be a law always. United States Senators in the farthest East are already urging its repeal. We’ve barely time, even by going now, to get in on the ground-floor. Then we’ll get, in our own right, to have and to hold, in fee simple, as the lawyers say, a big square mile of the finest land that ever rolled out o’ doors.”

“Will there be no mortgage to eat us up with interest, and no malaria to shake us to pieces, John? And will you keep the woodpile away from the front gate, and make an out-of-the-way lane for the cows, so they won’t come home at night through the front avenue?”

“There’ll be no mortgage and no malaria. One-half of the claim will belong to you absolutely; and you can order the improvements to suit yourself. Only think of it! A square mile o’ land is six hundred and forty acres, and six hundred and forty acres is a whole square mile! We wouldn’t be dealing justly by our children if we let the opportunity slip. We’ll get plenty o’ land to make a good-sized farm for every child on the plantation, and it won’t cost us a red cent to have and to hold it!”

“That was the plan our parents had in view when they came here from Kentucky, John. They wanted land for their children, you know. They wanted us all to settle close around ’em, and be the stay and comfort of their old age.” And Mrs. Ranger laughed hysterically.

“You shiver, Annie. You oughtn’t to be out in this bleak March wind. Let’s go inside.”

“I’m not minding the wind, dear. I was thinking of the way people’s plans so often miscarry. Children do their own thinking and planning nowadays, as they always did, regardless of what their parents wish. Look at us! We’re planning to leave your parents and mine, for good and all, after they’ve worn themselves out in our service; and we needn’t expect different treatment from our children when we get old and decrepit.”

“But I’ve already arranged for our parents’ keep with Lije and Mary,” said the husband, petulantly. “Didn’t I tell you so?”

“But suppose Lije fails in business; or suppose he gets the far Western fever too; or suppose he tires of his bargain and quits?”

A black cloud scudded away before the wind, uncovering the face of the moon. The silver light burst suddenly upon the pair.

“What’s the matter, Annie?” cried the husband, in alarm. “Are you sick?” Her upturned face was like ashes.

“No; it’s nothing. I was only thinking.”

They entered the house together, their brains busy with unuttered thoughts. The baby of less than a year extended her chubby hands to her father, and the older babies clamored for recognition in roistering glee.

“Take my coat and hat, Hal; and get my slippers, somebody. Don’t all jump at once! Gals, put down your books, and go to the kitchen and help your mother. Don’t sit around like so many cash boarders! You oughtn’t to let your mother do a stroke of work at anything.”

“You couldn’t help it unless you caged her, or bound her hand and foot,” answered Jean, who strongly resembled her father in disposition, voice, and speech. But the command was obeyed; and the pale-faced mother, escorted from the kitchen amid much laughter by Mary, Marjorie, and Jean, was soon seated before the roaring fire beside her husband, enjoying with him the frolics of the babies, and banishing for the nonce the subject which had so engrossed their thoughts outside. The delayed meal was soon steaming on the long table in the low, lean-to kitchen, and was despatched with avidity by the healthy and ravenous brood which constituted the good old-fashioned household of John Ranger and Annie Robinson, his wife.

“Children,” said Mrs. Ranger, as an interval of silence gave her a chance to be heard, “did you know your father had sold the farm?”

A thunderbolt from a clear sky would hardly have created greater astonishment. True, John Ranger had been talking “new country” ever since the older children could remember anything; the theme was an old story, invoking no comment. But now there was an ominous pause, followed with exclamations of mingled dissent and approval, to which the parents gave unrestricted liberty.

“I’m not going a single step; so there!” exclaimed Mary, a gentle girl of seventeen, who did not look her years, but who had a reason of her own for this unexpected avowal.

“My decision will depend on where we’re going,” cried Jean.

“Maybe your mother and I can be consulted,—just a little bit,” said the father, laughing.

“We’re going to Oregon; that’s what,” exclaimed Harry, who was as impulsive as he was noisy.

“How did you come to know so much?” asked Marjorie, the youngest of John Ranger’s “Three Graces,” as he was wont to style his trio of eldest daughters, who had persisted in coming into his household—much to his discomfort—before the advent of Harry, the fourth in his catalogue of seven, of whom only two were boys.

“I get my learning by studying o’ nights!” answered Hal, in playful allusion to his success as a sound sleeper, especially during study hours.

“Of course you don’t want to emigrate, Miss Mame,” cried Jean, “but you can’t help yourself, unless you run away and get married; and then you’ll have to help everybody else through the rest of your life and take what’s left for yourself,-if there’s anything left to take! At least, that is mother’s and Aunt Mary’s lot.”

“Jean speaks from the depths of long experience,” laughed Mary, blushing to the roots of her hair.

“I’m sick to death of this cold kitchen,” cried Jean, snapping her tea-towel in the frosty air of the unplastered lean-to. “Hurrah for Oregon! Hurrah for a warmer climate, and a snug cabin home among the evergreen trees!”

“Good for Jean!” exclaimed her father. “The weather’ll be so mild in Oregon we shall not need a tight kitchen.”

“Is Oregon a tight house?” asked three-year-old Bobbie, whose brief life had many a time been clouded by the complaints of his mother and sisters,—complaints such as are often heard to this day from women in the country homes of the frontier and middle West, where more than one-half of their waking hours are spent in the unfinished and uncomfortable kitchens peculiar to the slave era, in which—as almost any makeshift was considered “good enough for niggers”—the unfinished kitchen came to stay.

The vigorous barking of Rover announced the approach of visitors; and the circle around the fireside was enlarged, amid the clatter of moving chairs and tables, to make room for Elijah Robinson and his wife,—the former a brother of Annie Ranger, and the latter a sister of John. The meeting between the sisters-in-law was expectant, anxious, and embarrassing.

“How did you like the news?” asked Mrs. Robinson, after an awkward silence.

“How did you like it?” was the evasive reply, as the twain withdrew to a distant corner, where they could exchange confidences undisturbed.

“I haven’t had time to think it over yet,” said Mrs. Ranger. “My greatest trouble is about leaving our parents. It seems as if I could not bear to break the news to them.”

“Don’t worry, Annie; they know already. When Lije told his mother that John was going to Oregon, she fainted dead away. When she revived and sat up, she wanted to come right over to see you, in spite of the storm.”

“Just listen! How the wind does roar!”

“I don’t see how your mother can live without you, Annie. I tried very hard to persuade Lije to refuse to buy John’s farm; but he would have his way, as he always does. Of course, we’ll do all we can for the old folks, but Lije is heavily in debt again, with the ever-recurring interest staring us all in the face. John will want his money, with interest,—they all do,—and we know how rapidly it accumulates, from our own dearly bought experience, the result of poor Joe’s troubles!”

“I hope my dear father and mother won’t live very long,” sighed Mrs. Ranger. “If John would only let me make them a deed to my little ten-acre farm! But I can’t get him to talk about it.”

II EARLY LIFE IN THE MIDDLE WEST

III MARRYING AND GIVING IN MARRIAGE

The destinies of the Ranger and Robinson families had been linked together by the double ties of affinity and consanguinity in the first third of the nineteenth century. Their broad and fertile lands, to which they held the original title-deeds direct from the government, bore the signature and seal of Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States; and their children and children’s children, though scattered now in the farthest West, from Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands to the Philippine Archipelago, treasure to this day among their most valued heirlooms the historic parchments. For these were signed by Old Hickory when the original West was bounded on its outermost verge by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and when the new West, though discovered in the infancy of the century by Lewis and Clark (aided by Sacajawea, their one woman ally and pathfinder), was to the average American citizen an unknown country, quite as obscure to his understanding as was the Dark Continent of Africa in the days antedating Sir Samuel Baker, Oom Paul, and Cecil Rhodes.

The elder Rangers, who claimed Knickerbocker blood, and the Robinsons, who boasted of Scotch ancestry, though living in adjoining counties in Kentucky in their earlier years, had never met until, as if by accident,—if accident it might be called through which there seems to have been an original, interwoven design,—the fates of the two families became interlinked through their settlement upon adjoining lands, situated some fifty miles south of old Fort Dearborn, in the days when Chicago was a mosquito-beleaguered swamp, and Portland, Oregon, an unbroken forest of pointed firs.

There was a double wedding on the memorable day when John Ranger, Junior, and pretty Annie Robinson, the belle of Pleasant Prairie, linked their destinies together in marriage; and when, without previous notice to the assembled multitude or any other parties but their parents, the preacher, and the necessary legal authorities, Elijah Robinson and Mary Ranger took their allotted places beside their brother and sister, as candidates for matrimony, the festivities were doubled in interest and rejoicing.

“It seems but yesterday since our bonnie bairns were babes in arms,” said the elder Mrs. Robinson, as she advanced with Mrs. Ranger mère to give a tearful greeting to each newly wedded pair. And there was scarcely a dry eye in the assembled multitude when the mother’s voice arose in a shrill treble as she sang, in the ears of the startled listeners, from an old Scottish ballad the words,—

Her voice, which at first was as clear as the tones of a silver bell, quavered at the close of the first stanza and then ceased altogether. But by this time old Mrs. Ranger had caught the spirit of the ballad, and though her voice was husky, she cleared her throat and added, in a low contralto, the impressive lines, paraphrased somewhat to suit the occasion,—

At the close of this stanza, Mrs. Ranger’s voice broke also; and the good circuit rider, parson of many a scattered flock, who had pronounced the double ceremony, caught the tune and, in a mellow barytone that rose upon the air like an inspired benediction, added most impressively another stanza:

“It’s high time there was a little change o’ sentiment in all this!” cried a bachelor uncle, whose eyes were suspiciously red notwithstanding his affected gayety. “I move that we march in a solid phalanx on the victuals!”

The primitive cabin homes of the borderers of no Western settlement were large enough to hold the crowds that were invariably bidden to a neighborhood merrymaking. The ceremonies of this occasion, including a most sumptuous feast, were held on the sloping green beneath an overtopping elm, which, rising high above its fellows, made a noted landmark for a circumference of many miles.

People who live apart from markets, in fertile regions where the very forests drop richness, subsist literally on the fat of the land. Having no sale for their surplus products, they feast upon them in the most prodigal way. Although through gormandizing they beget malaria, not to say dyspepsia and rheumatic ails, they boast of “living well”; and the sympathy they bestow upon the city denizen who in his wanderings sometimes feasts at their hospitable boards, and praises without stint their prodigal display of viands, is often more sincere than wise.

The lands of the early settlers, with whom these chronicles have to deal, had been surrounded, as soon as possible after occupancy, with substantial rail fences, laid in zigzag fashion along dividing lines, marking the boundaries between neighbors who lived at peace with each other and with all the world. These fences, built to a sufficient height to discourage all attempts at trespass by man or beast, were securely staked at the corners, and weighted with heavy top rails, or “riders,” so stanchly placed that many miles of such enclosures remain to this day, long surviving the brawny hands that felled the trees and split the rails. In their mute eloquence they reveal the lasting qualities of the hardwood timber that abounded in the many and beautiful groves which flourished in the prairie States in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri comprised all that was generally known as the West.

Much of the primitive glory of these diversified landscapes departed long ago with the trees. The “Hook-and-Eye Dutch,” as the thrifty followers of ancient Ohm are called by their American neighbors (with whom they do not assimilate), are rapidly replacing the old-time maple and black walnut fences with the modern barbed-wire horror; they are selling off the historical rails, stakes and riders and all, to the equally thrifty and not a whit more sentimental timber-dealers of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, to be manufactured into high-grade lumber, which is destined to find lodgment as costly furniture in the palatial homes, gilded churches, great club-houses, and mammoth modern hostelries that abound on the shores of Lake Michigan, Massachusetts Bay, Manhattan Island, and Long Island Sound. But no vandalism yet invented by man can wholly despoil the rolling lands of the middle West of their beauty, nor rob Mother Nature of her power to rehabilitate them with the living green of cultivated loveliness.

Original settlers of the border-lands had little time and less opportunity for the observation of the beautiful in art or nature. Their lives were spent in toil, which blunted many of the finer sensibilities of a more leisurely existence. The hardy huntsman who spent his only hours of relaxation in chasing the wild game, and the weary mother who scarcely ever left her wheel or loom and shuttle by the light of day, except to bake her brain before a great open fire while preparing food, or to nurse to sleep the future lawmakers of a coming world-round republic, were alike too busy to ponder deeply the far-reaching possibilities of the lives they led.

Such men of renown as Lincoln, Douglas, Baker, Grant, Logan, and Oglesby were evolved from environments similar to these, as were also the numerous adventurous borderers not known to fame (many of whom are yet living) who crossed the continent with ox teams, and whose patient and enduring wives nursed the future statesmen of a coming West in fear and trembling, as they protected their camps from the depredations of the wily Indian or the frenzy of the desert’s storms.

Rail-making in the middle West was long a diversion and an art. The destruction of the hardwood timber, which if spared till to-day would be almost priceless, could not have been prevented, even if this commercial fact had been foreseen. The urgent need of fuel, shelter, bridges, public buildings, and fences allowed no consideration for future values to intervene and save the trees.

In times of a temporary lull in a season’s activities, when, for a wonder, there were days together that the stroke of the woodman’s ax was not heard and the music of the cross-cut saw had ceased, the settler would take advantage of the interim to draw a bead with unerring aim upon the eye of a squirrel in a treetop, or bring down a wild turkey from its covert in the lower branches; or, if favored by a fall of virgin snow, it would be his delight to track the wild deer, and drag it home as a trophy of his marksmanship,—an earnest of the feast in which all his neighbors were invited to partake.

Then, too, there were the merrymakings of the border. What modern banquet can equal the festive board at which a genial hostess, in a homespun cotton or linsey-woolsey gown, presided over her own stuffed turkey, huge corn-pone, and wild paw-paw preserves? What array of glittering china, gleaming cut-glass, or burnished silver, can give the jaded appetite of the blasé reveller of to-day the enjoyment of a home-set table, laden with the best and sweetest “salt-rising” bread spread thick with golden butter, fresh from the old-fashioned churn? The freshest of meats and fish regularly graced the well-laden board, in localities where the modern chef was unknown, where ice-cream was unheard of, and terrapin sauce and lobster salad found no place. House-raisings, log-rollings, barn-raisings, quilting bees, weddings, christenings, and even funerals, were times of feasting, though these last were divested of the gayety, but not of the gossip, that at other times abounded; and the sympathetic aid of an entire neighborhood was always voluntarily extended to any house of mourning. There were few if any wage-earners, the accommodating method of exchanging work among neighbors being generally in vogue.

Such, in brief, were the daily customs of the early settlers of the middle West, whose children wandered still farther westward in the forties and fifties, carrying with them the habits in which they had been reared to the distant Territory afterwards known as the “Whole of Oregon,” which originally comprised the great Northwest Territory, where now flourish massive blocks of mighty States.

Prior to the time of the departure of the subjects of these chronicles for the goal of John Ranger’s ambition, but one unusual occurrence had marred the lives and prosperity of the rising generation of Rangers and Robinsons. To the progenitors of the two families the mutations of time had brought problems serious and difficult, not the least of which was the infirmity of advancing years. This they had made doubly annoying through having assigned to their children, when they themselves needed it most, everything of value which they had struggled to accumulate during their years of vigorous effort to raise and educate their families.

In the two households under review, all dependent upon the energies and bounty of the second generation of Rangers and Robinsons, there were besides the great-grandmother (a universal favorite) two sexagenarian bachelor uncles and two elderly spinsters, the latter remote cousins of uncertain age, uncertain health, and still more uncertain temper, who had long outlived their usefulness, after having missed, in their young and vigorous years, the duties and responsibilities that accompany the founding of families and homes of their own. It was little wonder that drones like these were out of place in the overcrowded households of their more provident kinspeople, to whom the modern “Home of the Friendless” was unknown. What plan to pursue in making necessary provision for these outside incumbents, even John Ranger, the optimistic leader of the related hosts, could not conjecture.

“We’ve fixed it,—Mame and I,” said Jean, one evening, after an anxious discussion of the question had been carried on with some warmth between the two family heads, in which no conclusion had been reached except a flat refusal on the part of Elijah Robinson to quadruple the quota of dependants in his own household.

“And how have you fixed it?” asked her father, who often called Jean his “Heart’s Delight.”

“Our bachelor uncles and cousins are just rusting out with irresponsibility!” she cried with characteristic Ranger vehemence. “They ought to have a home of their own and be compelled to take care of it. There’s that house and garden where you board and lodge the mill-hands. Why not give ’em that and let ’em keep boarders? The boarders, the four acres of ground, and the cow and garden ought to keep them in modest comfort. This would make them free and independent, as everybody ought to be.”

“But the boarding-house belongs with the farm. I’ve sold it to your uncle.”

“Then let Uncle Lije lease or sell it to them, share and share alike.”

“What is it worth?” asked Mary.

“Only about three hundred dollars, the way property sells now,” said her uncle.

“Then let ’em pay you rent. The place ought to support them and pay interest and taxes.”

“Yes,” cried Mary; “the old bachelor contingent, that worry you all so much because you keep ’em dependent on your bounty, can take care of themselves for twenty years to come, if you’ll only let ’em.”

“The proposition is worth considering, certainly,” said their father, smiling admiringly upon his daughters.

“And we’ll consider it, too,” said the uncle. “That much is settled.”

IV OLD BLOOD AND NEW

V SALLY O’DOWD

VI THE BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY

The sale of Squire Ranger’s effects proceeded without unnecessary delay. The sawmill, the first portable structure of its kind ever seen west of the Wabash River, was eagerly purchased on credit by a waiting customer, and work at the mill went on without interruption. What a primitive affair it was! And how like a pygmy it seems as the resident on the North Pacific’s border recalls its littleness, and contrasts it with the mammoth mills of Oregon, the lower Columbia, and Puget Sound, which grasp in their giant arms the dead leviathans of the primeval forest, and set their teeth to work tearing to pieces the patient upbuilding of the ages gone!

The motive power of John Ranger’s sawmill consisted of about a dozen superannuated horses, some spavined, some ringboned, some wind-broken, all more or less disabled in some way; these were regularly harnessed, each in his turn, to a set of horizontal radiating shafts attached to a rotating centre, above which, on a little platform, stood the driver, with a whip.

“I know it’s wicked to kill the trees and cut them up into boards; it’s just as wicked as it is to kill pigs and cattle,” was Mary Ranger’s comment when she first beheld the frantic work of the raging saw, which, screaming like a demon, ate its way through hearts of oak and hickory, or tore the slabs from the sides of the black-walnut and sugar-maple patriarchs with ever unsated ferocity.

But this sawmill had long been a boon to the entire country, as was evidenced by the multiplication, since its advent, of framed houses, barns, bridges, schoolhouses, and churches, which suddenly sprang into vogue, not to mention the many miles of planked highways that rushed into fashion before the railroad era in the days when “good roads conventions” were unheard of.

Children born and reared in cities—subject, if of the tenant class, to frequent changes of habitation, or, if their homes are permanent, to frequent intervals of travel—can have little idea of the love which children of the country cherish for the farms and homes to which they are born, and in which their brief lives are spent. The very soil on which they have trodden is dear to them, and seems instinct with sentience. They make a boon companion of everything with which they come in contact, whether pertaining to the earth, the water, or the air. Their little gardens are familiar friends; the flowers of the wildwood are loving entities; the brook that sings in summer through the tangled grass and sleeps in winter under a bed of ice is always a communing spirit. The sighing winds chant rhythmic lullabies in the treetops, and the language of every insect, bird, and beast has, to them, a distinctive meaning. The blue heavens are their delight, and the passing clouds their friends. The sun, the moon, and the stars hold converse with them, and the changing seasons bring to them, each in its turn, peculiar joy.

But, dearly as they loved the old home and its surroundings, the Ranger children, who had never crossed the boundary of township number twelve, range three west, in which they were born, looked forward eagerly to the forthcoming journey. Once only had Mrs. Ranger ventured beyond the township limits since leaving the Kentucky home of her childhood; and that was many years before, when she went with her husband to the county seat to attach her mark to the fateful mortgage, upon which the accruing interest seemed always to be maturing at the time when she or the children were the most in need of books or shoes or clothing.

“I wasn’t allowed to learn to write in my childhood,” she falteringly explained to the notary, when, after affixing her mark, she watched him as he attached his seal to the document which was to be as a millstone about her neck forever after. “My father always thought that education was bad for girls,” she added. “He said if they knew how to write they’d be forging their husbands’ names and getting their money out of the bank. And he said, too, that if girls learned to write, they’d be sending love letters to the boys.”

“It’s never too late to learn,” was the notary’s reply. “If I were you, I would learn to write when the children learn. You can do it if you try.”

“I’d be glad to, if I could find the time; but it’s hard to learn anything for one’s own especial benefit with a baby always in one’s arms. When the children get big enough to learn to write, I’ll try, though.”

And she did; with such success that she never after signed her name with a cross.

“I’m glad we’ve got that mortgage off our hands at last, Annie,” said her husband as they counted up the somewhat disappointing returns after the sale of their personal effects was over.

“But you’re not morally free from it, John, or even legally so. If the purchaser should fail, the load would then revert to Lije, you know. Say, John, can’t I deed my little ten-acre farm to my father and mother? It never cost you anything. I took care of old man Eustis for six long years; and you know he gave the little farm to me as pay for my services, absolutely.”

“Haven’t I paid its taxes all along, Annie?”

“And have I earned nothing all this time, my husband?”

“Oh, yes, you’ve earned a living; and you’ve got it as you went along, haven’t you?”

Mrs. Ranger made no reply, but being silenced was not being convinced.

“Be patient,” said Jean, aside. “I’ll manage it.”

Several pairs of great brown-eyed oxen, with which the children had become familiar in their days of logging about the sawmill, were easily trained for the long journey; but others, untamed and terrified, as if pre-sensing the trials awaiting them through untracked deserts, submitted to the yoke only under the cruelest compulsion. New wagons, stanchly built and covered with white canvas hoods, stretched tightly over hickory bows, were ranged on the lawn, under the naked, creaking branches of the big elm-tree. Provisions, resembling in quantity the supplies for a small army, were carted to the front veranda, awaiting shipment down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to St. Louis, to be reshipped up the Missouri to the final point of loading into wagons for crossing the Great American Desert, as the Great Plains were then known.

Visitors, including friends and relatives from far and near, came to the dismantled house in great relays, and the business of Squire Ranger’s office as justice of the peace increased a dozen fold. All this commotion involved increasing labor for Mrs. Ranger, who faded visibly as she silently counted the intervening days before the hour of final separation from her sorrowing parents. If the Squire suffered at the thought of parting with anybody, he made no sign except to complain of a “pesky cold” that made his eyes water, which he attributed to the “beastly climate.”

“The spirit of adventure that inspires my husband to emigrate does not permit him to foresee danger,” was Mrs. Ranger’s ever-ready reply to the numerous prophets of evil who came to condole, but got only their labor for their pains. “I will not try to interfere with his plans. I started out as a bride to walk the road of life beside him, and I mean to do as I agreed.”

But the good wife grew thinner and whiter as the days sped on; and when at last the wagons were all ranged in line, with every yoke of oxen in place; when the last farewell had been spoken; when the last audible prayer had ascended heavenward, and the command to move on had been given,—she sank on her feather bed in the great family wagon and closed her eyes with a feeling of thankfulness akin to that of the sufferer from a fatal malady who realizes that his last hour has come.

“‘He giveth His beloved sleep,’” said Mary, softly, as she covered her mother with a heavy shawl.

It was now the first of April, a fitful, gray, and misty day. A soft breeze was stirring from the south, and straggling rays of sunlight struggled through occasional rifts in the straying clouds. The spring thaw had at last set in. The sticky soil adhered to the feet of man and beast, and clung in heavy masses to the wheels of wagons.

The dog, Rover, who had always willingly remained at home on watch during the family’s absence at church or elsewhere, had hidden himself at starting-time; but he was found waiting in the road when the party was several miles out on the way, and, when discovered, approached his master with drooping tail and piteous whine.

There were tears in the eyes of the strong man, of which he was not ashamed, as he dismounted from the back of Sukie, his favorite mare, and, stooping, patted the dog affectionately on the head.

“They didn’t fool ’oo, did ’ey, Rovie?” said Bobbie, as he hugged the dog, unmindful of his muddy coat.

“Come to me, Rover,” exclaimed Mrs. Ranger, who had been refreshed by her nap. The dog obeyed, and, wet and dirty as he was, attempted to hide himself among the baggage. But his hopes were blasted by a peremptory command from his master: “Go back home and stay with grandfather!” The poor brute jumped, whining, to the ground and affected to obey; but he reappeared a dozen miles farther on, at the Illinois River’s edge; and when the ferry-boat, which he was forbidden to enter, was out of reach of either command or missile, he sat on his haunches on the river-bank and howled dismally.

“Don’t you think a dog has a soul, daddie?” asked Jean, through her tears.

“How should I know, daughter?” was the husky response. “I’m not yet certain that a man has a soul.”

VII SCOTTY’S FIRST ROMANCE

VIII A BORDER INCIDENT

The public roads or thoroughfares through which the party floundered when crossing the sparsely settled counties of western Illinois, which had noticeably improved during the day or two of travel from the East toward Quincy, grew almost impassable on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. Heavy freight-wagons, each bearing an immense load of merchandise, chiefly hides and furs from the Northwest Territory, had stirred the mud in the narrow lane to a seemingly inexhaustible depth; and the long spell of freezing by night, followed daily by the inevitable thaw, caused the many unbridged streams to overflow their banks and inundate the wide wastes of bottom land through which the ox teams were compelled to wander blindly, in continual danger of disaster. But the most disagreeable experiences resulted from the frequent snow-storms, which generally occurred at camping-time, accompanied by chilling winds and intermittent falls of rain or sleet, covering the earth with a glare of ice.

“When I get to heaven, I mean to ask Saint Peter to assign all cooks to high seats,” said Jean one evening, as, balancing a tray laden with tin cups and saucers, she paused above the heads of the men kneeling at the mess-boxes, and in apparent innocence upset a steaming cup upon the head of Yank.

“No harm done, I assure you, Miss Rangeah. Don’t mention it!” he said, affecting not to feel the burn at the back of his neck, whereat Jean grew repentant.

“Do you s’pose Saint Peter will pay any heed to the request of a slip of a girl like you?” asked Hal.

“I’ll not be a slip of a girl when I go through the gates o’ heaven, but a mature matron, famous and honored.”

“We are in a slave State now,” wrote Jean, under date of April 16; “and from my limited experience I am forced to conclude that slavery is more deteriorating in its effects upon the white people we meet than it is upon the blacks. The primitive cultivating of the soil we saw in central Illinois, where the white men do their own farming, was bad enough, God knows; but the shiftless, aimless, happy-go-lucky work of the Missouri ‘niggers,’ as they style themselves, is even worse. The white men we see at times are idle, pompous, and lazy. The white women are idle and apathetic; and the children are aimless and discouraged. Daddie says slavery is wrong, and no contingency can make it right; but I notice that he doesn’t propose any remedy.”

Prairie schooners were not known as “ships of the desert” then, for Joaquin Miller had not yet sought or acquired fame; and no Huntington or Holladay had made a transcontinental railway track, or tunnelled the sierras of the mighty West to open the way for the iron horse. Even the overland stage was an improvement as yet unknown; for Holladay had not yet established his relay stations, or sent his intrepid drivers out among the savages as heralds of approaching civilization.

“Daddy says humanity’s a hog,” was the leader in Jean’s next entry in her diary. “The weather continued so bad, mother was so wan and weak, and the stock were so nearly starved, that he decided to stop over for a day or two near a farmhouse and barnyard, where there seemed a chance to purchase food for man and beast. But we were glad to move on after a rather brief experience. The farmer doubled the price of his hay and grain every morning after ‘worship,’ reminding those of us who could not choose but hear his daily dole of advice to God, of Grandpa Ranger’s story of a planter and merchant he knew in his youth, of whom it was said that he would call his slaves to their devotions in the morning with a preamble like this: ‘Have you wet the leather? Have you sanded the sugar? Have you put meal in the pepper and chicory in the coffee? Have you watered the whiskey? Then come in to prayers!’”

The necessities of these farmers were born of isolation; and the opportunities for barter and dicker with passing emigrants stirred the acquisitive spirit within them into vigorous action. The prices of their hitherto unsalable commodities went up to unheard-of figures, increasing in geometrical progression. But Captain Ranger, having created a market in the remote country places in Illinois for supplies of coffee, tea, calico, and unbleached cotton cloth, had prepared himself at Quincy with such commodities, and was able to adjust his trade somewhat to the law of supply and demand.

Oh, those teamsters of the plains! No jollier crowd of brave, enduring, accommodating men ever cracked cruel whips over the backs of long-enduring oxen, or plodded more patiently than they beside the slowly moving wagons, as, wading often over shoe-tops through the muck and mire of the Missouri roads of early springtime, they jollied one another and cracked their whips and sang. Each misfit nickname was accepted as a joke, and none of the men inquired as to the origin of his peculiar cognomen. But Hal, being more inquisitive than they, asked troublesome questions of his sisters, who were in the secret.

“Better tell him, girls,” said their mother. “He’ll be in honor bound to keep the secret then. Won’t you, dear?”

“Jean did it,” said Marjorie.

“Then suppose you confess,” said Hal.

“It was this way,” she explained after a pause of mock seriousness. “The first night we were in camp, after we had washed the dishes, it occurred to me to write each teamster’s name and paste it to the bottom of his plate. I didn’t know the real name of one of ’em from Adam’s, so I wrote them down as Scotty, Limpy, Yank, Shorty, Sawed-off, and so on. We didn’t intend to perpetrate a misfit, but a joke, and we struck both. Scotty got the correct title, though it merely happened so. But you just watch ’em! Limpy’s as straight as an Indian; Sawed-off stands six feet two in his socks; Lengthy is no taller when he stands up than when he lies down; Yank is a characteristic slave-owner; and Sambo is an ingrained abolitionist!”

“We couldn’t have made such a lot o’ misfits if we had tried a week,” said Mary. “But the men all think Hal did it; so the suspicion doesn’t fall on us; and you get the credit for being somewhat of a wag, Mr. Hal.”

“It’s nothing new for men or boys to take the credit for what their sisters do,” said Jean, as Hal strode away, satisfied that in protecting his sisters from a piece of folly, by accepting it as his own, he was acting the part of a man. “Adam set the example; and where would Herschel have been if he hadn’t had a sister?”

“Adam might have been in a box if he couldn’t have had Eve,” laughed Marjorie; “for there would then have been nobody to raise Cain.”

“Or the Ranger family,” added Jean.

Several days of tedious, laborious travel brought the wanderers into an open, sparsely timbered, almost unsettled part of the State of Missouri. The snow and sleet gave way to brighter skies, the roads and sloughs were drying up, and the higher grounds were gradually arraying themselves in robes of green and gold.

“Here is vacant land, and lots of it,” said Mary, as she viewed the virgin prospect of a mighty settlement in undisguised admiration. “This is a beautiful world!” and she sighed deeply, her face toward the rising sun.

“Don’t look backward,” cried Jean. “Remember Lot’s wife.”

“There’s no use in trying to look backward,” urged Hal. “Dad will never halt till he lands us on the western shore of the continent, on the eastern hem of the Pacific Ocean. He says this country’s too old for him. The wild turkeys are all killed off, or scared out o’ sight; the deer and elk are gone for good; and the country’s played out.”

“Wait a few years, and there’ll be railroads gridironing this whole great valley of the Mississippi,” said Jean. “There’ll be towns and cities springing up in a hundred places. Farms and orchards and handsome country homes will cover these rolling prairies. The native groves will be more than quadrupled by cultivation, and schoolhouses and churches will spring into existence everywhere.”

“I wish you’d talk like this to your father! Won’t you, Jean?” asked Mrs. Ranger.

“You couldn’t hire him to live in a slave State!” cried Jean.

“The Reverend Thomas Rogers might manage to get this far on the way toward the setting sun without much money,” smiled Mrs. Ranger, meaningly. “The children favor our stopping here, on Missouri soil,” she added, as her husband joined the group. “Don’t you think the idea a good one, John?”

“What! And let the word go back among our people at home that we’d flunked? No! I’d die first, and then I wouldn’t do it,” exclaimed her husband, petulantly.

Mrs. Ranger burst into tears.

“There, there, Annie! Don’t worry. But don’t ask me to settle, with my children, in a slave State. Father left Kentucky when I was a boy to get away from slavery and its inevitable accompaniment of poor white trash. There is an irrepressible conflict between freedom and every form of involuntary servitude that exists under the sun. This nigger business will lead to a bloody war long before Uncle Sam is done with it, and I doubt if even war will settle it.”

“But Oregon may come into the Union as a slave State, John. You know that the extension of slavery is the chief theme that is agitating Congress now.”

“I’ll have a chance to fight the curse in Oregon, Annie. But it is a settled condition here. I’ll fight it to the bitter end, if I get a chance!” He strode away to look after the cattle and men.

“Dear, patient mother!” cried Jean, stroking her mother’s cheek tenderly. “Your head is as clear as a bell. But there’s a whole lot o’ common-sense in what daddie says, too. We’ll soon have settled weather; then you won’t mind travelling. We all think you’ll be well and strong as soon as we get settled in Oregon.”

“Maybe so, if I could only live to get there,” faltered the feeble woman. “But—”

“But what, mother?”

“Nothing. I was only thinking.”

Jean’s heart sank. “You must get to bed, mother dear,” she said lovingly.

The Ranger children, tired out with the fatigue and excitement of the day, were soon locked in the deep sleep of healthy youth and vigor. Not so Mrs. Ranger. The regular breathing of her sleeping loved ones soothed her nerves, but she seemed preternaturally awake.

A gentle breeze stirred the white wagon-hood overhead. Sukie, who was tethered near, neighed gently as Mrs. Ranger spoke her name, and came closer to be stroked.

“Is de Cap’n heah?” asked a dusky figure with a child on its hip, as it edged its way between the mare and the wagon-wheel.

“He’s out with the cattle at present. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Hide me, quick! De houn’s is aftah me, honey. I’ve jes’ waded de crick, and dey’ve lost de trail. Quick, missus; an’ I’ll sarve ye forever!”

The low baying of the bloodhounds proclaimed that they were again on the trail.

“Climb in here! Be quick!” exclaimed Mrs. Ranger, making room for the quaking fugitive. “I’ve never tried to sleep with a nigger and her baby, but I can stand it if I have to,” she said to herself, as the refugee took the place assigned to her.

“What in thunder are you up to now?” asked her husband when he looked in upon his wife and children in the morning and discovered the dusky intruder.

“Trying to help you to circumvent the institution you are so ready to fight, which, as you say, is wrong, and no contingency can make right,” replied his wife, her cheeks and eyes aglow with mingled satisfaction and excitement.

IX THE CAPTAIN DEFENDS THE LAW

X THE CAPTAIN MAKES A DISTINCTION

XI MRS. McALPIN SEEKS ADVICE

The next forenoon Captain Ranger rode up alongside the carriage of Mrs. McAlpin and her mother, in which Jean was posing as driver and guest, and said: “I hope I gave you no offence in speaking as I did to Mr. Burns last night.”

“No offence at all, Captain. Don’t mention it; you were simply discharging your duty. But”—and Mrs. McAlpin hesitated a little—“would you mind exchanging your mount with Jean for a little while? I am quite sure she will enjoy a canter on the back of Sukie, and I wish to counsel with you a little. I am sorry to impose upon your good nature.”

Mrs. Benson took little notice of the Captain or of her daughter, but leaned back on the cushions, apparently absorbed in a book.

“I want your candid opinion,” said Mrs. McAlpin. “Do you consider the marriage ceremony infallible? Is it an unpardonable sin to break it, except for a nameless reason? I have an object in asking this question that is not born of mere curiosity.”

“Nothing of human origin is infallible, madam; and, for aught I can see to the contrary, nothing is infallible anywhere.”

“Do you believe it is better to break a bad bargain than to keep it?”

“That depends upon circumstances.”

“Why do you evade my question?”

“Because I can’t see what you’re driving at.”

“Then I’ll come at once to the point. Suppose you had been born a woman?”

“That isn’t a supposable case.”

“But we’ll let it rest for the present as if it were. Suppose you were born to be a woman,—we’ll put it that way for the sake of illustration,—and suppose, while you were yet a child, you had been married to a man many years your senior—married just to please somebody else—in defiance of your own judgment or desires?”

“Millions of women are married in that way every year, madam. Look at India, at China, at Turkey, and at many modern homes, even in England and America! It would seem to be the exception and not the rule where women get the husbands of their choice. I know it is the fashion to pretend they do; for a woman has to become desperately weary of her bargain before she’ll own up honestly to a matrimonial mistake.”

“But suppose one of those women had been yourself; don’t you think if you had been so married in childhood, that you would have rebelled openly as soon as you reached the years of discretion?”

“Nonsense, Daphne!” interrupted Mrs. Benson. “You harp forever on a single string. Suppose you discuss the weather, for a change.”

“There are points on which my estimable mother and myself do not agree,” said the daughter, with a sad smile. “Don’t mind her, please. I have learned that you are a wise and just man, and I am in need of advice. What would you do if, although you had obeyed the letter of the human law, you knew in your own soul that your marriage was a sin?”

“Don’t talk like that in my presence, Daphne! I cannot bear it!” exclaimed her mother, petulantly.

“When I left the States I hoped to get away from everybody’s domestic troubles,” said the Captain, earnestly. “Please don’t tell me about yours—if you have any—unless it is in my power to assist you.”

They had reached a narrow and rocky grade, where careful driving was necessary to avoid disaster.

“We must turn aside here, ladies,” the Captain exclaimed suddenly, as he dexterously alighted and guided the horses by the bits to the only point of advantage in sight. “Cattle and horses ought never to be compelled to travel together. You can’t hurry a steer except in a stampede, and then Old Nick himself couldn’t stop him.”

“They remind me of more than one pair of mismated bipeds I have met,” said Mrs. McAlpin.

The Captain stood at the horses’ heads till the last of the jolting and complaining wagons had safely passed the perilous bit of roadway. Then, guiding the team back to the road, he resumed his seat in the carriage, his lips compressed like a trap.

“Don’t you think Mr. Burns is a wonderful man?” asked Mrs. McAlpin, in a desperate effort to rekindle a conversation.

“He’s a fellow of considerable genius in some ways, but a mighty poor ox-driver.”

“He reminds me of many a woman I have seen,” continued Mrs. McAlpin, “who has failed to get fitted into her proper niche. His mind isn’t fitted to his work. I have seen women chained by circumstances to the kitchen sink, the wash-tub, the churn-dash, and the ironing-board, who never could make a success of any one of these lines of effort, though they might have made excellent astronomers, first-class architects, capable lawyers, good preachers, capital teachers, or splendid financiers. It is a pity to spoil a natural statesman or stateswoman to make a poor ox-driver or an indifferent housekeeper.”

“You seem to take great interest in Scotty,” remarked the Captain.

“I do. We have travelled extensively through the same lands, though we had never met until our orbits chanced to coincide on this journey. He has a retentive memory, a wide experience, and a keen appreciation of the beautiful, both in nature and art, and so have I. He is as much out of place as an ox-driver as I should be in a cotton-field. He’s a perfect mine of information, though, about a lot of things.”

“Then why not take counsel of him, instead o’ me?”

“He would hardly be a disinterested adviser.”

“Ah, I see!”

Mrs. McAlpin blushed. “He has not spoken to me one word of love, Captain,—if that is what you mean. I am not an eligible party,” and the lady used her handkerchief to wipe away a tear. “I want your opinion about getting a divorce from a union that I detested long before I ever met Mr. Burns. It is unbearable now.”

“Hush, Daphne! Not another word,” interposed her mother. “Strangers have no right to an insight into our family affairs.”

“But I must speak to somebody. Stay, Captain!” laying her hand upon his arm as he was about to leave the carriage.

“Are you running away from your husband, madam?” he asked, resuming his seat.

“You guess correctly, sir.”

“I suspected it all along; but it was none of my business in the beginning, nor is it now. But I confess that it looks as if I were making it my business to conduct a caravan of grass widows to Oregon, judging from the present aspect of affairs.”

“To make a long story short,—for I see you are growing restless,—I was married in my callow childhood, married in obedience to my mother’s wish. She was a widow and poor; my suitor was accomplished and rich. If he’d been a sensible man he would have courted and married my mother, who adores him. But old men are such idiots! They’re always hunting young women, or children, for wives.”

“You’re complimentary.”

“Beg your pardon; present company is always excepted. They imagine that young and silly girls will make happy and contented wives,—when any person not overcome by vanity knows that no young man or young woman can be truly enamored of anybody that’s in the sere and yellow leaf. What would you think of a woman of mamma’s age, for instance, making love to a boy? And if such a boy should consent to marry her, who believes that he would be content with his bargain after his beard was grown?”

“Ask me something easy,” said the Captain.

“My father was a physician; and it was my childhood’s delight to study his books, attend his clinics, and make myself generally useful among his patients. I never dreamed of surrendering my person, my liberty, my will, and the absolute control of my individuality to the commands of any human being on earth except myself, till after the deed was done for me by another. No wonder I rebelled when I reached the years of maturity and discretion.”

“Mr. McAlpin was a good man and a gentleman, Captain Ranger,” interrupted Mrs. Benson.

“Yes, mamma; he was always ‘good.’ He never whipped his wife; he gave her everything that money could buy. There is no reason that the law can recognize for me to be dissatisfied. But I don’t belong primarily to myself, and I don’t like it. Mamma here, with her ideas of woman’s place in life, would have made him an excellent and happy wife.”

“He was always a gentleman, Daphne,” repeated her mother. “Don’t do him an injustice.”

“Yes; and I was his personal and private property. I was a beautiful animal, as he thought, to bedeck with his trinkets and show off his wealth; but I was nobody on my own account. I was simply his echo,—or supposed to be,—and nothing else.”

“Daphne, you forget that this carriage, these horses, our wagons and oxen, and the supplies for this journey are all the product of his bounty.”

“They are the product of my jewels, Captain. This outfit is mine; it was bought with my own heart’s blood! I owe nothing to Donald McAlpin.”

“Do you think you have dealt justly by your husband?” asked the Captain. There was reproof and impatience in his tone.

“I owe him nothing, sir. I am in the same line with Dugs,—a runaway chattel. That is all.”

“But Dugs, whose name now is Susannah, did not enter into her bargain voluntarily.”

“Neither did I. My mother made the bargain.”

“How did you escape, Mrs. McAlpin? And why did you undertake this journey?”

“Mr. McAlpin was called away to England last year, to inherit an additional estate. Mamma was too ill to go, so I stayed to nurse her. I had been his body vassal for four years, and was at last a woman grown. One taste of liberty was enough. I will never be his vassal again. I decided to make this very unusual journey to elude pursuit. He’d not think of searching for me outside of the United States or Canada; least of all in the Great American Desert, whither we are bound. I mean to lose myself for good and all in Oregon.”

“And so now you are seeking a divorce?”

“Yes, sir; that is, when I reach Oregon.”

“Thousands of other women have borne far worse conjugal conditions all their lives, and died, making no outward sign, Mrs. McAlpin. Men also have their full share of these afflictions, which they bear in silence to the bitter end.”

“That is their own affair, sir. If other people choose to wear a ball and chain through life, that is their privilege. I would not do their choosing for them if I could.”

“What course would you pursue if you had children?”

“Then I suppose I should be compelled to die with my feet in the stocks. Children might have diverted my mind and helped to save my sanity, though. I’ve prayed for them without ceasing, but in vain. I’m going to a remote country, a new country, where new environments make newer and more plastic conditions. The laws of men, one-sided as they are, will divorce me after seven years.”

“And what is Scotty going to do during all this time?”

“If he loves me as he thinks he does, he’ll wait. If it’s only a passing fancy, he’ll get over it in time. I will not permit his attentions now, nor until Donald McAlpin divorces me and gets another wife.”

Captain Ranger’s union with the gentle bride of his choice had been so natural, and their lives together had been so harmonious, despite their many cares and sorrows, that neither of them had ever harbored a thought of living apart from the other. Differences of opinion they had sometimes, and now and then a brief, angry dispute, but the end was always peace; and he remembered now, with a pang of self-reproach, that in all such encounters he, whether right or wrong, had invariably gained his point.

“You are my guiding star, my faithful wife,” he whispered, as he gently assisted her from the wagon after they had halted for the night. “Come with me, dear, and get some exercise, while Sally and Susannah help the other girls to get supper.”

“I don’t see why we mightn’t end our journey here, John,” said his wife, as they gazed abroad over the vast expanse of table-land that stretched away on every side, intersected here and there with streams, their courses marked by stately rows of cottonwood just bursting into leaf, their bases hedged with pussy-willows. “Here are land and wood and water as good as any we passed yesterday. This surely will be a rich and thickly settled country some day.”

“But it is all Indian country, my dear. I wish you would talk about something else.”

They returned to the camp in silence.

“I wish the girls were as tractable as you are, Annie,” he said an hour later, after having had a heated dispute with his daughters over some trifling disagreement. “They are as headstrong as mules.”

“Being girls, they take after you, John,” replied his wife, with a smile. “I’m afraid their husbands won’t find them as tractable as I have been.”

“Bring on more of your flapjacks and bacon, Miss Mary,” cried Scotty, as Mary poised a big pile of the steaming cakes over the heads of the hungry men who knelt at the mess-boxes.

“You seem to be regaining your lost appetite,” exclaimed Sawed-off. “Have you and the widder cried quits?”

“That’s our business,” was the curt reply.

It was late when Mary sought her mother’s couch for a brief visit that night. She was weeping silently, and her mother caressed her tenderly. “I know your heart is troubled, darling,” said Mrs. Ranger, “but do not be discouraged. Be of good cheer. Every cloud has a silver lining.” And Mary’s heart was comforted, though her reason could not tell her why.

XII JEAN BECOMES A WITNESS

“How’s your journal getting on, Jean?” asked her father, one evening, after all was still in camp.

Mrs. Ranger had been unusually nervous and timid all day, and Susannah had been in constant attendance upon the wagon-bed full of little ones,—seven in all,—who had been more than usually unruly, fretful, and quarrelsome.

Jean looked ruefully at her father. “The pesky thing isn’t getting along at all!” she exclaimed. “There’s nothing to inspire one to write. There’s no grass for the cattle, no wood for the fires, and no comfort anywhere.”

“Then write up the facts. Don’t allow yourself to get morbid. Don’t be so listless and lackadaisical.”

It was now the twentieth of May; and under this date, in restive obedience to her father’s command, Jean began her entries again:—

“We came about eighteen miles to-day. And such a day! It has been drizzly, disagreeable, and cold from morning till night, with no cheery prospects ahead. We hear of an epidemic of measles having broken out on the road, endangering much life among children and such grown folks as didn’t have sense enough to get the disgusting disease before they left their mothers’ apron-strings. We passed several newly made graves by the roadside to-day,—a melancholy fact which interested mother deeply.

“Indians, for some reason, are keeping out of our sight. As we are right in the midst of the summer haunts of many tribes, we are shunned, possibly on account of the contagious diseases among the whites, which are said to kill off Indians as the Asiatic plague kills Europeans. Our company has escaped the epidemic so far; so there is one blessing for which we may be thankful.

“We forded a stream to-day, called the Little Sandy, in the midst of a driving rainstorm, and are now encamped in a deep, dry gulch; that is, we call it dry, because the water runs away nearly as fast as it falls. There is a fine spring on the hillside; and some green cottonwood which we found at the head of the gulch is being slowly coaxed into the semblance of a fire.

“May 21. The skies cleared this morning, and we have found some good grazing for the poor, half-famished stock. We haven’t travelled over a dozen miles, but we must stop and give the animals a feed. We have passed extensive beds of iron ore to-day, outcroppings of which are seen in every direction.

“May 22. We yoked up early this morning and came three miles, to the banks of the Big Sandy. The day is clear, but the roads are still muddy after the rain. The early morning was dark and foggy, the air was raw and cold, and the outlook was cheerless in the extreme. Some of the horses in a neighbor’s outfit stampeded, and it has taken nearly the whole day to recapture them.

“May 23. We hear rumors of Indian raids ahead of us, and mother is much alarmed. We must not stop for Sunday, but must hurry on to get past the danger-point. If the Indians knew how defenceless we really are, they would rout the camp before morning.

“The sluggish waters of the Big Sandy are swarming with larvæ. Daddie says it’s lucky they’re not mosquitoes yet; but the trains coming along a week hence will be terribly annoyed by the intruders, who are now unable to molest us.

“May 24. We are following the Little Blue,—a muddy stream about a hundred feet in width.

“May 25. We met to-day a long train of heavily loaded wagons coming from Fort Laramie with great mountains of buffalo robes. At this rate, the buffalo will all be killed off in a very few years. The frightened creatures are now so wild that it is next to impossible to get a shot at one of them; and the antelope are even more timid. Why is man such a destructive animal, I wonder?

“The men driving the freight-teams we met were a mixed-up lot of Indians, Spaniards, and French and Indian half-breeds. Their speech was to us an unintelligible jargon in everything but its profanity, which was English, straight. There was one white man in the crowd, or maybe two of them. They were on horseback, and kept aloof from the common herd. A peculiar apprehension overcame me as I gazed at one of these strangers. He was large, bronzed, and portly, and sat his horse like a centaur; or perhaps I should come nearer the truth if I said like an Englishman. My heart beat a strange tattoo as I watched him. Somehow, it seemed to me that he was in some way concerned with some of our company. I did not understand the feeling, but it wasn’t comfortable.”

“There, daddie!” she cried, exhibiting the written pages. “Don’t say I’m neglecting my journal now!”

The twilight had deepened. Below the camp ran a deep ravine, at the base of which a little brook sang merrily. Clumps of cottonwood, badly crippled by wayfarers’ axes, struggled for existence here and there. In her haste to reach the covert of the bushes unobserved, Jean ran diagonally over a settlement of prairie dogs, near which the campers had inadvertently pitched their tents. The Lilliputian municipality was evidently well disciplined, for at the sound of approaching footsteps the same sharp, staccato bark, of mingled warning and authority, that had for an instant startled the foremost team at camping-time, was heard, and every little rodent dropped instantly out of sight. Profound silence fell at once upon the little city, which had before been a bedlam of voices.

Jean reached the foot of the ravine and stopped to listen, her heart beating hard. “I am sure Sally made an appointment to meet somebody in this ravine to-night,” she said to herself, “and I’m just as sure she’ll need a friend. Women are such fools where men are concerned.” She heard the sound of human voices, and pressed her hand hard over her heart.

“I know you think you’re safe from arrest,” said a voice she knew to be Sally O’Dowd’s. “As your wife, I may not be able to give legal testimony that will send you to the gallows; but you’re not beyond the pale of lynch law.”

A mocking laugh was the only audible response.

“I haven’t even told the Squire,” resumed the woman’s voice. “Nobody knows about it but you and me and the unseen messengers of God.”

Again that mocking, brutal laugh, followed by oaths, with words of commingled anger and exultation. Jean held her breath.

“S’posing you could testify,—which you can’t, for that divorce is tied up on appeal,— my oath would be as binding as yours, Mrs. O’Dowd. And I would swear to God that it was you did the deed. It would be easy enough to make any court believe my story, for it was common talk that you rebelled all the time against such a litter of babies.”

“O God, have mercy!”

“Nobody saw me kill the brat but you, Sally. It would have been bad enough if the young ones had come one at a time, being only a year apart; but when it came to two pairs of twins inside o’ thirteen months, it was time to call a halt.”

“Are you never to have any mercy on me, Sam?”

“Come back to me as my lawful wife, and you’ll see. I’ll be easy enough to get along with if you’ll treat me right.”

The wife was struck dumb with astonishment.

“Come back to me, darling!” The mocking tone gave way to one of cooing tenderness. Jean saw his dusky figure through the shadows. “You see you’re in my power, Sally. Better make a virtue of necessity. You can coax the Squire to let me join his train. I will even be a teamster, if necessary, for your sake and the children’s.”

“What?” cried the woman, in sincere alarm. “Could I be your wife after I’ve seen you kill one of our children before my very eyes? No, no! Go your way, and let me go mine in peace. If you will leave me and the three surviving babies alone, I’ll never tell anybody about the murder. I swear it!”

Again that brutal laugh.

“Do your worst, Sally O’Dowd! You can’t prove that I killed the brat. You haven’t any witness.”

“I have the silent witness of my own conscience; and so have you, Sam O’Dowd. Do you think that I am such an idiot as to come out here to meet you alone?”

“She knows he’s a coward,” thought Jean, “and she’s bluffing.”

“Now see here, Sally! You love me; you know you do; you’ve told me so a thousand times.”

“I did love you once, Sam; but that was so long ago that it seems like a far-off dream. I despise, I loathe, I abhor you now!”

“Then this’ll settle it. I’ll go to the Squire and tell him we’ve buried the hatchet, and I’m going with you to Oregon. I don’t care a rap whether you hate me or not. But if you give me any trouble, I’ll swear that you did that killing.”

“Oh, help me, pitying Christ!” wailed the unhappy woman. “Is there, in all this world, no Canada to which a fugitive wife may flee, and no underground railroad by which to reach it?”.

Again arose that brutal laugh upon the air. The belated bird in the bushes cooed to its mate, and the prairie dogs chattered in the distance.

“Don’t be afraid of him, Sally,” cried a clear voice from the depths of the cottonwoods. “A tyrant is always a coward. I heard your confession, Sam O’Dowd; and as I am not your wife, I can be a witness.”

There was no more brutal laughter. A horse stood picketed and stamping at the head of the gulch, and the murderer hurried toward it with heavy strides. Jean listened with eager attention till he mounted and rode rapidly away.

“Are you still there, Sally?” she asked, as the hoof-beats died away in the distance.

“Yes, Jean; but where are you, and why are you here?”

“The Holy Spirit guided me, I reckon. I was just possessed to come. I didn’t know I was following you, or why I came; but I just did it ’cause I had to.”

“It was hazardous, Jean. He might have killed us both.”

“He’s too big a coward to kill a more formidable foe than his own baby. But you were an idiot to meet him out here, Sally.”

“He was with that freighters’ outfit, but on horseback. He came to me a few minutes before camping-time, when I was walking for exercise. I didn’t want a scene at camp, so I agreed to meet him out here alone, if he would keep out of sight.”

“You’re a bigger fool than Thompson’s colt, and he swam the river to get a drink,” said Jean. “But we mustn’t linger here. He may have a confederate.”

“Not he, Jean. He’s too suspicious to trust a confederate.”

“Let’s go back to camp, anyhow, Sally; mother will be missing us. But you needn’t be afraid of Sam again. I’ve settled his hash,” she said, as they hurried to the open. “Isn’t it a terrible thing to be married?” she added, as soon as she could speak again.

“No, Jean. Marriage under right conditions is the world’s greatest blessing. All enlightened men and women prefer to live in pairs, and make each other and their children as happy as possible. I admit that I made a big mistake when I married; but your mother didn’t, because your father is one of God’s noblemen. The fault isn’t in marriage, but in the couple, one or both of whom make the trouble, when there is trouble. But the conditions between husbands and wives are not equal. Law and usage make the husband and wife one, and the husband that one. Where both the parties to the compact are better than the law, it doesn’t pinch either one; but when a woman finds herself chained for life to a sordid, disagreeable, stingy, domineering man, the advantages of law and custom are all on his side. It is no wonder that trouble ensues in such cases.”

“But, young as I am, I have seen wives that could discount almost any man for meanness,” said Jean. “There are women, now and then, who take all the rights in the matrimonial category, and their husbands haven’t any rights at all.”

“Women sometimes inherit the strongest traits of their fathers; I admit that. And such women can outwit the very best husbands.”

“I’ve read of a woman,” said Jean, musingly, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton by name, who went before a legislative assembly in New York a few years ago, and secured the passage of a law enabling a married woman of that State to hold, in her own right, the property bequeathed to her by her father. And then, as if to prove that women are idiots, there were women in Albany who refused to associate with their financial savior any more. They said she had left her sphere. But never mind. The world is moving, and women are moving with it.”

The camp-fires had died to heaps of embers, the lights were out in the tents and wagons, and all except themselves were settled for the night.

“Don’t say anything to anybody about my meeting with Sam, will you, Jean?”

“Not unless he annoys you again. Then I’ll be ready to meet him with facts.”

“He might put your life in jeopardy, my dear.”

“Jeopardy nothin’!” cried Jean, adopting the slang of the road. “He’s too big a coward to put his neck in danger. But just you wait! I’ll live to see an end to one-sided laws and a one-sexed government. See if I don’t! And the men will fight our battle for us, too, as soon as they are wise enough.”

“If you don’t come across a matrimonial fate that’ll change your tune, my name isn’t Sally O’Dowd,” exclaimed her companion, as they drew near the camp.

“Your name isn’t O’Dowd, but Danover,” cried Jean. “You’re safe in making such a prophecy on such a basis.”

XIII AN APPROACHING STORM

XIV A CAMP IN CONSTERNATION

“Stake down the wagons,” was the next order. “Don’t stop to pitch any more tents. Don’t try to kindle any fires.”

Scarcely had the orders been obeyed before a darkness as black as Erebus had settled upon the camp like a gigantic pall. It was a peculiar darkness, permeated by an ominous, silent, intangible, vibrating, appalling Something! A silence that could be felt was in the air. The oxen in the gulch bellowed in terror; the horses neighed. The stillness of the air was oppressive, portentous, awful. The women clasped the children in close embrace. The children clung to their protectors in silent terror. All hands save the teamsters, who were out with the stock at the mouth of the ravine, where they were stationed to guard the animals against stampede, crouched under the wagons in the Cimmerian blackness. Anon, a blinding flash of sheet lightning, followed by others and yet others in bewildering succession, awoke a rolling, roaring, reverberating cannonade of thunder. Guided by the flashes of lightning, the frightened men left the cattle to their fate and, returning to the camp, took refuge under the wagons. Hailstones as big as hens’ eggs fell by hundreds of tons, displacing the awful silence with a cannonade like unto the heaviest artillery of a great army in battle.

The wind blew a terrific gale. The chained wagons rocked like cradles. Several heavy vehicles in a neighboring train, not being chained to the ground, as the Ranger wagons had been, were upset and their contents ruined by the hail and rain. Others were blown bodily into the river. Luckily no lives were lost. The cattle and horses, pelted by the hail till their bodies were bruised and bleeding, huddled together at the head of the gulch for mutual protection.

The storm lasted less than twenty minutes, and ceased as suddenly as it began. The black clouds soared away to the northward, leaving a blue starlit sky overhead, and underfoot a mass of hail and mud. The Platte, having caught the full fury of a cloud-burst a few miles above the camp, rose rapidly, threatening the frightened refugees in the wagons with a new danger. But the shallow banks were high enough to confine the mad rush of muddy water within an inch or two of the top, thus averting the horror of a flood which, had it come, would have completed the havoc of the storm.

The lightning, as though weary of its display of power, retreated to the distant hills, and played at hide-and-seek on the horizon’s edge, while Heaven’s Gatling guns answered each pyrotechnic display with a distant, growling, intermittent roar.

Mrs. McAlpin’s carriage was a total wreck; but her wagons remained intact, and she and her mother escaped to them in safety.

The morning revealed a scene of desolation. The earth in all directions as far as the eye could see had been torn into gulleys by the mad rush of falling hail and rain, each seeking its level in frantic haste. Hailstones lay in heaps, some soiled by contact with the liquid mud, some as clean and white as freshly fallen snow.

The contents of Mrs. McAlpin’s carriage were entirely gone. Nothing remained of the vehicle but one of its wheels and some shreds of its cover, which were found half buried in the mud. Of the harness, nothing was left but a bridle bit, in which was lodged a woman’s glove, and near it the remains of a palm-leaf fan.

“We should all be thankful that no lives were lost,” said Mrs. Ranger, who was looking on while Sally O’Dowd and Susannah assisted her daughters, who, with Mrs. Benson and Mrs. McAlpin, were exposing the wet and dilapidated paraphernalia of the camp to the hot rays of the morning sun.

“But we’d have a heap mo’ to thank Gahd fo’, missus, if He’d hel’ off dat stawm,” exclaimed Susannah, with a characteristic “yah! yah! yah!”

At eleven o’clock the order was given to bring in the stock, and prepare to move on, when it was discovered that Scotty was missing.

“We s’posed he was helpin’ Mrs. McAlpin’s men, as he generally does, to get her things to rights, so we didn’t bother our heads about him,” said Sawed-off, who was Scotty’s partner of the whip and yoke. “I’ve been doing the most of his share of the work ever since we’ve been on the road.”

Scotty was nowhere to be found. An organized search was begun at once, and all thought of moving on was abandoned till the Captain should learn his fate. The cattle and horses were turned out on the range for another badly needed half-holiday. Through all the remainder of the day the anxious quest continued. Mrs. McAlpin was as pale as death. Her sombre weeds, worn for no known reason, formed a fitting frame for her pinched and anxious face and bright, abundant hair. Her mother was visibly agitated. Mrs. Ranger lay on her feather bed all through the trying afternoon, her eyes closed and her lips moving as if in prayer.

“Night again, and no Scotty!” exclaimed Captain Ranger, his voice husky with feeling. As no trace of the man had been discovered, the organized search was called off.

“Scotty’s death was one of the freaks of the flood,” said Hal.

“None of you ever did Scotty justice,” exclaimed Mary, as she descended upon the party with a heaped plate of their staple food.

“That’s what,” echoed Jean, as she brought on the beans and bacon.

“Scotty knew more in a minute than half of us can ever learn,” cried Marjorie, with whom he was a favorite.

“Yes,” said the Captain, dryly. “He’s a genius, Scotty is! He’ll turn up presently. Doubtless he’s off somewhere studying a new stratum of storm-clouds. He has killed two of my leaders already by making them start the whole load while his mind was on the incomprehensible and unknowable in nature. But I’ll wager he knows enough to look out for himself in a crisis.”

“He was a whole mine of information about other things, if he didn’t know much about driving oxen,” sobbed Jean.

“He isn’t dead!” exclaimed Mrs. McAlpin. “I mean to continue the search myself to-night.”

“You’ll get caught by a panther!” cried Bobbie. “I haven’t seen ’em, but I know they’re there!”

“Where, Bobbie?” asked Marjorie.

“Up in the gulch. I can see ’em with my eyes shut!” and the child, not understanding the laugh that followed at his expense, hastened to the wagon where his mother lay, to receive the consolation that never failed him.

“It won’t be against the laws of God or man for me to love Rollin if he is dead,” said Mrs. McAlpin to herself, as she crept shivering from her retreat in her wagon to the ground. Throwing a shawl over her head, she hastened out in the direction in which Scotty was hurrying when she had last seen him. The cattle, quite satisfied from the unusual effects of a day’s rest and a full meal, chewed their cuds quietly, or lay asleep in the best sheltered spots they could command, breathing heavily. She wandered fearlessly among them, calling frequently for the lost man, but received no response save an occasional “moo” from an awakened cow, or a friendly neigh from Sukie, who was tethered near.

The morning star rose in the clear blue of the bending sky as her search went on, and she knew that the long June day was breaking. Flowers of every hue, newly born from the convulsions of the recent storm, smiled at her in their dewy fragrance; and in the branches of a crippled cottonwood a robin began his matin song. A meadow lark, disturbed in its languorous wooing by the lone watcher’s footsteps, soared upward in the crystal ether, sending back, when out of her sight, a swelling note of triumph, prolonged, triumphant, sweet.

“Rollin! Rollin Burns!” she called, repeating the name in every note of the scale.

At length a long, low moan startled her. She listened eagerly for a moment, and repeated her call. Whence had come that moan? There was no repetition of the sound. She spoke again, calling the name in a higher key.

Another moan—it might have been an echo from the canyon’s walls—came, more distinct than the first, but the echoing gulch gave no indication of its location.

“Call again, Rollin! It is I,—your own Daphne!”

“Is it indeed you, Daphne?”

She pinched herself to see if she was really awake. She had never heard her Christian name spoken by Burns before. The name sounded strangely sweet in the breaking twilight, and in spite of her apprehension and uncertainty her soul was glad.

“Call again, Rollin! Help is near.”

“Come this way, Daphne! I am in a cave, almost under your feet. A bowlder that I stepped upon rolled over, loosened by the storm, and let me through into the bowels of the earth. My leg is broken. I must have been unconscious. I have swooned or slept, or both. Be careful how you tread. There are badgers in this hole, and I have heard rattlesnakes.”

“Which way, Rollin? Where are you?”

The sound of his voice seemed to come from beneath her feet.

“Is the storm over?”

“Yes, long ago. It’s been over for thirty-six hours. But I can’t locate you.”

“Here, I tell you! Under this rock. If it had fallen directly on me, I should have been a goner. For God’s sake, be careful, or you’ll break your own dear neck! Don’t get excited. Run for help, and don’t stir up the rattlesnakes.”

The injured man had fallen at first by the turning of the rock, as he had stated, giving his leg a twist that broke it, and, by the turning of his body in falling farther, had overturned the bowlder again, and thus was held a prisoner.

Mrs. McAlpin peered into a narrow aperture through which the coming daylight had entered. Their eyes met.

“Daphne!”

“Rollin!”

“So near and yet so far!” cried the prisoner, as he struggled to free himself. A spasm of pain overspread his face, and a dew, like the death damp, settled on his hair and forehead.

“O God! he has fainted again!” she cried, running with all her might and screaming for help.

“What in thunder is the matter now?” exclaimed Captain Ranger, as he emerged, half dressed, from his tent.

“I’ve found Rollin! He’s imprisoned in a cave, with a broken leg! Fetch spades and a mattock to dig away the dirt from the rock! Be quick!” cried Mrs. McAlpin, leading the way.

Nobody heard the robins sing, or paused to enjoy the triumphant melody of the lark.

Scotty was still in a merciful swoon. Very carefully the men loosened the rock from its hold on his legs, and with their united strength rolled it away from the mouth of the cave.

“It’s damned lucky you are, old boy!” cried Yank, as the crippled man regained consciousness. “That rock would have crushed you to pulp if the walls of the cave hadn’t saved you.”

“A miss would have been as good as a mile!” replied Scotty, as he fainted again.

“Who’s going to set these bones?” asked Sawed-off. “It’s a bad fracture, compound and nasty. There’s no severed artery, though, which is lucky, or he’d ’a’ bled to death. Captain Ranger, did you ever set a broken bone?”

“Never.”

“I’ll do it,” exclaimed Mrs. McAlpin. “Cut away his boot. Bring a cot from the camp. Bring some adhesive plaster. Captain, can you make some splints? Stay! I’ll cut away the boot. There! Steady! Slow! If we can set the bones before he recovers consciousness, so much the better.”

The cot with its unconscious burden was carried to the side of the widow’s wagon.

“Bring water and more bandages, girls.”

“Where did you get your skill?” asked the Captain, as Mrs. McAlpin felt cautiously for the broken bones and deftly snapped them into place.

“It isn’t a very bad fracture,” she said, unheeding the question, as she held the bones together while the orders for splints and bandages were being obeyed.

“Some water, quick, and some brandy!” she said in a firm voice, though her cheeks were blanching. She held stoutly to her work till the limb was securely encased in the proper supports. But when her patient recovered consciousness and looked inquiringly into her eyes, she fell, fainting, into the Captain’s arms, and was carried to his family wagon, her eyelids twitching and her muscles limp. When she recovered, she found herself reclining in the wagon beside Mrs. Ranger, who was gently chafing her face and hands.

“All this has been too much for you, dearie,” said the good woman.

“Where’s Rollin?”

“In your mother’s wagon. We have rigged him up a swinging bed, and Mrs. Benson will see that he wants for nothing. You are to ride here, in the big wagon, with me.”

“You have no room for me in here. You and I, and Mary and Jean, and Marjorie and Bobbie, and Sadie and the baby and Sally, and the three little O’Dowds, and Susannah and George Washington can’t all ride and sleep in this narrow space. We’d offend the open-air ordinances of heaven.”

“It is all arranged, my dear; don’t worry. Our overflow has gone to another wagon. We’ll have plenty of room.”

“But Mr. Burns?”

“Your good mother has taken entire charge of him. She is behaving as beautifully in this crisis as you are, my dear.”

XV CHOLERA RAGES

XVI JEAN’S VISIT BEYOND THE VEIL

XVII FATHER AND DAUGHTER

Jean passed out silently into the night, and pausing a moment, looked up to the silent stars, and whispered: “‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork.’”

How long she stood meditating she never realized. The tethered cow lowed again,—a plaintive, beseeching wail, that seemed almost human. She was mourning for her slain calf, poor thing,—a calf left by the roadside at its birth. It had been mercifully killed by Captain Ranger’s order, that it might escape the hardships of a sure but lingering death in following its ill-fated mother.

The cow’s udder was distended and feverish. Jean, as mindful of the practical affairs of life as of its mysteries, knelt upon the ground, and, with the skill of much practice in the art of milking, relieved the poor bereft mother of her pain.

“Poor Flossie!” she said, as the patient animal drew a sigh of relief. “Poor Flossie! It seemed cruel to deprive you of your baby. And they did it, too, before your very eyes! You must be thirsty, Flossie; you’re so feverish,” she said, as she brought the grateful animal a pail of clear, cold water.

Jean crept shivering into bed between her sleeping sisters, where she tried in vain to lie awake, to live over again the vivid experiences of her dream.

“Was it a dream?” she asked herself as she cuddled close among the blankets. “Who knows what dreams are, anyhow? And is there anybody on the earth who can understand, define, or fathom the mystery of sleep?” In a few minutes she was fast asleep, and when she awoke it was morning.

“There are, there must be, other senses finer and more acute than our five physical ones,” she thought, as she crept from her bed, refreshed and wide awake.

The stars had paled, and the clear gray of the early dawn lit up the crests of the abounding hills.

The simple preparations for the funeral rites were made in silence. Men and women moved mechanically about the camp. The very cattle seemed to understand.

No casket was procurable, but every man in camp was ready to do all in his power to supply the need. Junipers of goodly size abounded in the neighboring woods. From two of these, felled for the purpose, thick puncheons were hewn to form a crude but stanch enclosure for the good woman’s final home. A grave was made, with hard labor, in the abounding sandstone, and the women lined its vault and edges with flattened boughs of evergreen, thus making an ideal resting-place for the still, white form, as beautiful in death as it had been in youth.

There was no prayer or sermon. The simple rites were about to close when Mary whispered to her father: “I have heard mother say she wanted us all to sing when they should be laying her away.” And the three eldest daughters of the peaceful dead and the storm-rent living sang with tremulous but not unmusical tones:—

John Ranger looked upward with bared brow and streaming eyes, and in his heart a flickering hope was born.

The Reverend Thomas Rogers, with all his fervent eloquence and well grounded belief in the very orthodox scheme of salvation which he had so constantly preached, had never shaken his doubts as did the plaintive promises of that simple, impressive hymn.

His devoted wife, strong in her faith in the efficacy of prayer, had long ceased to speak to him of her religious convictions, for which his ready logic and quaint ridicule suggested no answer. At such times, consoling herself with the command of her Master, she would enter into her closet, shut the door, and pray for him and their children in secret, with never a doubt that sometime, someway, her prayers would be answered openly. And who shall say that her faith was not at last rewarded, in a way she least expected, through that plaintive song, through which, being dead, she had yet spoken?

After the burial, the remainder of the day was spent in the silent performance of the many accumulated duties of the camp. There was no time for the luxury of grief. The women and girls washed, ironed, cooked, did the dishes, mended wearing apparel, sewed up rents in wagon-covers and tents, and gathered heaps of wild flowers, with which they adorned the fresh mound of earth that none of them expected ever to see again.

The men were not idle. A broken ox-yoke needed mending. Wagon-tires were reset. Such heavy articles as could be dispensed with were discarded.

Jamie’s cradle, for which Mrs. Ranger had begged a place in their effects, and her grandmother’s spinning-wheel, which she had stored in one of the wagons, were among the articles ordered to be thrown away.

“Your mother will not miss them now,” said Captain Ranger, huskily.

“It is a shame to disregard our dear mother’s wishes, now that she cannot speak for herself,” said Mary, in a whisper, aside to Jean.

“I know it; and I’ve already made a bargain with Mrs. McAlpin to store them in one of her wagons. Daddie will thank us for it sometime.”

Sadly and silently the work went on; for the living had to be cared for, and nothing more could be done for the dead.

When evening came Jean sought her journal, climbed to the rim of the little natural amphitheatre overlooking the sparkling spring of icy water near her mother’s last resting-place, and read in the last space she had left blank, in her father’s bold chirography, some lines of a poem which he had quoted from memory:—

“Dear bereaved and sorrowing daddie!” sighed Jean, as she closed the book. “I cannot write a word to-night. Sacred to him and his be the page on which he has inscribed these echoes of his heart. But let nobody say, after this, that daddie has no sentiment in his make-up. The trouble is that he is too busy a man to give rein to his feelings, except under extraordinary pressure. I wish he hadn’t tried to throw away those heirlooms of mother’s, though. The oxen wouldn’t have felt the difference in the load. It was an act that he’ll be ashamed of some day.”

Weeks after, when the memory-hallowed relics came to light, Captain Ranger bowed his head upon his hands and gave way to such a convulsion of grief as had not shaken him, even at the time of her transition. Jean had good cause to recall the stanzas he had inscribed to her mother’s memory in her battered journal, as she said to herself: “I knew all the time that daddie’s heart was right. It is only necessary to touch it in the proper place to show that it is tender.” Once more she closed the book without having written a word.

But we must not anticipate.

On the 22d of June another entry is recorded,—Jean’s last memorandum of their journey in the Black Hills: “The prickly pears still give us much annoyance. The roads are heavy with sand, and the rocks over which our wagons must bump and bound are terribly rough and jagged.

“Across the Platte, and away to the southward many miles, though they seem much nearer, owing to the rarity of the air, are quaint and curious formations in the rocky cliffs, worn by the winds of ages into rude images of men and animals that stare at us with sunken eyes, their broken noses, grinning skulls, and disfigured bodies reminding us of unhappy phantoms risen from the under world.

“Sometimes the semblance of a great mosque or cathedral rears its domes and minarets in the clear blue of the heavens; and sometimes what seems a great embattled fortification is seen rising with realistic majesty from a vast sage plain that looks, with a little aid of the imagination, like the dried-up bed of a big moat. Of course, ‘’tis distance lends enchantment to the view,’ as no doubt the images we see so distinctly would resolve themselves into shapeless masses if we could see them at close range.

“The grass we so much need for the stock has again disappeared, and daddie says we shall return to-morrow to the main travelled road. Wild flowers are blooming in profusion all around our camp, smiling at us as if in mockery of the prevailing desolation. Wood is scarce again, and we find few buffalo chips.

“We seldom see any more deer or antelope, and the buffalo have all escaped to the distant hills; that is, all but the hapless multitudes that have been cruelly and needlessly slaughtered by the unthinking and greedy hunters of the plains.

“We passed half-a-dozen newly made graves again to-day, and it is evident that we are getting back into the dreaded cholera belt. The day has been extremely hot, but the evening is chilly and blustering. Daddie says the most of the victims of the epidemic are women. I wonder if such sorrow as ours pervades every family into whose ranks the Silent Messenger comes unbidden and steals away its hope.

“The Indians seem to have all been scared away by the cholera. What must they think of us, who claim to be civilized and even enlightened, who have come to bring them our religion, and with it starvation, pestilence, and death?

“Our world isn’t yet fit for the abode of anything but beasts of prey, of which poorly civilized man is chief. No wonder the Indians fear and hate us. We destroy their range, we scare away their game, we scatter disease and death among them; and as rapidly as possible we seize and possess their lands. ‘No quarter for man or beast’ should be written upon our foreheads in letters of fire. But maybe we are merely fulfilling our destiny. I cannot tell; it’s all a mystery.” She closed the book with a sigh.

XVIII THE LITTLE DOCTOR

XIX A BRIEF MESSAGE FOR MRS. BENSON

“We’ll not be able to advance another mile unless something can be done to cure the cattle’s feet,” exclaimed the Captain the next morning, when his teamsters came together for consultation.

“I have been studying the case during the night,” said Mrs. McAlpin, who was preparing breakfast. “It is cool and pleasant now, but it will be terribly hot by nine o’clock. We must treat the sore feet of our sufferers to a heroic cure, and get them out on the range, away from the sand of the public road, before the sun gets over the hills. We can’t drive a hoof over the road to-day.”

“I’d like to know how in blazes we’re going to doctor the cattle’s feet without medicine,” cried Hal. “We haven’t even enough o’ ‘Number Six’ on hand to give my off-leader’s left foot a thorough treatment.”

“I guess we have everything we need,” replied the Little Doctor. “Bring me your fullest tar-bucket. There, that’s encouraging. Got any turpentine, Captain? That’s good. Now bring me an iron pot, Susannah. Here’s a good bed of glowing coals. There,” she cried, as she emptied the liquid tar into the iron kettle. “Now let’s add the turpentine, and I’ll heat the mixture as slowly as possible over these red-hot coals. It is fortunate that the flames are dead, otherwise we might set our dish on fire and spoil our broth. Have you any oakum?”

“Not a bit. Who’d ’a’ thought we’d need oakum on a land-lubbers’ journey like this?” said the Captain.

The Little Doctor knitted her brows. “Have you some Manila rope and a big pan?” she asked.

“We have mother’s clothes-line, if that will do,” said Jean.

“Yo’ uns not gwine to empty dat stuff in my dish-pan, honey?” exclaimed Susannah, in indignant protest, as Mary was fetching the pan.

Mrs. McAlpin laughed.

The seething mixture was lifted dexterously from the coals in the nick of time to prevent an accident by fire. It was then emptied into the dish-pan and stirred to the consistency of blackstrap,—a commodity with which the wayfarers were familiar,—and pieces of the tarred rope were made ready for placing between the doctored hoofs.

“We’ll try our Little Doctor’s remedy on Scotty’s off-leader first,” said Hal. “If it should kill him, there will be only one dead, and he’s nearly dead anyhow.”

The poor beast bellowed pitifully as his hoof was plunged into the almost scalding mixture; but like the lassoed victim of a branding iron, he could not get away, and each hoof received its treatment in its turn.

By the doctor’s order, a tent had been cut into convenient patches; and the seared feet of the afflicted brute, after a liberal supply of the flour of sulphur had been added to the tar and turpentine, were securely wrapped with the pieces and bound with rope, to protect them from the dust and gravel of the roads.

By the time that each disabled animal had been subjected to this heroic treatment, it was long past noon, and the Captain decided to turn the teams back upon the range for the remainder of the day.

“May I take a ride on Sukie, daddie dear?” asked Jean. “I’ll find good grass for her, and plenty of it.”

“Yes, Jean. Take her to yonder ravine, where you see a clump of cottonwoods. You’ll be pretty sure to find some tender grass at their roots.”

Jean leaped nimbly to the saddle and cantered leisurely away.

Suddenly a bronzed and handsome horseman rode up beside her and lifted his hat,—a large sombrero, surmounting a pair of square shoulders that sported a gay serape.

“Good-morning, little miss. Or would you call it afternoon? I had stopped under the cottonwoods to graze my horse, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to accost you. Going to California?”

“No; to Oregon.”

“A God-forsaken country that. Rains thirteen months in every year.”

“Have you ever been there?”

The stranger shook his head. “I’ve had rain enough in England to do me for the rest of my life.”

“A little of the Oregon rains we’ve read about would be a godsend if we could have it now,” said Jean, mopping her perspiring face with the curtain of her sunbonnet, and glancing ruefully at the brazen sky.

“May I ride beside you for a little distance?”

“If we keep in sight of the wagons, sir.”

“You’re not afraid of me, I hope?”

He was close beside her now, so close he could have grasped her bridle-rein.

“Afraid? Of course not. I am not afraid of any gentleman.”

“Do you belong to yonder camp?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And there are two ladies travelling with you,—a widow and her daughter?”

“There are a grass widow and a nigger, sir.”

“Now see here, little one,” and his voice grew harsh and loud, “you’ve been coached; that’s evident. Don’t be frightened. I don’t mean to harm you. But I am no longer deceived. Will you do me a favor?”

He was reading her face anxiously.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“Will you carry a note for me to Mrs. Benson?”

“I don’t know, sir. See! They’re bringing in the cattle. I must hurry back to camp.”

“Wait a little, miss. I must write a note.”

“I haven’t promised to give it to anybody, sir.”

“But you’ll do it,” he said, thrusting a few hastily written, unsealed lines into her hand. “Give that to the young lady’s mother. I feel that I can trust you. Here’s a dollar. You will not read the note, nor say a word about it to any one?”

“You can trust me, sir, but I do not want your dollar.”

“Keep it, child.”

He wheeled and was gone. She watched him disappear in a cloud of dust, and hid the note away in the bosom of her dress.

“He trusted me, and I won’t read it, though I’d be glad to know its contents,” she whispered to herself. “Why does Fate make me the depositary of other people’s affairs and then burden me with secrecy? I’m only an ignorant girl; but I know enough about the secrets of more than one of our fellow-travellers to explode bombs in several directions if I’d tell!”

“I am overjoyed at the success of my first practice as a veterinary doctor,” said Mrs. McAlpin the next day.

“We’re all glad,” said the Captain. “Small use any man would have for this world if it weren’t for the women to help him out under difficulties.”

“Poor Captain! How he misses his wife!” she thought, as she sought the wagon where Scotty lay.

“I’d get well a great deal faster if I had you for a nurse, Daphne,” he said appealingly.

“Nature is doing her best for you. She’s mending your bones thoroughly. If we patched you up in too big a hurry, we’d soon be in trouble again.”

“But I feel like a chained eagle, lying here.”

“Captain Ranger is making you a pair of crutches, Mr. Burns. You’ll soon be out again on your well foot, if you obey orders. Where’s mamma?”

“In the shadow of the wagon, yonder.”

Mrs. Benson was resting in the shade, indulging in a silent reverie. “Are all the teachings of my life to be overthrown?” she said, as she thrust a note into her pocket and buried her face in her hands. “Can it be true that Daphne was right and I was wrong? What will people say? Daphne has good principles, but she’s as unsentimental as a Mandan squaw. She has no more romance in her make-up than black Susannah. Yet,” and a fluttering hope welled up in her heart, “she’s a true and faithful daughter. I would to Heaven that all the people in the world were as good.”

She produced her treasured note again, and read it stealthily.

“Yes, yes! it can be managed, and none of the curious will ever be the wiser,” she said, after due reflection. “It is indeed fortunate that he’s been compelled by the law of entail to take his mother’s name. Nobody will know him in Oregon.”

Mrs. McAlpin found Scotty at camping time with a voracious appetite and a temper like a caged bear.

“Where have you kept yourself through all this blistering afternoon?” he asked, munching his food heartily.

“I can’t stay with all my patients all the time, Mr. Burns, especially as so many of them are quadrupeds, with the hoof-ail.”

“I suppose, then, that I am to be classed as a biped, with the leg-ail.”

“Exactly.”

“Ouch! oh!” he exclaimed with a grimace, as the knitting bones gave a sudden twinge, reminding him that they were awake and on duty. “These infernal bandages are loose again, I hope.”

“Your bandages are doing nicely, sir. The Captain will have your crutches ready in a day or two. Then you can take some exercise.”

“What have you done with those hideous black garments, Daphne?”

“Do you like these gray ones better?”

“Yes, I like the gray ones better.”

“So does this abounding dust. My black clothes were getting rusty, so I made a contribution of them to the water nymphs of the Platte.”

“Why did you wear those weeds?”

“They served my purpose, sir.”

“You almost provoke me into profanity, Mrs. McAlpin; you are so mysteriously non-committal.”

“Glad to hear it. Men don’t feel like swearing when death is staring them in the face.”

“Your supper is getting cold, and Mrs. Benson says you must hurry up.” The intruder, as usual, was Jean.

“I will see you later, Mr. Burns,” said Mrs. McAlpin, and she ran away, laughing.

“You seem very happy this evening, mamma,” she said, as with cup and plate in hand she seated herself on a wagon-tongue.

Mrs. Benson blushed. “Why don’t you eat?” she asked, evading her daughter’s question.

“I hardly know. But I am out of sorts. Just think of men coming out on a journey like this, with ailing wives and unborn children, with no adequate preparation for their needs! I left one woman, less than two hours ago, with newly born twins, and a yearling squalling like mad at the foot of her bed. The mother was as docile as a kitten, and a hundred times more helpless.”

“Where was the father?”

“Oh, he was shambling around, helpless and in the way. He was kindness personified; but he was as useless as a monkey. When woman’s true history shall have been written, her part in the upbuilding of this nation will astound the world. I’ve seen heroines on this journey who far outrank the Alexanders, Washingtons, and Napoleons of any of our school histories. Yonder’s a herald coming to announce another case! Will you accompany me, mamma? I can ask Captain Ranger to stay with Mr. Burns.”

“Not to-night, Daphne. I am very tired. And you know I have no patience with a woman doctor, anyway. Women were seen and not heard when I was a girl.”

XX THE TEAMSTERS DESERT

XXI AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER

“Oh, this wonderful Western country!” wrote Jean in her diary, under date of midnight, July 4. “After travelling so long on the banks of the Platte that we had come to look upon it as a familiar friend, we left it to the southward and turned our course up the valley of the Sweet Water, through a succession of low, wooded hills. This little river, though not more than a hundred feet wide, is quite deep, and runs like a mill-race. The water is as clear as ether, and agreeably cold.

“Nobody can conceive the vastness of this country, or imagine its future possibilities, until he has crossed the great unsettled part of this continent to the westward and seen it for himself.

“Some days we move for many hours over great stretches of alluvial soil, which only needs the impulse of cultivation to make it yield of the fruits of the earth like magic. Again, we are in the midst of big fields of crude saleratus, or salt, or sulphur. Now and then our cattle are compelled to wade through an alkali swamp, suggesting more foot-ail; but our Little Doctor says that danger is past for this year; she has not stated why, and maybe she doesn’t know.

“We encamped last night near Independence Rock,—a huge pile of gray basalt, covering an area of perhaps ten acres, and looking to be about three hundred feet high. Its sides are formed of great irregular bowlders, worn smooth by the warring elements of ages.

“July 5. Yesterday was Independence Day, and as we had camped near Independence Rock, daddie laid over to celebrate.

“About noon, Mary, Marjorie, and I concluded that we would climb the rock to its summit, carrying with us the only star-spangled banner the train could boast. But our scheme failed through the fickleness and fury of the same elements that have been smoothing the surface of the rock during the ages gone.

“We had climbed over halfway to the top when a low, dense cloud, as blue-black as a kettle of indigo dye, enveloped us. It came upon us so suddenly that we hardly realized our danger till we were surrounded by semi-darkness in the midst of a pelting hailstorm. We retreated so blindly and hastily that it is a miracle we didn’t break our necks.

“Thunder and lightning followed, or rather accompanied the hail, and were succeeded by a deluge of rain. Sudden squalls of wind would fairly lift us off our feet at times as we hurried downward, making the descent doubly perilous. But the storm soon spent its fury, leaving the air as clear and sweet as a chime of bells.

“A roaring fire welcomed us at camp, by which we warmed our chilled marrow-bones and dried our sodden toggery.

“Daddie scolded; Mame charged our mishap all to me; Marj blamed both of us, and excused herself. It is the way of the world, or of most people in it, but it is sometimes very provoking. I hadn’t thought of attempting the climb till the other girls proposed it; but I took the brunt of the blame, and, as usual, got all the scolding.

“The storm wouldn’t let us try to float the flag, but it got very wet, and we had our labor for our pains.

“Sally and Susannah prepared a Fourth of July banquet of antelope steaks, to go with our regulation diet of beans and coffee. After dinner Mrs. McAlpin sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ the rest of us joining in the chorus. Susannah sang a lot of negro melodies, and George Washington danced for us, his white teeth shining, and eyeballs gleaming. Hal read the Declaration of Independence, and daddie ‘made the eagle scream.’

“He was in the midst of his oration, and I was wondering where all the men of valor came from, seeing they had had no mothers to assist in getting up this spread-eagle scheme we call a republic, when I was compelled to leave the crowd and poise myself on a wet wagon-tongue to write the thing up. Scotty, who is still on crutches, delivered an oration on the side, of which I heard but little, owing to my banishment.

“But I won’t always be so meek and silent on the Fourth of July. I’ll write a Declaration of Independence for women some day.

“Daddie burned some powder after dark, ‘to amuse the children,’ he said, but I noticed that the men enjoyed the noise even more than the children did. Poor Bobbie got some powder burns about the face, and Sadie and the babies gave us a squalling chorus, prompted by fright, causing me to wonder why men must always celebrate our patriotism with the emblems of death and destruction.”

On July 6 she wrote: “We have reached the edges of the Rocky Mountains now; and as we climb slowly and almost imperceptibly toward their summits, our road winds in and out along the meandering bases of a great divide, down which many little streams of icy water dash with foam and roar, forever in a hurry, always trying to go somewhere, and never reaching any settled goal.

“Now and then we get glimpses of distant summits, but we are reaching them by an ascent so gradual that daddie says we shall not realize that we have crossed the great divide till we see the water has changed its course from east to west.

“We passed a trading-post to-day, belonging to a company having its headquarters at Salt Lake. The men in charge wore big sombreros, buckskin trousers, and moccasins of buffalo hide. They all smoked incessantly and affected the airs of the genus cowboy, or vaquero of the plains, of whom we often see specimens roving over hill and plain on horseback, their shoulders covered with gayly colored serapes, flapping in the wind like wings.

“We pass daily from six to a dozen graves, but not so newly made as those noticed heretofore; so we conclude the cholera is abating.

“There, old Journal! I’ve done my level best to write you up to date. But it’s like climbing these mountains,—uphill work, and dreadfully monotonous!”

“Did you buy a fresh stock of provisions, Captain?” asked Sally O’Dowd, as they were preparing to leave the trading-post which Jean had mentioned, after he had held a long parley with a big, bronzed, and heavily bearded mountaineer, who was strikingly handsome despite his peculiar make-up.

“Yes, Sally. I bought a couple o’ hundred pounds o’ flour, for which I paid a twenty-dollar gold-piece.”

“I was feeding the children, and didn’t get a chance to make my purchases at the proper time. Won’t you hold the teams back a few minutes for me?”

“Yes, but hurry up.”

“Let me have a hundred pounds of flour, sir,” she said, approaching the counter, behind which the trader stood, smoking a huge meerschaum.

“Anything else?”

“Yes; the balance of this twenty-dollar gold-piece in dried peaches, please.”

In filling her order, the trader raised the cloth partition of the tent to reach his base of supplies, and in the middle of the tent Sally espied an unkempt squaw and half-a-dozen dusky children.

“I’ll be compelled to hurry,” she said, as he leisurely weighed her fruit. “Captain Ranger is always demanding haste.”

The trader started suddenly, his face blanching.

“Where does your train hail from?” he asked.

“From the middle West, sir. We are going from the West to the West.” The trader balanced two sacks of Salt Lake flour on his shoulders, and grasping the smaller package of peaches, strode out hurriedly toward the wagon near which Captain Ranger was standing, impatient to be gone.

“These purchases are for the lady, sir. Where will you have them dumped?”

“Any place where there’s room, and don’t let any grass grow under your feet!”

“The lady tells me your name is Ranger, sir.”

“Yes. What of it?”

“Will you walk with me a little way ahead of the wagons? I have something important to say to you alone.”

“We are scarce of drivers,” replied the Captain, hesitating. “Two of my men are out hunting.”

“I can drive,” exclaimed Jean, reaching for the whip, which she handled with the skill of a freighter, finishing her flourishes with a series of snaps at the end of a deerskin cracker, like the explosion of a bunch of fire-crackers.

“If we’ll take this cut-off, we’ll come out a mile or more ahead of the wagons,” said the trader. “Then we can rest by the roadside till they catch up.”

The Captain strode by his side in silence.

“Don’t you know me, John?” asked the stranger, grasping him by the arm, and speaking in a hoarse whisper.

Captain Ranger eyed him earnestly, his cheeks paling.

“Can it be possible that you are—Joe?” he asked, seizing his hand with a vise-like grip.

“I am indeed your brother Joe,—an outlaw, now and always.”

“No, you are not an outlaw; the fellow over whom you got into that trouble is alive and well. You’d have got out of that scrape all right if you hadn’t jumped your bail and left all the rest of us in the lurch. Why didn’t you stand your trial, like a man?”

John Ranger’s feelings overcame him, and he sank upon the ground, filled with old-time memories. He buried his face in his hands. Time and distance faded away, and he saw, with eyes of memory, the gentle, fading face of his toiling, uncomplaining wife, whose life had been for years a sacrifice to penury through the debt entailed by this brother’s cowardice.

“Do you mean to tell me that Elmer Edson is not dead?”

The question called him back to present conditions with a sudden start.

“Elmer Edson is not dead, but Annie Ranger is!” he said hoarsely. “We had to leave her precious dust in the ground away back yonder in the Black Hills. We started together on this terrible journey, hoping to escape the consequences of that awful mortgage with which you left us in the lurch. She had denied herself many comforts and all the luxuries of life for a dozen years to feed the ever-eating cankerworm of interest. No, Joe, you didn’t kill Edson; but through my efforts to help you out of a trouble in which you should never have been entangled, you became accessory to the lingering death of my wife.”

“Don’t reproach me, John! I loved Annie like a sister. I did indeed. She was a sister to me from the day she became your wife. You don’t or won’t see how it grieves me to hear of her death.”

“Why didn’t you write to us, like a man?”

The brother had risen to his feet, and was pacing nervously to and fro, whittling aimlessly on a bit of sagebrush.

“I was afraid to write. There was a price upon my head, as you have no need to be informed.”

“Yes, Joe; and to pay the interest on that price was the bane of my existence for a dozen years. But you can write now. Our dear mother—God bless her!—would forget all the terrible past if she could hold you in her arms once more. It is your duty to return at once, and settle, as well as you can, for the trouble you have caused. You ought at least to lift that accursed mortgage from the farm, and let Lije Robinson and Sister Mary and our parents spend the remainder of their lives in peace. You are a free man, and can go where you please.”

“But I am not a free man, John. Even with that horrible load off my shoulders, I still am bound, hand and foot.”

“Are you married, Joe?”

“Yes, John. You see, when a fellow is in hiding among the Indians, with a price set upon his head, and is therefore afraid to go home, he’s nothing but a fugitive from justice; he expects to spend his life there, and never see the face of another white woman; and when there are scores of pretty Indian girls in sight—”

John Ranger jumped to his feet, his fists clinched and his eyes glaring.

“You don’t mean to tell me that my brother is married to—to a—squaw?”

There was ineffable scorn in his tone and manner. It was now Joe’s turn to sink upon the ground and bury his face in his hands. When he again looked at his brother, there was an expression of age and anguish upon his face which had not been there before.

“I am the husband of an Indian woman, and the father of seven half-breed children,” he said with the air of a guilty man on trial for his life. “But there are extenuating circumstances, John. My wife was no common squaw. If you care for me at all, you will not apply that epithet to the mother of my children. She was the daughter of a Mandan chief, who had large dealings with the Hudson Bay Company, and who sent her to England to be educated. You’d hardly think it to see her now, though; for the Indian women fall back into aboriginal customs when they leave the haunts of civilization to return to their people and take up life, especially as mothers, among their own kind and kin. At least, that is what Wahnetta did.”

John Ranger groaned. “My God! has it come to this?” he cried, looking the picture of despair.

“If you had been in my place, you would have married her yourself, John. Nobody has a right to judge another; for no one knows what he will do till he is tried.”

“Don’t you regret the marriage, Joe?”

“It is too late for regrets. The deed is done, and I cannot get away from my fate. Shall we part as friends and brothers? Or is there an impassable gulf between us?”

There was an unspoken appeal in his tone, far stronger than words, which John Ranger remembered for many a day. But he refused his brother’s proffered hand, and said hoarsely, as he sprang to his feet: “Don’t, at your peril, let anybody know that you are my brother!”

He wheeled upon his heel and was gone.

XXII THE SQUAW MAN

XXIII THE SQUAW ASSERTS HER RIGHTS

XXIV A MORMON WOMAN

XXV JEAN LOSES HER WAY

XXVI LE-LE, THE INDIAN GIRL

“Nika klosh cloochman!” clucked the Indian girl.

Jean looked at her inquiringly.

“Nika wake cumtux Siwah wa-wa?” asked the dusky maiden, offering her hand.

“She says she is a good Indian girl, and asks if you understand her,” said Siwash, who was leisurely putting the room to rights. “She’s my little sister; heap good. Ugh! Nika speak jargon?”

“No, Siwash.”

But the maiden’s manner, though coy, was assuring, and Jean clasped her hand eagerly. She was a graceful, nimble, and pretty creature; and Jean thought with a sigh of regret of the ugly transformation awaiting her under the cares and burdens of maturity and maternity, when, no longer like “the wild gazelle, with its nimble feet,” she would resemble other elderly Indian women.

“What is your name, little girl?” she asked, as the maiden dropped gracefully upon the hearth at her feet.

“Nika wake cumtux Boston wa-wa.”

“She says she doesn’t understand you,” grunted Siwash.

“Ah-to-ke-nika a-it sewar.”

“She says she has a good heart.”

“Why doesn’t she speak her name?”

The girl crouched low on the hearth and spread her shapely brown fingers before the dying embers.

“Nika Le-Le. Nika caid.”

“She says her name is Le-Le, and she is a slave.”

“Your sister? and a slave?”

“I, too, was a slave,” said Siwash, “but I bought my freedom; and when I get ten horses of my own, I will buy Le-Le’s. Could you help us? Your father is good.”

“A good heart isn’t always accompanied by a full purse,” thought Jean.

“Who imagines that he has a property interest in your sister?” she asked aloud.

“Our chief, Tyee of the Nootkas. He captured both of us in a war with our people, the Seattles, many, many moons ago.”

“Ugh! Way-siyah! Whulge!” cried the girl, writhing like a captured eel.

“Mac-kam-mah-shish, copa-nika?”

“She asks if you cannot buy her.”

“Nowitka! Mika! Closh potlatch hy-u chickamin?”

“God knows I wish I could buy her,” said Jean.

No painter could have done justice to the varying expressions that alternately lighted and clouded the Madonna-like face of Le-Le, as she strained every nerve to comprehend the conversation. And when at last every vestige of her awakening hope had settled into a conviction of failure, she buried her face in her hands, and, bending forward, shook her black abundant hair over her face and body to the floor, and uttered a piercing wail, making Jean’s blood curdle.

“Le-Le’s cold!” cried the girl, crouching lower, till the embers singed the ends of her straying locks.

“Don’t cry, Le-Le dear. You have come to spend the night with me,” exclaimed Jean, seizing her gently by the arm.

“Nika wake cumtux,” cried the girl.

“You have come to sleep,” pointing to the bed in the corner.

“Nowitka! sleep! Nika cumtux.”

“She understands,” said Jean, rising and turning to Siwash. “Good-night.”

Jean was too full of contending emotions for sleep. She lingered long upon the hearth. “I could stay here always,” she exclaimed in a low voice, but loud enough to awaken the wary maiden from her slumbers on the bed. But the mutual vocabulary of the twain did not admit of satisfactory conversation, and the Indian girl sank back into unconsciousness.

As she sat there thinking, a pair of kindly eyes seemed watching her every movement with a tender devotion that made her heart beat wildly. “I wish I’d never teased or laughed at Mame,” she sighed, as the Reverend Thomas Rogers flitted past her inner vision. “What is Life but Love? And who and what is Love but God? And what is God but the wonderful Mystery that is both Life and Love?”

Le-Le was away in dreamland, on the enchanted shores of Whulge,—the Indian name for the magnificent body of water known to the civilized world as Puget Sound.

“This is holy ground,” cried Jean, so softly to herself that none but Cupid heard. “These lowly walls will be a sacred memory to me through all the rest of my life. But life will mean worse than nothing to me without my one hero. Must I go away to-morrow? Oh, my God! can I ever live again, away from this lodge in the wilderness? Guard and guide my love, O Spirit of Life, and shield him with Thine everlasting arms!”

Then, recollecting that she had not prayed, as usual, for the dear ones in camp, she lovingly invoked divine protection for each and all, and was soon in a sound, refreshing sleep.

“Yes, daddie dear, I’m safe and sound,” she cried, as she awoke to consciousness, to find that the sun was shining and her father’s familiar voice was calling her name in vigorous tones at the door.

Jean hastily donned her clothing, which, simple as it was, excited the envy of Le-Le. “Mika klosh, cultus potlatch?” she said inquiringly, as she fondled a blue-and-white neck-ribbon, which was not over clean.

“Cultus potlatch?” she asked again.

Although Jean was not certain as to the maiden’s meaning, she gave her the ribbon and tried to think her excusable.

“Did you want it? Was that what you meant?”

“Nowitka! Cultus potlatch! Hy-as klosh!”

Jean tied the ribbon in a double bow-knot around the girl’s tawny neck, and Le-Le, studying its effect in the little mirror on the wall, exclaimed with a low chuckle, “Hi-yu klosh!”

“Oh, daddie darling,” exclaimed Jean, opening the door and springing to his embrace, “did you think your historian was lost?”

“Yes; or worse!” replied her father, his anger displacing anxiety as soon as he saw that she was safe. “This isn’t the first time you’ve lost yourself on this trip. If it happens again, I’ll—”

“Don’t chide or punish the young lady, please!” interposed her obliging host. “If you had seen how badly frightened and anxious she was last night when she found herself left alone among strangers, you’d forgive her without a word.”

“That’s so, daddie,” sobbed Jean.

“I surrendered my country-seat to her, and sent for this little Indian maiden to keep her company.”

There was a touch of humor in his tone, augmented by a kindly smile, which sent the hot blood into the truant’s face and made her heart beat hard.

“Won’t you thank the gentleman, daddie? I might have been murdered but for him.”

“Of course I thank the gentleman; but that doesn’t lessen your offence. You deserve a good thrashing!”

“Which I’ll never get, daddie dear!” Then turning to her host, she added, “Daddie never whips us, but he threatens us sometimes.”

“I think I owe you a little explanation, Captain,” said the host. “I might have risked taking your daughter across the river in a rowboat last night if it had been safe to trust her on the other side after dark. There are Indians camped along the way; and, though they are peaceful enough when they are compelled to be, they are not trustworthy under all circumstances. But my servant, Siwash, has breakfast ready and waiting. I can’t allow you to go on till you have broken your fast.”

The host conducted his guests into the dugout to a table loaded with a bountiful supply of coffee, fish, venison, hot biscuit, beans, and wapatoes,—the last two dishes being deftly exhumed from the depths of a bed of ashes, where they had been cooked to perfection during the night.

“Your servant is an artist in his business,” said the Captain, in praise of the food.

“Yes, Captain. I found him a slave, and, seeing he was superior to most of his class, I purchased him for what you would consider a trifle. Then, as time wore on, I encouraged him to buy his freedom from me. He is now trying to purchase his sister; but he finds it slow work, as her value increases as she gets older and better able to dig camas and tan buffalo hides.”

“It is awful to enslave the Indians!” cried Jean. “The Government ought to stop it!”

“Slavery among the Indians is no worse than among the negroes,” said her host, with an admiring smile.

“Women are not responsible for slavery, sir,” said Jean.

“But women are very ardent defenders of slavery wherever it exists, my daughter,” added her father, gravely.

“That’s because they themselves are servants without wages, daddie. Mother used to say that the worst slave-drivers she ever saw down South were the overseers who were slaves themselves. Women are not angels, but they are doing the best they can without political power.”

“I don’t know but you are right, Miss Ranger. Women ought to have power. My sovereign is a woman, and we have no slavery in England.”

“Thank you for giving me the best of the argument, Mr. Ashleigh. But I see that daddie is impatient, and we must be going.”

“I hope you’ll pardon me for referring to a proposition you made last evening, although you may have changed your mind, Miss Ranger. You proposed writing to my mother. Will you do it?”

“Ask daddie.”

“I have no objection, of course,” said her father, “if it is understood that I shall see the letters.”

“Of course,” responded Jean.

“May I have the pleasure of corresponding with your daughter, sir?”

“Yes, if I can see the correspondence.”

This was a greater concession than Jean had dared to hope for.

“Thank you, Captain Ranger. I am sure my mother will be delighted with the young lady’s letters. She has awakened my dormant sense of filial duty and inspired me with a determination to return to it. I shall not neglect my mother again.”

“Come, Jean! It is high time we were off!”

As her father spoke, the possible termination to this peculiar meeting gave him a heartache.

The last good-byes were spoken, and Captain Ranger heaved a sigh of relief. “It will be out of sight, out of mind, with both of ’em in less than a month!” he said, sotto voce.

XXVII JEAN TRANSFORMED

“Where did you spend the night, Jean?” asked Mary.

“In heaven,” answered Jean, her cheeks glowing.

“Nonsense.”

“I mean exactly what I say, Mame. I lodged with an Indian princess, and ate my meals with a member of the British aristocracy. The princess couldn’t speak English, but her brother acted as interpreter, so we got on all right. She is a slave of an old chief of the Seattles. I wish I had the money; I’d buy her, and send her back to her people.”

“You might as well wish you owned the moon!”

“I own the earth,—as much of it as I need. Everybody does.”

“Then the most of us get cheated out of our patrimony,” laughed Sally O’Dowd.

“I wish you could all have had a chance to look in on me and my princess last night; we were as snug as two bugs in a rug. The crickets sang on the hearth, just as they used to do of nights in the old home. The wind roared like a storm at sea, and the rush of the river was grand. I can shut my eyes and live it all over again.”

“You’ve gone stark mad!” laughed Hal.

“As mad as a March hare,” said Sally O’Dowd. “I know the symptoms from sad experience.”

“You ought to be repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Why are you not sorry?” asked Mary.

“Because in losing myself I found my fate.”

“Was it an Indian brave in a breech-cloth, with a bow and arrow, a shirt-collar, and a pair of spurs?” asked Hal.

The roar of laughter that greeted this query made Jean fairly frantic. “You’re worse than a lot of savages yourselves,” she cried. “If I had my way, I’d go back to that lodge in the wilderness and stay there!”

Jean climbed into the wagon, buried her face in her hands, and abandoned herself to a deep, absorbing reverie. “Oh, mother dear,” she said softly, “if you could speak, you would sympathize with me, I am sure. If I only had your love and sympathy, I wouldn’t care what anybody else might think or say,—not even daddie. A new light and a new life have come into my soul. Though a cruel fate may separate us through this life, we shall always be one. But God made us for each other, and we shall surely meet again.”

There was no longer any game to be had for the shooting; the little extra food the company could purchase from the Indians, or from the few white borderers at infrequent trading-posts, was held at almost prohibitive prices. Dead cattle continued to abound at the roadside, filling the air with an intolerable stench through every hour of the day and night. No camping-spot could be found where the surroundings were not thus polluted. Captain Ranger’s teams were giving out from sheer exhaustion, induced by starvation rather than overwork, and two or more of his weaker oxen were dying daily.

“I’ll break the horrible monotony of this diary,” said Jean at last, “or I’ll die trying.” And for many days her jottings were confined to minute, and sometimes glowing, descriptions of snow-capped mountains, bald hills, tree-studded lesser heights, and vast and desolate wastes of sand and sage and rocks. Sterile valleys, verdant banks of little rivers, mighty streams, and running brooks received attention, in their turn, from her pen, the whole making a record surprisingly akin to the journals kept by Lewis and Clark, and left on record half a century earlier, of the existence of which she had no knowledge. There was one theme of which her father enforced daily mention,—a regular account of the scarcity of grass and game and wood and water.

A murder by the roadside, and the consequent trial, conviction, and execution of the murderer by a “provisional government” temporarily organized for the purpose received a painstaking record, as did also a difficulty with some thieving and beggarly Indians, whose hostility was awakened by the rashness of one of a trio of bachelors, who were encamped one night near the Ranger wagons. Captain Ranger made the Indians a pacifying speech, but only by the aid of some trifling present among the women of the tribe, and a gift of a pair of blankets to their chieftain, was the impending danger averted. A double guard was placed outside that night; and, for several nights following, a corral was made of the wagons in the shape of a hollow square, into which the cattle were driven to rest and sleep.

The now famous Soda Springs, known to the commercial world as Idanha, next caught the coloring of Jean’s pen. The different geysers rising from the tops of the gutter-sided mounds of soda-stone were carefully and graphically described. The crater of a long-extinct volcano received special mention. The bad water of alkali-infected streams and swamps, left by slowly evaporating pools and ponds, through which cattle and wagons labored with the greatest difficulty; the dreary wastes of sagebrush, sand, and rock, through which everybody who was able to walk at all was compelled to trudge on foot; the devastations of prairie fires; the endless wastes of stunted sage and greasewood; the struggling aspens on the margins of tiny streams,—all met graphic and detailed delineation, such as nobody can appreciate to the full who to-day traverses these vast and wondrous wilds in a railway coach, or gazes upon them from a Pullman car.

“Captain Ranger,” said Sally O’Dowd one evening, “do you notice that Jean is growing strikingly beautiful?”

They were halting for the night after a day’s hard drive; and the jaded oxen, weak and sick from the combined effects of hard labor, cruel whippings, and an insufficient supply of grass and water, were necessarily the chief objects of his attention and solicitude. A broken wagon-tongue added to his perplexities, as good timber for repairs was not available; and the mileage of the day’s travel had been much shortened by the necessity of stopping to mend the break, or, as the Little Doctor not inaptly said, “to reduce the compound fracture of a most important part of the wagon’s anatomy.”

“All my girls are handsome,” said the Captain, as he tested the strength of a splice on the broken tongue by jumping upon it with both feet.

“But Jean has been transformed, Captain. The change has been growing upon her daily since the date of that Green River episode. The child is hopelessly infatuated with that young Englishman.”

“Much good it’ll do her,” he exclaimed, mopping his brow with a soiled bandanna. “It is painfully evident that three of my girls will soon be women. If their mother were here, it wouldn’t be so hard to manage them. No, Sally, I’ve noticed no particular change in Jean.”

“Because you are too busy for observation, sir. She hasn’t been a particle like herself of late.”

The Captain hurried away to his work, muttering, “Nonsense!”

Jean had seated herself on the most distant wagon-tongue, her battered, ink-bespattered journal in her lap, her pen in one hand, her inkstand in the other, her knitted brows and glowing face expressing deep concentration of thought and feeling.

Captain Ranger, having finished his work of repairs, dropped wearily upon an axle-tree, and, for the first time in several days, prompted doubtless by the words of Sally O’Dowd, took a long and searching look at Jean.

“Yes, indeed; Sally is right,” he soliloquized. “Jean is developing a wonderfully beautiful style of womanhood. What a pity it is that she cannot have her mother at the very time when she needs her most!”

Pangs of anxiety akin to jealousy shot through his heart as he studied her features; her downcast eyes were hidden by the heavy lashes as she bent over her work. “She doesn’t resemble her mother as Mary does, but she must be the almost exact counterpart of what my mother was at her age,” he mused, as he noted for the first time the ripening lips, the rosy and yet transparent hue of her cheeks, and the sunny sheen of her hair. He was surprised that he had not before observed the soft, exquisite contour of her face and neck, the full rounded bust, and the shapely development of her feet and hands.

As he sat watching the lights and shadows of thought and feeling that played upon her features, the remembrance of the girlhood of her mother, whose arduous married years had all been spent in his service, arose before him with startling power. “Dear, patient, tender, self-sacrificing Annie!” he exclaimed, as he arose from his rocking seat and strode away in the gloaming. “I never half appreciated your worth until I lost you for ever!”

“No, not for ever,” softly sung a still, small voice in the depths of his inner consciousness. “Do not reproach yourself. All eternity is yet to be.”

Jean felt, rather than saw, the pressure of his eyes, and half divined his thoughts. She felt the telltale blood as it rushed unbidden to her cheeks, and was seized with a great longing to throw herself into his arms and breathe out the full secret of her great awakening in his ears; but something in his manner repelled her advances, and she withdrew more than ever into herself.

“O Love!” she cried in a tone so low and sweet that none but a messenger from the Unseen might hear, “how ungovernable art thou, and how incomprehensible! The worldly-wise may decry thee; the misanthropic may deride thee; the vulgar may make of thy existence an unholy jest; the selfish and ignorant may trample upon thee; human laws may crush thee; but thou remainest still a thing of life, to fill thy votaries with a holy joy and endow them with the very attributes of God. An imperishable entity art thou, O Love! Thou art interblended with every fibre of my being now, and I accept thee as a sweet fulfilment of my earthly destiny.”

Of course Jean was young and fond and inexperienced and foolish; and these chronicles would offer her rhapsodies as the utterances of no worldly-wise oracle. But her thoughts were fresh and pure; and who shall say they did not emanate from the very fountain of life itself, whose presence she could sense but could not understand?

She wandered off toward the rushing, maddening torrent of Snake River, whose music had for her, in these moods of introspection, but one interpretation.

“Daddie may denounce, Hal and Mame may tease, and Marjorie,—yes, and all the world deride me,” she said, as she sat upon a bowlder and abandoned herself to reverie; “but henceforth there shall be nothing in this world for me to cherish but Love and its handmaiden, Duty.”

Snake River, full at this point of jutting rocky islands, through which the foaming, roaring waters rushed like a thousand mill-races on parade, dashed madly against its banks beneath her feet, and rushing on again, roared and laughed and shrieked and sang. Lichens clung to the uplifted rocks, which, hoary with age and massive in proportions, held vigil in the midst of the eternal grandeur. Mountains clambered over mountains in the dimly lighted distance, and reaching to the red horizon, overlooked the Pacific seas.

“The antelope and elk are gone,” she thought, “and we are lone watchers amid the eternal vastness. But the sage-hen, the lizard, the owl, and the jaybird linger; and yonder, among the everlasting rocks, are the homes of the Indian, the rattlesnake, the badger, and the wolf.”

Rustling footsteps startled her. “Why, it’s daddie!” she exclaimed, her heart beating audibly. “I thought you were an Indian or a bear!”

“You oughtn’t to go off alone, my daughter. There is some hidden danger threatening us; I feel, but cannot divine it. Something is going wrong somewhere or somehow. Let’s hurry back to camp.”

“You’re the last person on earth I’d suspect of giving way to a morbid fancy, daddie dear. You must be very tired.”

“It isn’t that, my daughter. I am sad because you have allowed your heart to stray, and I do need you so much—so much!”

She answered not a word.

XXVIII THE STAMPEDE

XXIX IN THE LAND OF DROUTH

XXX BOBBIE GOES TO HIS MOTHER

Jean’s aching tooth suffered a relapse, and the suppuration that ensued made her seriously ill.

On the 14th of August her father again made an entry:—

“Five of our escort have left us, taking with them a wagon-bed left by the wayside by somebody whose cattle have died or strayed. They made a clumsy boat of the square-bottomed thing; and with this frail craft, which they successfully launched in the tortuous waters of the Snake, they expect to find safe navigation to its confluence with the Columbia. Although it was a relief to get rid of some of them, chiefly because they thought they knew so much more about my business than I was able to learn, I am apprehensive of results solely on their account. Snake River doesn’t look to me like a safe stream to be trusted. But it was a relief to see them go, because we are yet many hundreds of miles from our goal, and our supplies of food and means of transportation are getting more precarious daily.

“August 15. Lost another ox by drowning.

“August 16. Weather insufferably hot. Lost an ox to-day from eating a poisonous herb. At this rate we shall soon be left with one wagon. The cattle must hustle for food after every day’s pull, making it very hard to keep life in their poor skeleton bodies.”

On the evening of the 18th Jean resumed her writing, which ran in part as follows:—

“The long and dreary road is rough and hilly, and the yielding sand is deep. We found to-day at noon a patch of dry grass, and stopped to graze our famishing cattle. But we neglected, by some mischance, to fill our water-casks in the morning, so we had a dry luncheon in the hot sand, under the blistering sunshine. Our shoes have all given out from constant walking, and we are reduced to moccasins, which we get by barter among the Indian women. But the deerskin things afford us no protection from the still abounding cacti, which seem to thrive best where there is the least moisture.

“We are encamped once more on the banks of the Snake. It was quite dark when a halt was ordered.

“August 19. Glory to God in the highest! We are once more within sight of some trees that are not sagebrush. They are off to the westward, several miles away, and their stately presence marks the course of a stream we cannot see.

“August 20. The stream proved to be the Owyhee,—a lukewarm, clear, and rapid little river with a pebbly bottom. The air is so foul from the stench of decaying cattle, the water of the little river is so warm, and the heat so intolerable that sickness and death must soon ensue if the conditions do not change. It is no wonder that we see many graves by the roadside. Most of them are the last resting-places of mothers who have mercifully fallen asleep and been buried, often with their babes in their arms.

“August 21. Old Fort Boisé lies opposite our camp, away beyond and across Snake River, looming in the distance like a mediæval fortress from the midst of a gray, dry moat. Our printed guide, a little pamphlet written by General Palmer in the forties, tells us that this fort was built by the Hudson Bay Company for shelter and storage, and as a means of protection from the Indians, with whom the traders did a thriving business when the century was young. It is now fallen into decay, and is doubtless the abode of bats and birds and creeping things.

“The men who left our company on the 16th inst., in a boat made of a wagon-bed, rejoined us to-day, having had all the navigation on the Snake they seemed to care for. They were a woe-begone and God-and-man-forsaken set; and their chief fear was that they would not be permitted to come into our train again on the old footing. Daddie—dear, big-hearted, hospitable man—took them in, though they deserved a different fate; but we think they’ll be content to let the best that can be had alone hereafter.

“August 23. After a long, hot, and arduous journey of over thirty miles, and consuming two days of the most trying experience possible, we reached Malheur River, another tributary of the Snake. But we failed to find any food for the cattle, and were compelled to pull out again the next morning before dawn, headed for what appeared to be a stream of water, as we judged from a fringe of willows. But when we reached the bed of the stream it was dry as a bone. We were compelled to stop, though, as it was then high noon, and it was reported twelve miles to the next water. So a part of our force was detailed to dig a well in the creek bottom for water for domestic use, and the rest were sent back to the Malheur to water the stock, as soon as they had eaten their fill of the dry grass, which to us is more precious than gold, or anything else just now but water.

“On the 24th we left this camp and travelled down the dry bed of the creek for several miles, through a valley that had evidently been missed by the trains ahead, as the grass was fine and abundant. After leaving this valley, we travelled over a blind trail through a hot, dusty ravine till ten o’clock at night, when we reached some sulphur springs and encamped, feeling cross, half sick, and disgusted with all the world. The air is heavy with the fumes of sulphur, and Limpy says we are less than half a mile from hell.”

On the 25th of August Jean’s journal again gave evidence of Captain Ranger’s chirography and style. His characteristic narrative follows: “To-day we made eight miles, which brought us to a deep and rocky canyon debouching into the Snake. This is to be our last encounter with this tortuous, treacherous, and in every way terrible serpent, of whose presence we long ago had much more than enough.

“Three miles farther brought us to Burnt River,—a small, rapid, and crooked stream, with a sandy delta at its disproportionately extended mouth. Here the country changes its entire topography. The bold and abrupt foot-hills are covered to their tops with an abundant coat of seed-bearing bunchgrass; and numerous juniper-trees which somehow in the long ago gained a footing among the sloping shale and sand, lend a peculiar beauty to the scene.”

“Mr. Burns, I’m going to die before long.”

These were the words of little Bobbie, the darling of the family and of the entire company, and were spoken to Scotty on that memorable day in the Black Hills when preparations were in progress for the burial of his mother.

The blow came suddenly. The child had been overjoyed at the prospect of reaching the end of the journey at an early day. The sight of Burnt River filled him with pleasing anticipations. He was never more playful, quaint, and original than when his father stood him on his shoulder to view the last they should see of the Snake River.

“Where is it going now, papa?” he asked artlessly. “Is it always hungry? Is that what makes it in such a hurry? What does it eat? And where does it sleep o’ nights? It’s a sure enough snake, isn’t it?”

At midnight, when the weary party were sound asleep, Mary, who was lying near him, was wakened by an ominous cough, which rapidly developed into an acute attack of croup.

“It was a stubborn case, and quite beyond my poor skill,” said the Little Doctor, as they all stood weeping around the still and beautiful form of the precious dead.

“What do you imagine caused the child to predict his untimely taking off, Mr. Burns?” asked Mrs. McAlpin, as they watched alone.

“I suppose it was merely a child’s fancy,—a coincidence, probably.”

“And I suppose it was a revelation. Many important lessons may be learned from the artless utterances of a child.”

For many weeks Mrs. McAlpin had studiously avoided conversation on any subject with the one man on earth whom she believed to be her counterpart.

“Wait till that human imperfection called the Law has made me legally free,” was her invariable command whenever her suitor showed symptoms of impatience.

But to-night, as they knelt together in the presence of what the world calls Death, he seized her hand, and it was not withdrawn.

“Kneeling in this presence, may I have my answer, Daphne?”

The dim light of a sputtering tallow candle shed a faint glow across the white sheet under which the still form of Bobbie lay in dreamless sleep.

She returned the pressure of his hand in silence. But when he would have caught her in a close embrace, she gently withdrew and whispered: “We will take our first kiss at the altar, darling.”

“I am happy now, and I can wait. God bless you!” he whispered; and as others were about entering the tent, he arose from his knees and went out silently among the stars.

The morning came at last. Amid the tearful silence of the company the train moved on for a couple of miles and halted at the foot of a mountain to consign the mortal remains of the little soul to their last resting-place. High up on the mountain-side, on a natural terrace, the grave was made under a spreading juniper-tree, in whose branches the wild birds chant his requiem as the years roll on, and the eternal breezes sing.

The next morning, August 29, found the face of Nature covered everywhere with a thick coating of hoar-frost. Ice had formed during the night in the water-pails, an eighth of an inch in thickness, and an inspiriting sensation of chilliness filled the air. But as the sun rode high in the brassy heavens, the day grew intensely hot. On and on and up and up the ailing cattle labored; and on and on and up and up the dispirited company toiled, footsore and weary, ragged and dirty. But hope was not dead; for was not the goal of their ambition now almost in sight?

The mountains of Powder River were next crossed, and the weary pilgrims emerged upon an open plain over which the pygmy sagebrush of the desert ran riot. Here a quarter of a century later an enterprising city was destined to arise, in the midst of abounding mines and burdened wheatfields, wherein the irrigated lands would drop fatness and the stockman grow rich among the cattle of a thousand hills.

“This valley,” wrote Jean, under date of September 1, “is beautiful to look upon; but it is considered worthless, as it is too dry for cultivation, and there is no way to rid the land of the ever-obtruding sage. Daddie says it will never be made to sprout white beans.”

The ranchers, stock-raisers, mine-owners, merchants, artisans, mechanics, speculators, newspaper men, politicians, and successful schemers in every walk of life can well afford to forgive Daniel Webster, John Ranger, and every other false prophet who in his day harped on the same string, in view of the continuous fields of wheat, oats, barley, rye, vetch, hops, and fruits of all kinds peculiar to the temperate zone which this wonderfully fertile valley now produces under the impulse of irrigation, not to mention the mines of gold and silver, precious stones, and baser metals with which the hills and mountains are fabulously rich.

The descent of the Ranger company into the now famous Grande Ronde valley was most perilous. It was made long after nightfall, through a precipitous and rocky defile, where a slip of the wagon-wheel or the misstep of an ox would have plunged the adventurous teams, wagons, men, women, children, and all, over sheer bluffs.

Camp was pitched in the edge of the beautiful valley, then a reservation belonging to the Nez Percé Indians. Rye-grass was growing as high as the top of the head of a man on horseback; and at one end of the valley, where now is a famous resort for health and pleasure, a number of hot springs were outlined by great columns of steam, which, rising beneath the arid air, hung low over the foot-hills, and, hanging lower yet in the vale below, spread itself like an enormous fleece over a lake of seething water.

XXXI THROUGH THE OREGON MOUNTAINS

XXXII LETTERS FROM HOME

XXXIII LOVE FINDS A WAY

“You needn’t select any lands for me, Captain,” said Mrs. Benson. “I have decided to go to Portland to-morrow with the team that’s going down for supplies. I shall not return. But my daughter will remain and take a claim. She has decided to turn rancher, but I do not like the life.”

“Isn’t this a rather sudden change in your programme, Mrs. Benson?”

“Not at all. I didn’t intend to remain when I came here. I wouldn’t have come any farther than Oregon City, but I wanted to get a view of the future home of Daphne; and now, as she has chosen for herself and has a fair prospect of happiness ahead, I am ready to look out for myself. I shall stop awhile in Portland, and be ready to take the next steamer for San Francisco. I will go to New York by way of the Isthmus, and will spend the evening of my days in Paris or London.”

“I’m sure I wish you well, Mrs. Benson.”

“Thank you, Captain. My heart is too full for words! I know you will always be a friend to my dear daughter.”

“You surely do not mean to go where you can never see your daughter again!”

“Yes, Captain. Do you recall that tall and bronzed and handsome man of whom you bought the buffalo robe you gave to your wife a short time before her death?”

“You mean Donald McPherson?”

“Yes, sir. The fates have settled it. He is to be my husband, and Daphne and I must part.”

“You have my best wishes for success and happiness,” said the Captain, earnestly, as he offered his hand.

“There is some peculiar mystery about all this!” he exclaimed to himself the next day, as Mrs. Benson climbed into the wagon and started off to meet her fate. “But it’s the way of women. They are as fickle as the wind.” He thought bitterly of his own budding and now blighted hopes.

“Don’t grieve for her, Daphne,” said Mr. Burns, in a husky voice, as the wagon disappeared. “She was kind to me when I was crippled and cross, and I shall never forget her watchfulness and care for me under the most trying conditions. She is your mother, too, and that of itself is enough to inspire my everlasting gratitude. I have no respect for the man who fails to appreciate the woman to whom he is indebted for his wife.”

“It is well for the three of us that we have learned our lesson, Rollin. We are all young yet, and all eternity is before us.”

“Yes, Daphne! Eternity is both before and behind us. We are henceforth to be all in all to each other, as I believe we have been in the past, my darling.”

“No, Mr. Burns, do not ‘darling’ me yet. We must await the tardy action of that human imperfection called the law before I can honorably become your ‘darling.’”

Nevertheless, being human, she feigned not to notice the prolonged pressure of his hand at parting, nor did she refrain from answering his eager and tender gaze with a look that quickened every pulse and sent a thrill of gladness to his heart.

At the primitive hotel in the primitive little city of Portland, Mrs. Benson met an Indian woman, the mother of many children, who was introduced to her as Mrs. Addicks. The woman was richly and stylishly gowned and seemed much at home among the guests. Her mien and carriage were queenly, as she moved about the little parlor, exchanging a word here and there among the loiterers, with whom she seemed a general favorite.

“Haven’t I met you somewhere before?” asked Mrs. Benson, with whom, in truth, she had exchanged greetings on the plains under circumstances quite different from the present, as one, at least, had cause to remember.

“I do not recall a former meeting, madam. But you might have met me on the plains. I was on my way to Portland when you saw me, if you saw me at all. A frontier trading-post is no proper place to bring up a lot of Indian half-breeds. I came here to educate my children.”

“Then your husband is a white man?”

“Yes.”

“I beg your pardon, but you do not speak and act like the other Indians I have met.”

“I am a chieftain’s daughter, and I was educated in London. You spoke of travelling in the Ranger train. Mr. Ranger is my husband’s brother.”

“Does Captain Ranger know of this?”

“I neither know nor care! One thing is certain. I shall do my best to train and educate my children in such a way that he will be proud some day to own them as relatives. I have the girls in school at the Academy of the Sacred Heart. The boys are at the Brothers’ School.”

“Do you know Dr. McLoughlin?”

“Yes, and my husband knows him well. I saw him as the children and I passed through Oregon City. He was very kind, and bade me be of good cheer. He has an Indian wife himself, as you know. But he did not ask me in to see her, so we did not meet.”

As Donald McPherson had not yet arrived in Portland, Mrs. Benson had ample leisure for letter-writing.

“My dear Daphne,” she wrote, “a letter from Mr. McPherson awaited me, as I expected. He had sent it forward by a courier from the plains, in care of one of Dr. McLoughlin’s agents. I need not repeat its contents. Suffice it to say, that I am serene and calm. God has been very merciful to us all. Within the letter was a letter of credit, upon which I am now able to draw ample funds. I will place on deposit, subject to your order, all the money you will need. Do not hesitate to accept it. It is mine, to do with as I choose; and this is my choice of methods to expend the portion I have assigned to you.

“I have decided not to meet him till after you are a free woman, Daphne. I know you and Donald will guard our secret carefully; but I have doubts about Jean Ranger. She brought me that unsealed note, and, as you know, she is such a precocious little witch she might have read it before giving it into my possession. Could you, in some way, get at the truth of this without letting her see just what you are after?”

To which Mrs. McAlpin replied: “I will not do Jean the injustice to imagine for a moment that she would read a private note that was intrusted to her care and honor. Tell Donald that I will honor him as my step-father, but I will never see his face again. He was very patient with me during all the trying years when the Juggernaut of public opinion, combined with the inquisition of the law, kept us in bondage; and I thank him for his patience with all my heart. I am as painfully aware of the unconventionality of our proceedings as yourself, dear mamma, but as what the public doesn’t know doesn’t disturb that composite being in the least, we’ll keep our own counsel and be happy.

“My donation claim lies parallel to Sally O’Dowd’s. Captain Ranger’s claim adjoins hers on the south,—a plan that implies foreknowledge, if not foreordination.

“Mr. Burns and Albert Evans, our faithful teamster, have selected their land adjacent to mine. Evans has chosen a double allotment, having in prospect a wife who is a mere child, belonging to a neighbor about three miles away. I am disgusted with the venality of the transaction, which the child’s father regards with satisfaction, and the mother with tears.”

A few days later, Mrs. Benson wrote to Captain Ranger, as follows:—

“I have met here an interesting and highly educated Indian woman, who says she is the wife of the post-trader you met in Utah. She says that trader is your brother Joseph, whom for many years you mourned as dead. She is here to educate her boys at the Brothers’ School, and her girls at the Academy of the Sacred Heart.

“When we saw her on the plains, she looked nothing but an ordinary squaw. Now she and the children are well and fashionably dressed, and as presentable in every way as any family in this primitive hostelry; and that is saying a good deal, for there are ladies here of high rank and breeding from the Eastern cities, and also from over the seas. Mrs. Ranger (she still answers to the name of Addicks) was educated in London, she says, where, as the daughter of an Indian chieftain of the land of the Dakotas, she was admitted into the most aristocratic circles. After completing her education she returned to her native haunts and met your brother, who made her his wife. She seems to have plenty of money; her children are bright and intelligent,—the girls especially so, they being, she says, more like their father than the boys; and for this, as you know, there is a physiological reason.”

“I’ll see that woman the very first time I go to Portland,” said the Captain, aloud, as he folded the letter deliberately.

“What woman?” asked Sally O’Dowd.

“Nobody in particular,” he answered, thrusting the letter hurriedly into his pocket, and looking confused and foolish as he returned to his work.

The labor of felling, hewing, hauling, and finally raising into houses the timbers for the big log buildings which were to afford homes for the half-dozen or more families who had, by common consent, adopted a sort of corporate method for residing upon and cultivating their claims, told heavily upon the men, who, already depleted in strength by much hardship, were poorly equipped for their tasks. But there was no shirking of duties nor complaint over backaches, and the borderers’ homes arose like magic.

“How do you like the appearance of the new buildings?” asked Captain Ranger, addressing Sally O’Dowd.

“Why should you ask me?” was the curt response.

Surprised at her reply but disposed to be communicative, he added: “If all goes well, I’ll have a sawmill up yonder in the timber by this time next year.”

“That’s none of my business,” she retorted testily.

He looked at her for a moment in blank astonishment. “Why isn’t it your business?” he asked, at length. “Haven’t we agreed to first get you free from a bad bargain, and after that take up our line of march together? And won’t your belongings then be mine, and mine yours?”

“What about that other woman you are going to Portland to see? Do you take me for an idiot, Squire?”

He looked her in the face for an instant, nonplussed. Then as the reason for her change of manner dawned upon him, he threw back his head and laughed heartily.

“So that’s what the matter with us, is it?” he exclaimed, approaching her with a proffered caress. “We’ve been a trifle jealous, haven’t we?”

“Behave yourself, sir!” elbowing him away. “Go to Portland and see that other woman. No doubt a party by the name of Benson is expecting you.”

He guffawed again, making her angrier still.

“Come, Sally; let’s have no more nonsense,” he said, after his laughter had ceased, motioning her to a seat beside him on the doorway.

She stood irresolute.

“Very well, if you prefer to do so, you can sit a-standing, like the Dutchman’s hen. I’ve been keeping a letter that’s been burning my pocket for three days waiting for an opportunity to show it to you, Mrs. O’Dowd; but you’ve been so shy I couldn’t touch you with a forty-foot pole.”

“What do you suppose I care for your letters from that other woman?” she asked, dropping into the space in the doorway, all eagerness and attention, in spite of her disclaimer.

“Read it yourself, Sally. It is from my brother-in-law, Lije Robinson.”

“The latest sensation is the suicide of Sam O’Dowd,” the letter went on to say, after the usual preliminaries of the border scribe.

“No!” cried the widow, now such de facto, rising to her feet and turning deathly pale. “Sam wouldn’t commit suicide. He’d be afraid to meet his Maker.”

“But he did it, Sally. Read on.”

“He left a confession, saying it was remorse that drove him to it, and extolling his wife as a model woman, whom he had wronged beyond reparation in every way imaginable.

“His mother is wellnigh crazy. The home the two of them had wrested from his wife and her mother, in which the old woman had allotted to spend her days, goes back to Sally now, as, by his confession, his mother has no right to it.”

“Poor Sam!” cried the widow, dropping again into the proffered space in the doorway. “He had his faults, but he wasn’t all bad. This letter and his confession prove it. I shall try hard to think that he atoned for his greatest crime by his voluntary death. But I’d be sorry myself to meet the reception that he’ll get in heaven!”

“Why, Sally? What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Let the dead past bury its dead.”

Captain Ranger, who, in first proposing matrimony, had stated earnestly that his heart was still with Annie, gazed tenderly at the weeping woman, who arose and stood before him in a mute yet beseeching attitude, while a warm love for her sprang spontaneously within him.

“Come, Sally dear,” he pleaded; “sit down by me again, and let us talk it out.”

She obeyed mechanically, her frame convulsed with weeping.

“I can never talk again about a platonic union,” he said feelingly. “I know that Annie would sanction our marriage now if she could speak to us; and I believe with all my heart that she knows of our proposed relations, and that she will, under the peculiar circumstances, also approve.”

Ah, John Ranger! Materialist as you used always to proclaim yourself, you cannot, in the deepest recesses of your soul, rebel against the faith that is “the evidence of things not seen.” What have you done with your agnosticism?

“Captain,” said Sally, in a subdued tone, “I have seen the day when I would have followed Sam O’Dowd to the ends of the earth if he had commanded. I could and would have lived on the acorns of the forest rather than have failed to be his wife. Do not ask me to love you now. I cannot be your wife.”

“Are we not engaged?” he asked, astonished.

“Yes; conditionally. But I cannot think about it now. If I can ever bring myself to think it right for me to be your wife, I will not hesitate to tell you so. But not now, Captain; not now.”

She arose abruptly, and was gone.

XXXIV HAPPY JACK INTRODUCES HIMSELF

“Here,” said Jean, the next morning, approaching her father, who was hard at work by sunrise, “are the letters I promised to write to Mr. Ashleigh and his mother. You stipulated that you should see them, as you will remember.”

His head and heart were aching. “I don’t care a rap for your nonsense,” he exclaimed. “Nothing’ll ever come of it. The fellow has never written to you.”

“That’s so!” thought Jean, strolling off aimlessly into the woods. “Daddie gave him our address as Oregon City. Oh, my God! can it be possible that my other self has been married (or the same as married) to Le-Le, the Indian slave?”

Giant trees rose often to the height of three hundred feet,—one hundred and fifty feet from the ground without a limb,—and so straight that no hand-made colonnade could equal them for grace and symmetry. As Jean stood under these stately monarchs of the soil and listened to the soft sighing of the wind among their evergreen leaves, she heard the roar of rushing water. She clambered through a labyrinth of deciduous undergrowth till she came to a horseshoe bend at the head of a gulch, over which the water foamed and tumbled till lost from sight amid the tangled ferns and foliage.

“Halloa!” cried a voice from an unseen source.

She looked in the direction whence the call seemed to proceed, and beheld, standing on the opposite bluff, a typical young backwoodsman, tall and shapely.

She returned the salutation by waving her sunbonnet, which she had been swinging aimlessly by its strings, exposing her face and head to the caress of the balm-laden air.

A minute later, and the stranger was by her side. She noticed that he carried in a careless way a long, old-fashioned rifle; that a pipe was in his mouth, and a pistol of the “pepper-box” variety protruded from the leg of his boot.

“Are you the Ranger gal what got left at Green River?”

She turned ghastly pale at mention of the locality where her thoughts were centred, but made no audible reply.

“My name is Henry Jackman,—better known as Happy Jack,” he said, as he dropped the butt-end of his rifle to the ground with a thud, and stood waiting for her to speak.

“I’ve heard of you before,” said Jean; “you are the man who’s been talking sawmill to my daddie.”

“That’s what!”

“Then we may as well become acquainted. I am Jean Ranger, and I have an older sister Mary and a younger one named Marjorie, besides my brother Hal and two little sisters.”

“I seed yer dad yisti’dy an’ we talked things over. Thar’s a fine prospec’ hyer fur a sawmill.”

“So I perceive.”

“Yer dad an’ me’s goin’ to go snucks.”

“I do not understand.”

“I mean pardners. He’s got the sabé an’ I’ve got the rocks, so we can make a go of it. The kentry’s settlin’ up powerful fast, an’ thar’ll be lots o’ demand for lumber for bridges an’ barns an’ houses an’ fencin’ an’ sich.”

“I see. We had a lot of spavined, wind-broken old horses for our sawmill power in the States, sir.”

“Thar’s a water-power yander that beats hosses all to thunder, miss.”

“So I see, sir.”

“Thar’s millions o’ feet o’ logs in sight; an’ out yander in the mountains is a place to build a flume, so we kin raf’ the logs down to a lake that I found up thar in the woods. We’ll have a town here some day an’ make things hum.”

“Have you often met my daddie?” asked Jean.

“I’m lookin’ fur him now, every minute. We’re goin’ to survey some timber-land fur the mill-hands, farther up the crick. The curse o’ this kentry is bachelders. Ah! here’s the Cap’n now. It’s lucky you’ve brought along so many weemen folks, ole man; we’ll all be needin’ wives.”

This concluding remark brought the hot blood of indignation to the cheeks of Jean as she turned to meet her father, who was carrying an ax and a gun, followed by Mr. Burns, equipped with a clothes-line and a carpenter’s square.

“What in thunder are you doing out here, Jean?” asked her father, taking no notice of the stranger’s remark. “Don’t you know that the woods are full of wild beasts?”

“I’ve seen nothing wilder than your prospective ‘pardner,’” she answered aside. “He seems harmless; but he’s an ignoramus and a boor.”

“Very well, Jean. But ruin home now, and help the women folks. They have a whole lot o’ work on hand, getting settled, and you do like to shirk.”

“Thar’ll be lots more of it for ’em to do afore this timber is all sawed up,” added the prospective “pardner.” “It takes a mountain o’ grub to keep a lot o’ loggers in workin’ order. I’m mighty glad, Cap’n, that you’ve got a lot a weemin folks; we’ll need ’em in our business.”

“Yes,” retorted Jean. “They’re as handy to have in the house as a coffin with the proper combination of letters on the plate!”

Mr. Burns laughed; but Mr. Jackman dropped his lower jaw and looked the picture of an exaggerated interrogation point. “What’s the gal drivin’ at?” he asked under his breath; and her father said gravely, “Stop talking nonsense, Jean.”

It was mutually agreed upon that a logging-camp should be started at once, and the ground prepared during the coming rainy season for the foundation and erection of a combined sawmill, planer, and shingle-mill, and that Captain Ranger should return, as early as practicable, to the States, via the Isthmus, to purchase the necessary machinery, which could not at that time be procured on the Pacific Coast.

Soon thereafter Captain Ranger went to Portland to purchase the necessary supplies for the winter’s use. Arriving there, he repaired, in his best Sunday suit, to the primitive hotel, and inquired for Mrs. Addicks.

The lady appeared, after long waiting, fastidiously gowned and so thoroughly at ease that all his thought of the superior quality of the white man’s blood departed as he saw her, and he stood in her presence in embarrassed silence.

“Won’t you be seated, Mr.—”

“Ranger,” he said, fumbling his hat awkwardly and shambling into the proffered chair.

“To what am I indebted for this visit, Mr. Ranger?”

“You will please excuse me, ma’am,” he said, crossing his legs clumsily, “but I have come to see you on a little business that concerns us both. Your husband is my brother.”

“Then, sir, you can tell me something about his family. Do his parents yet live?”

“They were alive and well at last accounts; but it takes two months or more for a letter to go and come. Our grandmother died recently.”

“The dear old lady he calls ‘Grannie’?”

“Yes.”

“My husband will be grieved to hear of this. I must write to him at once. Can you give me any particulars concerning her last days? Did she remember Joseph?”

“She had a dream of him, and said his mother would live to see him again.”

“I used to wonder why my husband was so reticent about his family affairs. I supposed when we were married that he would take me back to live among his people. But he steadfastly refused to do it, and would not even let me know their post-office address. But I know all about it now. He left home under a cloud.”

“But it was not nearly so bad as he thought. I set his mind at rest on that score when we had that last interview. The poor fellow was in daily dread of discovery and pursuit for more than a dozen years.”

The woman arose and paced the floor in silence, the coppery hue of her complexion enriched by the blood that rushed to her face. She paused and stood before him, her hands folded over the back of a chair, as she waited for him to speak again.

“I did your husband a grievous wrong when I saw him at the post, madam. I must confess that I had no idea that the Indian woman he told me that he had married was—”

She waved her hand in protest. “There, there, Mr. John; no flattery, if you please. If you had seen me as I was that day, you would have felt justified in spurning your brother’s wife. It was not my fault, though, that he kept me like a common squaw. Your conduct is fully forgiven, since it resulted in an open declaration of independence on my part.

“There were a dozen young chieftains and half as many white men who aspired to my hand and heart in my girlhood; but Joseph was a king among them all. But we had not been married a month before I found that I was doomed to the same treatment, as his wife, that other Indian wives endure. So I lost heart, and accepted the situation as stolidly as my father would have done if he had been doomed to perpetual slavery.”

“Did Joseph always treat you badly after your marriage?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders.

“Hard times came to our tribe. The Hudson Bay Company’s business languished. We had a succession of bitter cold winters, with dry, hot summers following. The different tribes became involved in war. Then famine came, and pestilence. We will draw a veil over what followed, Mr. John. Joseph will never beat his wife again; I have sworn it!

“The fluctuations of fortune brought us at last to the Utah trading-post, where you saw Joseph. We were prosperous then, and might have lived like white folks; but he seemed to prefer to keep me situated like an ordinary squaw, so I gave him all he bargained for. But, ugh! I did detest the life. Finally my father died and left me an ample inheritance, which is mine absolutely. I will educate my children and take them to London, where there is no prejudice against my people such as abounds in this ‘land of the free and home of the brave’!”

“Do you think Joseph is able to repay a part of the money we lost on his account?”

“My husband will waste more money in a single night sometimes, at the gambling-table, than he will expend on his family in a year. I think he is quite able to pay his debts.”

“How would you like to visit our people back in the old home?”

“When our children reach the age of six or seven years, they begin to outgrow the Indian style and complexion,” she said; “but I’ll not take them among my husband’s people while they look like little pappooses.”

“Why not take them out to my donation claim? My family will be glad to welcome you.”

“Couldn’t I take my nurse along?”

“If you did, some fool would coax her to marry him, so he and she could hold a double quota of land. Better leave her here with your little ones, or set her to washing dishes.”

“In either case our landlord would marry her himself, I fear. But I’ll risk it.”

The older girls were out of school for a walk, in the company of their brother John and a black-robed Sister, and thus were permitted at this juncture to enter their mother’s presence for an introduction to their uncle.

“John and Annie are Rangers, as you see, sir. My husband is very proud of them.”

“And well he might be,” thought the Captain, as he scanned them critically.

The sun was sinking behind the Coast Range the next evening, throwing the picturesque valley of the Willamette into deep shadows, and lighting up the tops of the Cascade heights with tinges of rose and gold and purple, when a carriage and pair were seen ascending the narrow grade leading to the great log house occupied temporarily by all the families of the Ranger colony. The unexpected arrival of the Captain created a sensation, which was not at all abated when he vaulted to the ground, followed, before he could turn to assist her, by a large, well-formed, and faultlessly attired Indian woman, with a sheen of gold in her raven-hued hair.

“Mrs. O’Dowd,” said the Captain, offering his hand, “allow me to introduce Mrs. Ranger Number Two,—my brother Joseph’s wife.”

XXXV ASHLEIGH MAKES NEW PLANS

When Henry Jackman saw the wife of Joseph Ranger, whom he had known at the trading-post in Utah as Mr. Addicks, and understood the full significance of her arrival as a welcome visitor and relative of the Ranger family, he shrugged his shoulders and walked away, exclaiming: “I’m dummed!”

“No wonder Uncle Joe was captured by that fine creature,” said Jean to herself. “She must have been as handsome in her girlhood as Le-Le.” And for the first time in her life she fainted away.

When she awoke to consciousness, which was not till the next morning, she was on the big white bed in the spare chamber, whither she had been carried by loving friends and treated through all the watches of the night by the Little Doctor with the untiring faithfulness of a devoted friend.

“Take that Indian away! I cannot bear the sight of her,” cried Jean, as her copper-colored aunt approached her, proffering kindly offices.

“She must be humored in her whims till she has had time to recover, Mrs. Ranger,” said Mrs. McAlpin, aside. “There’s a love story and a disappointment behind all this. Her antipathy is not against you, but another Indian princess whom she thinks she has cause to remember.”

“I didn’t come here to make wounds, but to heal them,” faltered Mrs. Ranger, as, with an indistinct conception of the trouble, she left the room, followed by Sally O’Dowd.

“I want you to know that you have healed my wounds,” said Sally. “I was miserably and unreasonably jealous of—I didn’t know of whom—for a whole week before you came to us. I shall never be such a simpleton again.”

“My wise brother says you and he have concluded to marry each other, Mrs. O’Dowd.”

“We were engaged for a short time, but when I overheard him talking to himself about going to Portland ‘to see a woman,’ and he wouldn’t take me into his confidence about her, I got angry and jealous, and treated him shabbily.”

They found the Captain, of whom they went in quest, in his favorite seat on the front doorstep.

“I don’t see why you and Joseph cannot go together to visit your parents this winter,” said Mrs. Ranger, coming at once to the point. “Your partner can have ample time while you are away to get the foundations ready for the mill and other buildings. I will write to Joseph this very night and urge it if you say so.”

The Captain looked inquiringly at Mrs. O’Dowd.

“I quite agree with your brother’s wife,” she said, extending her hand. “I was an idiot to act toward you as I did.”

“With your permission, I will write at once to Joseph, explaining everything and urging him to come to the ranch at once. The courier goes out to-night, so there is no time to lose.”

“Yes,” said Sally, whose eyes were blazing with a new joy, “it is just as Wahnetta says. You can be spared better this winter than later. Will you go if Joseph consents to accompany you?”

“And leave you behind?”

“It would be very humiliating to your family and embarrassing to both of us for me to return as your wife to the old home of your Annie, John.”

“But you’ll marry me before I start?”

“No, John,” she said, the tears welling to her eyes; “we owe to your Annie’s people a tender regard for their feelings. If we were to be married before you visit them, they could never be reconciled to me.”

“I must consult my partner,” said the Captain. “He may not want me to leave at this time. The fellow is terribly unreasonable at times.”

“Is that ‘fellow,’ as you call him, your master?” asked Mary, who was passing, on her way to the milk-house. “He’s been hanging around the house ever since sun-up, waiting for a chance to see Jean. He’s depending on the three of us to keep the boarding-house, and he wants to marry Jean, to stop her wages.”

“Excuse me, ladies; I must see my partner at once,” said the Captain, as he hurried away.

It required much persuasive argument to secure the consent of Happy Jack to Mrs. Joseph’s proposition; but he yielded at length, as men are wont to do when women to whom they are not married combine to carry a point.

The outgoing courier was to leave Oregon City at sunset, and it was necessary to write many letters for the overland mail, destined for Salt Lake and the few intervening points along the route.

Among the missives was one from Jean to Ashton Ashleigh, containing only a few sentences:—

“I have loved you more than life, but I have awaited tidings from you till hope is dead. I wrote a letter for your mother, but it was not sent to her because I had not heard from you. You will understand. I am deeply wounded, but I shall not die. I shall do my duty and be honest with myself, no matter what others may do or be.

“A man who styles himself Happy Jack has come among us, who wants to make me his wife. He is forming a partnership with daddie in the sawmill business; and he insinuates that you have married Le-Le. Does this explain your silence?”

A fortnight passed, and Ashton Ashleigh read this letter by the flickering light of a smoking kerosene lamp. Siwash lay on a buffalo robe in a corner, reading; and near him sat Le-Le, making a cunningly wrought moccasin.

The wind outside was rising. The ice-laden chains and pulleys of the idle ferry-boat resounded to its attack like a thousand-stringed Æolian harp. Suddenly, under a louder and more furious blast than any that had preceded it, the ice-incrusted cables snapped asunder, and the frozen boat crashed through the ice blockade, her timbers breaking as if made of withes.

Ashleigh opened the door and peered out into the moonlight. White clouds rolled over and over one another, and the stark white landscape seemed alive with flurrying snow.

“Good-bye, Green River Ferry,” he said. “This is a fitting finale to my cherished hopes. Oh, Jean! my bonnie Jean! To think that the end should be like this!”

“The ferry-boat is gone, Le-Le,” he said the next morning. “Your ransom price has been paid, and you are, as you know, a slave no longer. I am going away. Take good care of Le-Le, Siwash, my boy; and take good care of yourself also.”

The girl’s English vocabulary was too meagre to admit of much expostulation in speech, but her wailing was blood-curdling as she knelt at his feet, alternately embracing his knees and tearing her hair.

“I have made a terrible mistake, poor girl,” he cried, tearing himself away, “but I meant only to be kind. It was my dream to set you free and take you with me to—to—her. But now I see that it will be impossible!”

Le-Le, still wailing, prepared his breakfast. Siwash brought his mules to the door, in stolid obedience to orders, his face as expressionless as flint.

“The white man’s heart is hard, like the hoof of the buffalo,” he said to Le-Le in her native tongue. “You mistook his kindness for love. But never mind. You’ll get over it.”

Two days of steady travel through the solitudes brought Ashleigh to the lodgings of the post-trader, Joseph Ranger, alias Addicks.

“Your wife,” John had written to his brother, “has come to visit us at the Ranch of the Whispering Firs, as my girls have named our donation claims, to hold which we have pooled our issues, and have filed upon them as individuals. My family are charmed with her. Do join us here at once. Take a donation claim near to one or more of ours. Forget bygones. And, best of all, go with me this winter, by the Isthmus route, to the dear old home. Do say yes, Joe, and we may all be happy yet.”

“Halloa!” cried Ashleigh, as he alighted at the post.

“Well,” cried Joseph Ranger, as he opened his canvas door; “it’s Ashleigh. Come right in! You’re the very man I wanted to see.”

A savory odor of hot biscuits and frying ham greeted the nostrils of the benumbed and hungry wayfarer.

“This supper smells good, Mr. Addicks.”

“Mr. Addicks no more, if you please, Mr. Ashleigh. My name is Ranger,—Joseph Ranger. I have found myself, and I shall be known by my real name hereafter. But help yourself to pot-luck. And please excuse me. I have just begun to read a letter from the coast. The courier hasn’t been gone five minutes.”

After Ashleigh had finished his meal his host thrust the letter in his face and said, “What do you think of that?”

“What do you propose to do?” asked Ashleigh, after carefully considering the missive.

“Why, go to Oregon, of course. What else could a fellow do? But I don’t know what in the dickens to do with my stuff.”

“You can leave me in charge, if you like. You can invoice at your lowest selling-price, and I’ll make what profit I can on the venture and close it out in the spring; that is, if you do not care to return next year.”

“The good Lord has taken pity on me at last,” cried the delighted host. “My luck has begun to turn.”

XXXVI HAPPY JACK IS SURPRISED

XXXVII NEWS FOR JEAN

The second meeting between the Ranger brothers was much more embarrassing than cordial. Each at sight of the other recalled their last encounter. They shook hands hesitatingly, and after an awkward pause sat down together on the front porch of the primitive hotel.

Joseph, who had been awaiting the arrival of his wife and the Captain for a couple of days, was displeased because his Wahnetta had not been within call from the moment of his advent, as long habit had led him to expect. That she met him now with the air of a friend and an equal, and after a pleasant greeting on her part discreetly left the brothers to themselves while she went in quest of her babies, was a display of good breeding and motherly solicitude which Joseph Ranger would have commended in any woman not his wife. But his will had so long been her only law that her greeting, in connection with his embarrassment at meeting his brother, put him in a very unamiable frame of mind.

“I concluded that you had gone back on your agreement, John,” he growled, after a painful silence.

“Oh, did you? Since when have you made a new record for punctuality, Joe?”

“Since the arrival of the last courier at the trading-post, who brought me your letter.”

“What did you think of my proposition?”

“I accepted it at once, or I would not have been here. Who is Wahnetta going out driving with, I wonder?”

“I called the cab for a drive with the children a little before you came, sir,” said the nurse.

“Oh!”

“You ought to be very proud of your wife, Joe.”

“I am beginning to be. Yet you never can tell what the Indian nature will attempt. She seems to be all right when she lives with white people, but she’d lapse at once into barbarism again if she got a chance. They all do it. It is in the blood.”

“She doesn’t seems to want that sort of a chance, Joe.”

“An Indian is like a wild coyote, John.”

“But you have caught a tame one, Joe. She is above the average, even of white women. Give her the chance she craves. Stand by her like a gentleman. She is as thoroughly civilized as any of us.”

“Did you see her at the trading-post last summer?”

“No; but why do you ask?”

“Because you would have beheld her in her native element. You may capture and tame a coyote, but when you turn him loose among his natural environments, you can’t distinguish him in a short time from the wildest wolf of the pack.”

“That being the case, there is strong need for keeping your wife in her adopted home, among your own people.”

John was thawing toward his brother at a rapid rate; and Joseph, the erring but encouraged and repenting brother, felt a pang of remorse as he arose to welcome his wife and children upon their return from their drive, resolving in his heart that he would never again allow himself to regret the vows he had taken upon himself in his early manhood.

The paper was awaiting the Captain at his table the next morning, with the announcement that the sailing of the ocean steamer was to be delayed for a couple of days on account of an accident to her propeller.

“Then we’ll have time for a spin out to the Ranch of the Whispering Firs, eh, Joe?” he asked, as his brother, accompanied by Wahnetta, who was resplendent in a crimson cashmere robe, over which her black mantilla was carelessly thrown, took his seat at his elbow at breakfast.

“I thought I’d like to take a spin through this embryo city,” was the quiet response.

“But I want you to see the lay of the land. I’m hoping to make you a partner in the ranch and sawmill business. You won’t want to buy a pig in a poke.”

A visit to Joseph’s sons and daughters at school was first in order. Then a carriage was called, and the entire party was conducted around and over stumps, logs, and devious primitive roadways to the heights.

“Why anybody wants to go to the Old World for scenery, when he can enjoy such a prospect as this right at his very door, is one of the mysteries of modern existence,” said Wahnetta. “Away to the north by east of us, in the home of my people, there is a land so different from this that it might be a part of another planet, yet it is passing beautiful. Directly to the north is the traditional Whulge, or Puget Sound, where the enemies of my people live, who, like my own, are dying out. This mighty land is a giant baby; wait half a century, and she will be a full-grown giantess.”

It was three o’clock when they returned to the hotel, but a fresh team from the one livery stable the metropolis of Oregon Territory was able to boast was placed at the disposal of the brothers, who spanned a distance of thirty miles in three hours. A light rain had fallen in the early morning, and the face of Nature was as pure as ether. Resplendent green abounded in the valley, lighted here and there by gleams of the gliding Willamette, on whose silvery current little white steamers were seen at intervals, flitting to and fro like swans. In many spots in the valley, and everywhere on the mountain-sides, stood rows on rows of forest firs, and beyond these, coming frequently into view as the road wound in and out among the trees, arose the snow-crowned monarch of the Cascades, majestic Mount Hood, whose slowly dying glaciers discharged their silt into the milk-white waters of the Sandy.

“What do you think of it all?” asked the elder brother, after a long silence, in which each had been feasting his eyes upon the beauty of the scene and filling his lungs with the exhilarating air.

“I’m thinking of the glories that await the later comers into this beautiful land, after the pioneers have worn their bodies out in their struggles with the native wilderness. I’ve been shutting my eyes and seeing coal mines, iron mines, gold mines, oil mines, silver mines, farms, fisheries, mills, factories, orchards, gardens, everything! I’ve lived in Utah and witnessed the marvels of irrigation there; but God does the irrigating in this country, and He does it well.”

“Did you see the fishes that swarmed in the Sandy, Joe?”

“Yes; and I’ve seen salmon and sturgeon struggling up the Columbia, so thick in the current that they looked like Illinois saw-logs. I think I know how Moses felt when he had

“Wait till we reach the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. Then you will see something worthy of all your rhapsodies. There!” cried the Captain, as they sighted the broad and slightly sloping plateau on which his new log house was built.

In front of it stood a towering fir-tree, like an ever-vigilant sentinel; and behind it rose gigantic colonnades of evergreen forests. Foaming waters surged and leaped through a ragged gulch; and tangled thickets of hazel, alder, dogwood, and elder crowded the luxurious growth of ferns that struggled for the mastery. “There!” he repeated, “what do you think now?”

“That I’d like to transport the entire family of Rangers, root and branch, to the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. Suppose we take your old sawmill off Lije’s hands and remove the whole thing to Oregon, John? It would be a good way to relieve him of his elephant.”

“The machinery is old and old-fashioned, Joe. We’d better buy everything new, and the best of its kind.”

“I was merely thinking of relieving Lije; that’s all.”

As they made the last turn leading to the house, they were accosted impatiently by the Captain’s junior partner.

“At this rate, you won’t git started to the States afore Christmas, Cap’n.”

“This is my brother Joseph, Mr. Jackman. And this, Joseph, is my partner, Mr. Jackman.”

The two men glared at each other for a moment in silence. Jackman was the first to speak,—

“Well, I’m dummed!”

“How came you to be known as Jackman? You posed as Hankins in Utah.”

“An’ you was Joe Addicks, pard. Better not tell tales out o’ school. That’s a game two can play at.”

“There are no tales to tell on my part. I am masquerading no more. Can you say as much?”

“I’m just a-beginnin’, as it were.”

“How in the name of Fate did you come across that chap, John?” asked Joseph, as they alighted from the buggy.

“He has taken a donation claim on the mountain-side which includes the water-power for our mill site. At least, he says it does. Burns and I haven’t had time to survey it yet.”

“Better go slow with that fellow, John.”

“What do you know about him, Joe?”

“Nothing; only he’s been a noted crook and jail-breaker.”

“Jean is to be our book-keeper. She’s been disappointed over that Green River affair. Do you know what became of Ashleigh?”

“I left him at my station in charge of my business. He’s as honest as the day. But, by the way, why didn’t Jean answer the letter he sent out in care of your Happy Jack?”

“She received no letter. But what about Le-Le? Did he marry her?”

“Did Ashleigh marry Le-Le? What a question! Who said he did?”

“Jackman.”

“Jean must know of all this. Will you break it to her, Joe?”

Night had come; and the autumn rains were gently enwrapping the Ranch of the Whispering Firs in a sheet of mist when Joseph Ranger sought Jean in her little schoolroom for a private conversation.

The flickering light of a single kerosene lamp emitted a characteristic odor. A rough table supported the lamp; and on a three-legged stool sat the schoolma’am, trying to bring order out of the chaos of a score or more of papers left by the children.

“Ah!” she said, arising. “Come in, Uncle Joe. You won’t find our crude beginnings very inviting, but we mustn’t despise the day of small things.”

“You’re making a good beginning, Jean. But I have not come to talk about your school. I have brought you some tidings from Mr. Ashleigh.”

Jean turned pale and would have fallen if her uncle had not caught her in his arms.

“Here is a note which he gave me just as I was leaving for the West.”

Jean retained her composure by a supreme effort of the will.

“You were my dream,” the letter began; “I trusted and loved you as I can never trust and love another. And the end is to be your marriage with a fellow you call Happy Jack! Oh, Jean, my bonnie Jean! Why have you been so fickle and so rash? I sent you a letter and a ring. It was my great-great-grandmother’s ring, and a hereditary talisman. The messenger was one Harry Hankins, a borderer and scout, who was going to Oregon City. No, Jean; I did not marry Le-Le, but I did secure her ransom, and I should before now have been on my way to you, but was awaiting your letter. Good-bye, and may God guard and keep you! Think of me as your heartbroken friend and lover.”

“I never received one single word from him,” said Jean; “and I never saw or heard of Harry Hankins.”

“Oh, yes, you did, Jean. He is none other than your father’s partner.”

“How can I reach Mr. Ashleigh with a letter? It must be sent at once.”

“That will be impossible, Jean; there will be no courier going out for a month yet. But we will take a letter to Portland, and leave it in care of Wahnetta. She will see that it is forwarded at the first opportunity.”

Busily the work went forward. But Happy Jack was nowhere to be seen, and the brothers were compelled to take their departure without making the business settlement with him which they so much desired.

“Never mind! We’ll freeze him out, or scare him out, if he shows up here again,” said the Captain, as he and his brother turned their faces Portland-ward.

XXXVIII THE BROTHERS JOURNEY HOMEWARD TOGETHER

The steamer in which the Ranger brothers embarked for San Francisco was an ancient and somewhat decrepit tub, as much unlike the floating palaces that plough the Pacific Ocean to-day as the long railway trains with their Pullman coaches, cushioned seats, and electric bells are unlike the prairie schooners which belabored oxen hauled across deserts and mountains when the oldest pioneer of to-day was young, and Captain Ranger was in his prime.

“We’re at the jumping-off place,” said the elder brother, when the vessel stopped at Astoria. “There will never be a chance for the restive American citizen to get any farther west than the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean. And yet who knows?” he added, after a pause. “Burns has a theory in which, after all, there may be some logic. He says that the entire planet will some day be under the management of an affiliated government formed by a few great powers, who will organize an alliance to control, and maybe protect, the weaker nationalities from one another. Jean is enthusiastic over the theme.”

“You seem to set great store by Jean.”

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s about raking up a new engagement with that Green River chap. If she does, she’ll marry soon, and get immersed in the cares of a family, like all the rest of the girls. If so, she’ll never amount to much.”

“No great general can do as much for the world, no matter how many nations he conquers, as the mother who rears a family of noble men and women, John. I would rather be in some mothers’ shoes than in the President’s.”

“And so would I. But it is hard, when a man has raised a daughter of great mental promise, to see her talents buried under the selfish domination of some prig of a husband who has all the power though he hasn’t half her sense.”

“Wait long enough,” said John, as they passed Tillamook Head and pursued their undulating way southward; “wait long enough, and the genius of American liberty and enterprise will settle yonder shores with a million or more inhabitants. Railroads by the dozen will cross the continent in time, sending out lateral branches in all directions, till the whole country is gridironed with paths for the iron horse.”

“But the mountains are in the way, John.”

“They will be tunnelled or looped, Joe. New feats of engineering are being developed constantly; and I should not be surprised to hear of the discovery of some new force, or rather of the discovery of the utility of some always existing force, which will revolutionize transportation on the land and the sea. There are islands to the west of us, lots of them. And who knows but they will become a part of the possessions of the United States before the close of the century? I’d like to have Burns and Jean and the Little Doctor here to help me talk it out.”

“I can’t let my mind get away from me, as you do,” laughed Joseph, and they changed the subject.

Days passed, and the timber lines of southern Oregon and northern California gave way to the extensive treeless regions that border the central and southern edges of the Golden State. Immense stretches of barren, sandy wastes rose high in the arid heavens, revealing a region of desolation that seemed good for nothing but range for savage beasts and poisonous serpents.

“It is now my turn to prophesy and philosophize,” said Joseph. “My experience and observation in Utah, where irrigation has relieved the barren soil of its drouth, has taught me that irrigation will develop the latent power of the desert to sustain and perpetuate the race long after the Mississippi basin has ceased to respond to the demands of the husbandman and the vernal lands of the Willamette valley are worn out.”

“But the Willamette valley and the entire northwest coast will always beat the world with the fruits and cereals that thrive in the temperate zone.”

“‘Always’ is a good while, John. It is a pity that we can’t live always.”

“Jean declares that we do.”

“How came she to know so much?”

“I cannot tell; but she has evolved a theory from her studies and conclusions that seems plausible. At any rate, we cannot disprove it; and as it comforts her and hurts nobody, I am glad she can enjoy it. But the gong has sounded for dinner, and I am as hungry as a bear.”

“It is a glorious thing to be alive,” exclaimed the Captain, when they spied the lights of the Farallones to the leeward, while on their left rose Mare Island; and they knew that they were nearing the Golden Gate. Four days of happy, languorous idleness on a glassy sea had been theirs to enjoy. But each decided that he had had enough of leisure, and was glad when Telegraph Hill, the towering head of the city of San Francisco, was seen among its myriads of sand-dunes and rioting patches of native weeds.

“It is indeed a glorious thing to be alive!” said Joseph, as they were being jostled in the streets of the city, where a babel of tongues kept up a continuous clatter, as bewildering as it was unintelligible.

The hotel in which the brothers found lodgings was a little superior to the Portland hostelry, being larger; but the food was far from satisfactory, and they found the sand-fleas and Benicia Bay mosquitoes more voracious than welcome. The sights of the truly cosmopolitan city were new and alluring; and once, but for the intervention of the police, the verdant pair would have been fleeced by a smooth-tongued swindler. They were directed by a big policeman to an immense hardware establishment, where they found a complete up-to-date outfit for their plant. They then continued their journey toward the Isthmus with a feeling of anticipation to which their frequent conversations concerning the legendary lore of the peculiar country for which they were bound possessed a fascinating interest.

“I have read of a lost continent, which is said to have existed in a prehistoric age,” said the younger brother. “The Indians of the Mandan district have many legends in regard to it. They say the Great Spirit submerged the dry land in a fit of anger, thus separating the so-called Old World from the so-called New, and driving the remnant of the surviving inhabitants to the north as far as the Great Lakes, where they speedily relapsed into the barbarism that ensues from isolation, hardships, and necessity, until at last they perished from the face of the earth.”

“But what of the origin of the Indian race?” asked John.

“Their legends tell us that their ancestors came originally from Russia, by the way of Behring Strait, which in winter was closed by ice; that at one time the ice gorges were suddenly broken up by a tremendous gale and were never closed again. There were natives of the great Northland who were caught on the south side of the gorge, and, being unable to return, remained in what is now Alaska, whence they migrated, multiplied, and spread till they covered what is now the United States of America.”

“When we return to Oregon, you must not fail to start Burns on some of these legends, Joe. The Widow McAlpin, whom he means to marry as soon as she will consent, is as deeply interested in the origin of the Indians as he is.”

“But if we knew all about the immediate origin of the Indians, that wouldn’t settle the question, John. Where did the Russians get their start; and how did every island of the great oceans become inhabited?”

“You are carrying me away beyond my depth, Joe. Burns has a theory that different races of people are indigenous to all countries. He calls the story of Adam and Eve a myth, or a sort of cabalistic tale. That reminds me that Jean once completely nonplussed the Reverend Thomas Rogers by asking who were the daughters of men whom the sons of God took as wives. ‘And where,’ she asked, ‘did Cain get his wife?’”

“These speculations, which are by no means new, are as fruitless as they are perplexing, John. We know no more about them than these donkeys do that are floundering, with us on their backs, across this God-forsaken Isthmus. Will there ever be a canal cut across it, I wonder?”

“Guess we’d better talk about spring. That is something we can understand.”

“No, John. We can no more clearly comprehend the springtime, with its many wondrous revelations, than we can comprehend anything else that is unknowable. We know that sunshine, air, and moisture are necessary for the sustenance of organic life; but we don’t know what life itself is. It is as invisible to us, in all its wonderful activities, as God himself. No; we know no more about the life that animates spring than we know about the Atlantans. But we do know that travel is a great eye-opener; and by showing us how little we know, or can learn, it helps to take away much of our overweening self-conceit.”

There being no delay at Acapulco, and but little at New Orleans, our voyagers were soon aboard one of the palatial steamers that ploughed the waters of the Mississippi in the days when steamboating on the river was in the height of its glory. Floating palaces, with hearts of fire and arteries of steam, were equipped in the most sumptuous style. The cuisine of their tables was never excelled in any land. Trained servants were on duty at every hand in all departments, and such river races as the pen of Mark Twain has made immortal infused an alluring element of danger into the daily life of the adventurous traveller.

St. Louis was passed, and Cairo; and the voyage up the Illinois to Peoria was speedily consummated.

The brothers struck out afoot for the old home, which they came into sight of at sundown. A light snow covered the ground, and a bitter wind was blowing hard.

“Down, Rover, down! Don’t you know your master?” exclaimed the returned wanderer, as the great mastiff sprang at him with a low, savage growl, which changed at once to vehement proclamations of welcome as the faithful creature recognized his friend.

“Bless the dog! But be quiet! We want to surprise the old folks.”

In the cosey sitting-room of the little cottage sat a prematurely aged woman, plying her needle and softly crooning a plaintive lullaby. A couple of tallow candles burned dimly on a little table, and a much-worn work-basket sat at her left. In the opposite corner an old man sat, his head bowed, as if sleeping. An open Bible had fallen from his hand.

“There’s but one pair of stockings to mend to-night,” sighed the woman, as she folded her finished work, her thoughts reverting to scenes long vanished.

The white-bearded man aroused himself at her words and spoke.

“John is forty-three to-night,” he said huskily, his finger pointing to the family record.

“God be with him till we meet again!” was the sighing response as the mother struggled to thread her needle by the flickering light.

“Mary is a year younger than John; and Joseph came to us two years later than Mary,” said the patriarch, his finger still pointing to the cherished page.

“Oh, father!” cried the wife, “do you think I shall ever hold my Joseph in my arms again?”

“God knows best,” was the sad reply.

A cat purred contentedly at the woman’s feet, and crickets sang upon the hearth. Outside, the wind sighed dolefully.

“Wonder what’s the matter with Rover?” said the old man, rising to his feet, after repeated efforts, and hobbling toward the door. “He’s acting strangely to-night.”

“Don’t open the door, father,” pleaded the wife. “The whole country is infested with tramps and robbers. We’d better be cautious. I’m sure I saw faces at the window a while ago.”

“Rover knows what he’s about, wife. He never speaks like that to an enemy. I will open the door.”

It seemed to the men outside that the door was long in opening. “My fingers are all thumbs!” they heard the old man exclaim, after a fruitless effort to withdraw the bolt.

“Good-evening!” exclaimed Joseph, in a husky voice. “We are a pair of belated travellers, and seek a night’s lodging. Can we be accommodated?”

“We’re not used to keeping travellers,” said the patriarch, “but it is late, and another storm is brewing. Come right in. Wife can fix you a shake-down somewhere, I reckon; and we always have a bite on hand to eat.”

“We have two sons of our own out in the world somewhere, father,” said the wife. “I will trust the Lord to do by them as we will do by these strangers.”

John Ranger threw back his heavy coat and hat and stood before the pair erect and motionless.

“Mother!” he exclaimed, after a moment’s waiting, as he caught her in his arms, “don’t you know your boy?”

“Why, bless my soul, it’s our John,—my firstborn baby boy!” faltered the mother, as she resigned herself to his realistic “bear hug.” “I thought you was in Oregon.”

“So I was a few weeks ago; but I am here now! How are you, mother dear? And you, father? I am so glad to see you again! How goes the world with both of you?”

“All right, son, considering. That is, it’s all right now you are here. We can bear poverty and hardship now. Eh, wife?”

“Yes, father. If the Lord sees fit to afflict us, we can now bear it without complaining. Blessed be His holy name! But how did it happen, John dear? I was thinking about you to-night as being far away on this, your forty-third birthday.”

“We do things in a hurry on the Pacific coast, mother mine. This is an unexpected visit. But you are neglecting somebody.”

“That is so,” exclaimed the old man. “What might your name be, stranger?”

The tall man in the shadow took a faltering step forward and removed his hat.

“Don’t you know me, father?”

“Good God! Can it be possible that this is Joseph?”

“Don’t let him deceive us, John!” pleaded the mother. “I couldn’t live and bear it!”

“Yes, mother dear, it is indeed your Joseph,—your long-lost son,” cried the prodigal. “Don’t you recognize me now?”

John, who had released his mother, stood by in silence; while Joseph, secure in his welcome, gathered his mother in his arms and exclaimed, “It is now my turn to give you a bear hug. Take this, and this!” and he clasped her with half-savage tenderness again and again.

“Yes, mother!” cried the father, who, overcome by his emotions, dropped feebly into his chair. Then, controlling his feelings by a strong effort of the will, he added with a laugh, “Hadn’t we better kill the prodigal, seeing the calf has come home?”

At a late hour a frugal meal was spread, to which the weary home-comers did enforced justice, the mother on one side of the table weeping and laughing by turns, and the father on the other side endeavoring with indifferent success to be dignified and calm.

The brothers eyed each other askance as the supper proceeded, especially noticing the absence of the many little luxuries for which the Ranger tables had formerly been noted throughout the township.

“Father and I don’t have much appetite, so we don’t lay in many extras nowadays,” said the mother.

“We’ve been having a hard time of it since you left us, John,” broke in the father. “The fellow that bought the sawmill didn’t understand the business, and he soon swamped it. So Lije had to take it off his hands, and it left us mighty hard up. Lije has a big family, and the gals want clothes and schoolin’, and Mary is poorly and needs medicines; so mother and I do without lots of things we need. It was lucky for all hands, though, that Annie sent back that deed to the Robinson old folks. They’re independent now, in a small way. They have their own garden and cow and fruit and poultry, and they made enough off of their truck-patch last summer to pay their taxes and buy groceries. They don’t need many new clothes. They have bought a sleigh and a horse, so they can go to meetin’ Sundays; and next summer, Daddie Robinson says, he’ll be able to buy a buggy.”

“I meant to let you have that little place, father,” said John, trying in vain to eat his food. “But Annie claimed it as her own; and Mary and Jean insisted that she had a right to deed it to her own parents. If you had such a little home now, could you be contented?”

“Oh, John,” cried his mother, “if we only had a place as good! I never covet what is my neighbor’s, but I do want to be independent.”

“Can’t you pack your little effects and go with us to Oregon?” asked Joseph, a great lump rising in his throat.

The old man looked anxiously at his wife. The wife looked inquiringly at her husband.

“It will be just as father says,” said the wife, submissively.

“An old man is like an old tree,” began the father, bowing his head upon the table. “You can transplant a man or a tree, but you can’t make ’em take root to do much good in new soil after they get old. With the young it’s different. It’s out o’ sight, out o’ mind, with them. They can take root anywhere if the conditions are favorable and they want to change.”

“That’s right, father,” echoed the wife. “We’re too old to make a new start in a new country. Besides, the expense of transplanting us to so great a distance would go a long way toward taking care of us nearer home. I’d like it mighty well if we could live near all our children in our old days; but if it is better for them,—and I reckon it is,—the sacrifices we must make to bear the separation mustn’t count. We ought to be used to privation and poverty by this time.”

“We have all heard of the Irishman’s way of feeding, or not feeding, his horse!” exclaimed Joseph. “The plan seemed successful for a few days, but just when the animal was supposed to be used to the treatment, the ungrateful creature died.”

“I could keep the wolf from the door a few years longer if it wasn’t for my rheumatism,” said the father. “The after-clap of old hardships gets the better of me now and then. I’m only able, much of the time, to potter round the place and help your mother at odd jobs. I reckon she would miss me if I should be called away, however.”

“God grant that we may be called away together when we are wanted in the land o’ the leal,” said the good wife, fervently; and her husband responded with a hearty “Amen.”

“You are not to be allowed to worry any more!” exclaimed Joseph, rising to his feet and straightening himself to his full height. “I am not rich, but I am amply able to place you above want; and, so help me God, I’ll do it. I’ve been the stray sheep. I’ve wandered far from the fold, and I’ve been a long time coming to my senses. But I have put the past behind me, and, come what will, my dear father and mother shall be provided for during the remainder of their lives.”

“But you have a family, my son. Don’t make any promises that will interfere with your obligations to your wife and children.”

“I have some gold mines in Utah, mother dear, and an interest in several trading-posts on the frontier. I will never neglect you again.”

“Jean went away under a promise to assist us as soon as she could earn some money of her own,” said the father; “but we can look for no help from that quarter for some time to come. It isn’t right to expect it of her, either. Oh, boys, if you could only know how it has stung us to be treated as mendicants, after we have worn ourselves out in the service of our children, you would appreciate our joy over this cheering news!”

“Who is treating you as mendicants, mother, I should like to know?” exclaimed the elder son. “Didn’t I leave you provided for when I started for Oregon?”

“You did your best to make provision for our needs, my son. We are blaming nobody. Don’t allow yourself to feel unhappy. We are not complaining of anything but Fate.”

“But you ought to blame me,” cried Joseph. “It was I who brought all these calamities upon my nearest and dearest. But God knows I do repent in sackcloth and ashes.”

“Oh, father, we can never be unhappy now! Our boy that was lost is found. He that we mourned as dead is with us, alive and well. There is no blood-guiltiness upon his head, and no shadow of murder or hatred in his heart. The Lord be praised for all His tender mercies to the children of men!”

“Yes, yes, the Lord be praised!” echoed the father, fervently. “Surely, after all the blessings that have been showered upon us this night, we can take all the balance on trust.”

“We have the promise, father: ‘Trust in the Lord and do good, and verily thou shalt be fed.’”

“I’d give the world, if I had it, for the simple, child-like faith of our father and mother,” said John, as soon as the brothers were alone.

“And I’d give the world, if I had it, for a chance to live my life over, that I might have an opportunity to atone for the suffering I have caused you all.”

“Dear Joe, you have suffered too.”

He turned his face to the wall and relapsed into silence. And as he secretly invoked the presence of his beloved dead, he saw himself in an emigrant’s camp far away in the Black Hills. Again the tethered Flossie lowed plaintively at the wagon-wheel, bemoaning the death of her calf; again the still, white-robed form of his Annie appeared before his mental vision. And the sorrowing husband fell asleep.

XXXIX THE OLD HOMESTEAD

The gray dawn of a bleak December morning found the Ranger brothers alternately stamping the snow from their feet on the front veranda of the old homestead, and listening for the first sounds of awakening within. The same denuded locust-boughs swept the lattice as of yore; and it seemed but yesterday to John Ranger as he recalled the time he had caught his gentle Annie in his arms on that momentous and well-remembered evening, and made the startling announcement, “It’s all settled, mother. Brother Lije has bought the farm, and we’ll be off in less than a month for Oregon.”

He turned to his brother, whose face was like marble as he stood in the shadow of the wall, as silent as the Sphinx.

“Who in thunder is coming here to rout a fellow out o’ bed at this time of a Sunday morning?” growled Lije Robinson, as he opened the door an inch or so and peeped out into the biting air.

“It is I and another,” cried John Ranger, pushing the door wide open. For a moment the brothers-in-law faced each other in silence. One was dumb with many conflicting emotions, the other with simple wonder.

“Your conscience must have troubled you,” said Lije, after an awkward pause, “or you wouldn’t have come back. But come in! I’ll start up the fire. Who’s this?” looking hard at Joseph, whose bronzed and bearded face was more than half concealed by the upturned collar of his fur-lined overcoat.

“Don’t you know him, Lije?”

“Naw, nor I don’t want to.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Robinson had emerged from her room after a hurried toilet.

“Sister Mollie!”

“Brother John!”

For half a minute not another word was spoken.

“I never expected to set eyes on you again,” cried the sister at last, as, half crying and half laughing, she held him at arm’s length for a better view. “It seemed as if you had left the world when you went to Oregon; and now you are back again,—the same old John.”

“This is an age of progress, Mollie. The planet doesn’t seem so very big, if you know how to get around it.”

“Will you introduce the stranger, John?” asked his sister, in a welcoming tone.

“I’ve been waiting to see if he would be recognized. There is another surprise in store for you, Mollie. Did you ever see this man before?”

“Can it be possible,” she asked, her face deathly pale, “that this is my brother Joseph?”

“Yes, Mollie,” he cried, as he caught her in his arms, “I’m your long-lost brother.”

“Then I hope you’ve come prepared to pay your honest debts,” growled the brother-in-law. “I’ve wrestled with that old mortgage till I’m demnition tired!”

“I hope you’ll permit me to atone as best I can, Lije. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Don’t be too hard on him, Lije!” pleaded the sister, as she helped the prodigal to remove his overcoat. “You’re all right now, brother, aren’t you?”

“I will be as soon as I have settled some old scores with your bear of a husband.”

“Don’t mind Lije!” said his sister, aside. “His losses and obligations have made him discouraged and cross. It wasn’t natural that he should endure our hardships resignedly, as we did. Blood is thicker than water, you know. Oh, Joseph, if I only could buy for our parents a nice little farm, such as Annie deeded to her father and mother! There’s a ten-acre farm adjoining theirs; I cannot sleep for thinking about it. But my whole lifework has been devoted to Lije, and must count for nothing, so far as father and mother are concerned. Father gave me a cow and calf for a wedding present, as you will remember. They would have made me comfortable long ago if I could have kept them and one-half of their increase as mine.”

“Yes, Mollie; and I acted the brute beast over that gift. I was a bumptious boy then; and I encouraged Lije in the idea that he mustn’t allow his wife to own property. I waxed eloquent, as I thought, over coverture, and such other archaic injustice as merges the existence of a wife into that of her husband. Men are more appreciative of women on the Pacific coast than they are here; but there are laws and usages out there yet that call loudly for a change, the Lord knows.”

“I am not complaining of Lije, Joe. He has never offered me any bodily injury in his life, and I’ve learned not to mind the explosions from his mouth. I have everything I need for my own simple wants; but, no matter how hard I struggle, I can never help my parents to a penny unless I steal it”; and she laid her head on her brother’s shoulder and sobbed aloud.

“What’s the matter now?” growled her husband. “Can’t you stop your bawling when you have company?”

“Breakfast is ready,” said Annie Robinson, a tall and handsome girl, who had been busy in the lean-to kitchen.

“Annie, this is Uncle Joseph,” said her mother, smiling through her tears.

“I don’t want to see him,” retorted the girl, rudely, turning to Uncle John with extended hands and a smile of welcome, and saying in a half-whisper, “What did you bring him here for?”

“The hair of the dog is good for the bite sometimes, my girl. Your Uncle Joseph is all right. He’ll atone for everything if we’ll give him half a chance.”

“You owe Joseph an apology for your rudeness, Annie; I am surprised at you!” said her mother. Then, turning to Joseph: “Don’t mind Annie. She is unhappy and cross because she could not go to boarding-school this winter.”

“If I didn’t deserve what I’m getting I wouldn’t stand it, sister; but I’ve come to atone, and I must take my punishment.”

The room was severely cold, and the hot breakfast filled the air with a vapor that obscured the window-panes. The lighted candles, in their tall receivers, reflected translucent halos, and lit the lithe figure of Annie Robinson, who flitted silently between the table and the great black stove, serving the food, and looking like a weird, uncanny shade.

“The way of the transgressor is hard,” thought Joseph. “We must be ready to take the back track to-morrow, John,” he said, rising from his chair, and leaving his food almost untasted. “Whatever business you and Lije may have between you must be agreed upon to-day. Where can I hire a horse and sleigh?”

“I’ve a cutter in the barn,” said Lije, beginning to relax a little as his breakfast stirred his heart and warmed his spirits. “You’ll find half-a-dozen old sawmill horses in the big shed back of the barn. They’re spavined and ringboned, and one of ’em is knock-kneed; but you can take your pick of the lot.”

“Won’t you let me go along, Joe?” asked his brother, as they left the house together. “Where are you going, anyhow?”

“Of course you can go along if you are not needed here. I am going to see about buying that ten-acre tract that Mollie told me about. If it is suitable for the needs of our parents, I will see them installed in a home of their own before another week passes. Why, John, I’d rather murder our dear old father and mother in cold blood than leave them under the heel of that parsimonious—”

“Don’t be too hard on Lije, Joe. He’s had a whole lot to contend with since the sawmill, the debts, and other double loads have been left on his hands.”

“And no wonder,” was the significant rejoinder. “He deserves his fate.”

The sun arose in splendor, warming the air, and making the drive of three or four miles keenly invigorating and enjoyable. They found the little farm they had come to inspect in fair condition, though in need of some modern improvements, of which the brothers took note. The land had originally belonged to the senior Ranger, who had secured a title to the half-section of which it was a part, directly from the government.

“If father had been content with smaller land holdings, it might have been better for him and all the rest of us,” said John.

“There is danger that we may make the same mistake in Oregon,” replied Joseph.

“What a wealthy man father might have been, though, if he had held on to all the land he acquired in this country in an early day!” added John.

“But he’d be a happier man to-day on this ten-acre plat, with prosperous small farmers all around him and all the improvements and conveniences on the plat that it can be made to carry, than he would be with a whole township on his shoulders under the burdens of taxation and a careless tenantry.”

“I don’t know but you are right,” echoed John; “it isn’t what we own, or imagine that we own, in this world, but what we can utilize, that makes up our real possessions. Oregon will surely suffer, in years to come, as a result of the present system of land-grabbing. Most of the unhappiness of the farmers’ wives results from isolation, which small farms would remedy. This little home is a perfect gem. Mother will be delighted.”

“And the Robinson old folks will have congenial neighbors. I can shut my eyes and see father now, hobbling about the place with his cane, pulling a weed here and a flower there, tending the horse and cow and garden, planting his onions and potatoes in the dark of the moon, as of old, and his cabbage and peas and beans when it is full.”

“And think how mother will enjoy her poultry and posies! But we must do something to relieve Lije of his burden of debt, or he’ll drive Mollie to suicide.”

“I feel under no obligation to Lije, God knows! But for Mollie’s sake, I’ll see about helping him out.”

“Do you still intend to leave for the coast to-morrow?”

“No,” said Joseph. “I spoke hastily. This is Sunday. We can’t complete our business to-day. I will see the agent and settle about this little farm in the morning. After we get the old folks comfortable it will be time to consider Lije. He must wait.”

“I’ve been thinking all day,” said John, as they were journeying homeward, “that the entire running machinery of the home should be intrusted to women, who are the real home-makers. My Annie planned for the support of her parents, and made them modestly independent by a stroke of her pen. But she could not have done it if I had continued obstinate about signing the deed; and I am very much afraid I could not have been prevailed upon to do it if it hadn’t been for the persistence of Jean. She gave me no peace till the conveyance was made. If women possessed law-making power, these matters would in time be adjusted, and both men and women would be the gainers in the long run. But both men and women are as short-sighted as they are selfish. Solomon was right when he said: ‘There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.’ It is noticeable that men of the frontier are more inclined to be just with their co-workers, the mothers, than the men of the older States.”

“It’s all settled, mother,” exclaimed Joseph, as he alighted at the cottage doorstep and threw the reins to John; “I’ve been to see that little farm adjoining Pap Robinson’s, and I’ve made terms. The little place is yours from now on, and I will not leave you till you are settled in it.”

“Your father will be so happy, son! He started to meeting a little while ago. I stayed at home to have a nice, warm supper ready. It isn’t many more meals I’ll get a chance to cook for my boys.”

“You did your share in that line long ago, mother dear.”

In the family reunion in the little cottage home that night there were no intruders. John, Mary, and Joseph held sweet communion with their parents alone.

“Our Father in Heaven,” prayed the old man, before retiring, “we thank Thee for all Thy tender mercies to us-ward. We realize Thy hand in our chastening; and we behold Thy love in our sorrows, since, but for them, we could not appreciate our joys. We thank Thee for John, for Mary, for Joseph, and for this night’s reunion. We also thank Thee for our absent dear ones, and for those whose bodies are under the snow, whose spirits are with Thee.

“Animate us all with the Christ spirit, O God; and grant that in Thine own good time we all may meet again.”

And the brothers echoed aloud the good father’s “Amen.”

XL THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS

A year has passed, and the autumn of 1853 has arrived. It has been a most strenuous twelve months on the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. Rapid changes, unlooked-for vicissitudes, improvements upon the virgin soil, annoying delays, and happy reunions have made the seasons fly.

The house was now surrounded by a cultivated field, through the centre of which a broad, tree-lined avenue wound upward from the grade below. The cattle whose labor had saved the lives of the immigrants the previous year were now sleek and fat.

Behind the dwelling rose the foot-hills of the Cascade Mountains, their sides and summits clothed with the majestic forest of pointed firs from which the ranch had derived its name. Still higher up, and yet up, above the serrated steeps, loomed hoary old Mount Hood, spreading his snowy robes over the misty lesser heights, the top of his white turban hidden among the clouds, his flowing beard resting upon the pointed crests of the most distant trees.

The music of machinery filled the air. The sawmill was at its best, running day and night to supply the ever-increasing demand for lumber. The original plant had already been greatly increased.

“It is a glorious thing to be alive!” said Jean, pausing in the perusal of a letter. “The air is as balmy as springtime. What a blessed change it will be for Ashton, who has seen nothing but sagebrush, bald mountains, jack-rabbits, sage-hens, Indians, immigrants, and cacti the summer long! Oh, my darling, it is a whole year since our first meeting!

“My last day in the schoolroom is over. I have enjoyed my work. Many of the little tots are better for the training I have given them. But best of all is the improvement the experience has brought to me. Every good deed reacts upon the doer. Ashton will hardly realize the progress I have made in education, physical appearance, and culture during the vanished year”; and she smiled approvingly at her reflection in the little mirror. “And to think that to-morrow is our wedding-day!” She resumed the reading of her cherished missive.

“It will interest you to know that the fellow Hankins, whose villany came so near to wrecking our happiness, my beloved, has been sent to the Pen. at Salt Lake for forgery. What a splendid man he might have been if he had improved his opportunities! He still has a penitentiary term to serve in New York, which, added to his twenty years in Utah, will take him into the sere and yellow leaf.”

“And I’d have allowed myself to marry that fellow, I fear, if you had proved false to me, my Ashton,” exclaimed Jean, as she turned from her musings to survey her trousseau, upon which she and Mary had spent much time and skill.

“Are you at leisure, sister?” asked Mary.

“Of course I am always at leisure to see you, Mary. But what is the matter? You are as red as a rose and bright as a diamond!” and she fondled the sparkling gem upon her own finger lovingly.

“Something sweet and momentous has happened, my dear. Wish me joy! Mr. Buckingham and I are to make the fourth couple to join the matrimonial combination at the fateful hour to-morrow.”

“Isn’t this rather sudden, Mame? Won’t you be leaving Marjorie in the lurch at the cook-house? And, above all, what will you do for a trousseau?”

“No, dear, this change is not sudden. As you know, we have been engaged for over six months. But my fiancé, being under orders from the government, has not been certain of a permanency before. We will take Marjorie with us to Washington, and keep her in school. And now as to trousseau. My white dimity dress is fresh and new, and so is Marjorie’s. When we get to Washington, where Mr. Buckingham must spend the winter under orders from the Land Department, he says we can patronize the modiste to our heart’s content. It was a fortunate day for me when my husband that is to be was sent out to Oregon to investigate alleged land frauds; and more fortunate still that he discovered that fellow Hankins.”

“I wish we’d known this a week ago, Mame. You might have had an ivory-white, all-wool delaine, with lace and satin trimmings, just like mine.”

“My little sister, notwithstanding her reputation for strong-mindedness, is a charming bit of femininity, after all,” laughed Mary, as she hurried away.

The near approach of a creaking wagon caused the sisters to approach the window.

“As I live!” cried Jean, “it’s the Reverend Thomas Rogers coming up the grade. And that is his little doll-faced wife. Wonder where they came from, and what in creation they’re coming here for.”

“You must go out to meet them, Jean,” said Mary. “I never want to see them again; but we mustn’t be remiss in hospitality.”

“He looks as if the world had gone hard with him, poor fellow,” laughed Jean. “Don’t you wish you had to pull in double harness with the like of him for the rest of your life?”

“I would never have fancied him in the first place if I had had any sense,” said Mary. “Wonder who paid their bills,” she cried with a hysterical little laugh, as she watched the preacher’s wife while she alighted over the wagon-wheel without any attention or assistance.

“Yonder goes Mrs. O’Dowd to the rescue. Do you know, Mame, I think it is a wise step for daddie to hitch up with Sally O’Dowd? He might go farther and fare a whole lot worse.”

Although the greeting the Rogers family received from the Ranger household was not exactly in keeping with the open-hearted hospitality of the border, it seemed to satisfy the preacher, who made himself as agreeable as possible.

“I went, Squire, to see your parents and Mrs. Ranger’s a few days before I left the States,” said the preacher. “The dear old people were well and prosperous and contented. They have imbibed a new theory about time and distance. They talk learnedly about vibrations, a fourth dimension in space, and other such nonsense; and they declare that there can be no real separation of souls that are in perfect accord with one another. Their new belief is making them as happy as birds. I would have no objection to such speculations if they didn’t tend to undermine the gospel. All such theories detract from the faith of our fathers.”

“Not necessarily,” said Jean. “I think that we ought always to accept truth for authority; but you want everybody to accept authority for truth.”

“I see it is the same little ‘doubting Thomas’ we used to have in the Pleasant Prairie schoolhouse,” said the minister.

“There is a whole lot of common-sense in Jean’s religion,” cried Hal; “I mean to accept her manufacture of the article as straight goods, full measure and a yard wide.”

“These discussions are not profitable,” said Captain Ranger, dryly.

“Your father and mother are certainly very happy in their theories; I can say that much for them,” said Mrs. Rogers, who, from her nook in the corner, had seldom ventured a word. “Their cottage was as neat as a new pin. It was the springtime, and climbing roses were clambering over the little porch. The old people seemed to lack for nothing but the companionship of their children.” And the little woman, amazed at her own loquacity, shrank back abashed.

“God has been very kind and gracious to both of the good old couples,” said the preacher, in a sonorous voice.

“Some people have an unlimited supply of gall,” said Hal, aside to Mary, alluding to the preacher and his wife.

“I don’t see but they are all right,” was the smiling reply of the rosy-cheeked maiden. “They have placed me under everlasting obligations, I do assure you.” She arose to greet a handsome visitor, whom she proudly introduced to them as “my affianced husband.”

The preacher’s joy was unbounded when Captain Ranger invited him to perform a quadruple marriage ceremony on the morrow,—an incident he hailed as an augury of the further social and financial assistance of which he felt so much in need that he began at once to solicit aid for the erection of a church and parsonage.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t begin to bother us about this innovation for a week or two!” exclaimed the Captain. “I’ll see that you are fed and housed for the present. As Jean will be leaving us, we shall need a school-teacher. My wife will not want an outsider to use our house for the school; so we must make a schoolhouse and meeting-house combined, and let it suffice for the present.”

The morning brought a scene of hurry, bustle, and happiness. Long tables were spread upon the lawn, under the wide-spread branches of the luxuriant fir-tree the woodman had spared when the land was cleared. Flowers and ferns from the wildwood added glow and fragrance to the loaded tables. Mary and Jean, rosy with expectation, flitted everywhere.

“Did you ever in all your born days see such a wonderful man as my daddie?” asked Jean, addressing Sally O’Dowd; and the happy woman answered, “I never did.”

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Ranger, the latter resplendent in a satin gown of latest fashion, were conspicuous assistants; and their children, all of whom were gotten up for the occasion by their happy mother regardless of expense, were the observed of all observers. These children, added to the younger members of Captain Ranger’s brood, the three children of Mrs. O’Dowd, and Susannah’s “coon,” made a formidable array of young Americans.

At the appointed hour, Mrs. McAlpin, who had arrived early on horseback to assist in the preparations, was joined by Mr. Burns, who brought to her a sealed package, long overdue, concerning which they kept their own counsel. But in anticipation of its arrival, they had allowed a “personal” to appear in the local paper in due season, as follows: “Mrs. Adele Benson, the handsome widow who spent a few days in this city after crossing the plains last year, and whose widowed daughter, Mrs. Daphne McAlpin, is soon to be the bride of our distinguished fellow-citizen, Mr. Rollin Burns, recently astonished her friends in Oregon with the announcement of her marriage in London to the Right Honorable Donald McPherson, only son and heir of Lady Mary McPherson, whose extensive estates are the pride and envy of High-Head on the Thames.”

The appointed hour had come, and the four brides expectant were beaming and beautiful in their simple and becoming array. Mr. Burns and Mr. Buckingham awaited the signal to descend with their brides. But where was Ashton Ashleigh?

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed, and he did not come. The dinner was spoiling, and Susannah was furious.

“I allus ’lowed dah’d nothin’ come o’ dat co’tship!” she said to Hal.

“Go ahead and get the ceremonies over,” said Jean. “Don’t allow this interruption to mar the enjoyment of anybody.”

And while her father was leading Mrs. O’Dowd to the marriage altar, with Mr. Burns and Mrs. McAlpin following, and Mary and her chosen one bringing up the rear, she sank, white-faced and benumbed upon her bed, and gave no sign of life except in the nervous fluttering of her half-closed eyelids.

For a long time she lay thus, mercifully bereft of the power to suffer. “There is some unavoidable reason for this delay,” she said over and over to herself. “I’ll understand it all in time.”

The afternoon waned, and darkness fell upon the Ranch of the Whispering Firs.

“Jean!”

“Is that you, daddie dear?”

“Yes, darling.”

“What do you think has delayed Ashton?”

“Try to forget him, Jean. His failure to be on hand at his own marriage ought to prove to you that he is faithless. You will live to thank God that the knowledge of Ashton’s faithlessness did not come upon you after marriage.”

“Ashton is not faithless!” she cried, springing to her feet. Then she fell quivering to the floor.

“Run, quick, Hal! Saddle a horse and go for the Little Doctor,” cried Mary.

A heavy mist that had rolled up from the ocean in the afternoon had settled now into a steady downpour. There was no moon, and the dense darkness of the forest through which Hal’s road lay was as black as Erebus. “Jean loves you, Sukie,” he would say, patting the mare on the shoulder. “We must get the Little Doctor at all hazards”; and the mare, as if sensing the importance of her mission, would leap forward with a sympathetic whinny.

The door was opened by Mr. Burns, revealing a scene of domestic comfort.

A little table, covered with a snowy cloth and spread with light refreshments, stood before a blazing fire; and at its head sat Mrs. Burns, daintily attired in a light blue wrapper of exquisite workmanship.

“Why, Harry Ranger!” she exclaimed, as the lad stood inside the door, shaking his dripping garments. “I hope Jean isn’t worse? I left her calm and seemingly out of danger.”

“She’s fallen in a fit! I’ve come for the Doctor!”

The wind had lulled a little as the little party hurried down the muddy highway toward the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. The Little Doctor, nattily arrayed in a rain suit, hood and all, sat her horse securely and plunged headlong through the darkness, while Hal rode by her side, followed at a distance by her husband, who bumped up and down in Scotch-English fashion on a heavy trotter, reminding himself of John Gilpin, as his hat blew off and his stirrup slipped from his foot.

“I’ve heard rumors of the ‘coming woman’ many a time,” he thought, bracing himself by clinging to the horn of his Spanish saddle. “But the deuce take me if I like the article in practice, though I’ve long advocated her cause in theory.”

He said as much in an injured tone to his wife, as they alighted at the Ranger home, and received for answer, “We must always consider what is the greatest good for the greatest number, dear. Won’t we be well repaid for this night’s adventure if Jean is saved?”

The Little Doctor found her patient in a rigid, trance-like state, her eyelids fluttering and her breathing stertorous.

“The heart’s action is fairly good,” she said, after a careful examination. “The most we can do is to keep her quiet. I will administer an opiate, and I think nature will do the rest. Meanwhile, somebody must go after that recalcitrant bridegroom. She would soon recover her tone if she could lose faith in him altogether. It is suspense that kills.”

“Brother Joseph started across the Cascade Mountains after him early in the afternoon,” the Captain explained. “He declared that nothing but foul play or some unavoidable accident could have detained so ardent a suitor.”

At the hour of midnight, when the Ranch of the Whispering Firs was wrapped in silence, Jean awoke, dismissed Susannah, and rose from her bed.

“O my God,” she cried inwardly, “if it be possible, let this cup pass from both of us! I know, O Spirit of Good, that my own has not, of his own accord, deserted his counterpart, his other self. Give me strength equal to my day! Let me not fail him now, when I know he needs me most.

“I must have been in your presence, Ashton, while my body was asleep,” she said half audibly. “For, in spite of my seeming duty to be miserable, I cannot be unhappy or hopeless. I seem to have been on a journey; but my recollection of it is indistinct and disjointed.”

She went to the window and looked out into the night. The clouds had rolled away, the wind had ceased, and the silent stars were looking down.

XLI “ IN PRISON AND YE VISITED ME ”

Joseph Ranger left the scene of the triple wedding early in the afternoon in quest of the missing bridegroom, and was overtaken by the storm before riding a dozen miles. But the hospitable welcome of the pioneers awaited him at Foster’s; and a substantial breakfast was ready for him before the dawn. The sun was barely up before he left the valley and entered the mountain pass. His faithful horse, who seemed to understand that he was bound on no ordinary errand, carefully chose his steps among the rocks and gullies, and bore him onward with gratifying speed.

Night overtook him long before he had descended the last of the rugged steeps that crossed his path after passing the summit of the range.

Bands of elk and antelope crossed his track at intervals; and at night, when he stopped to camp under a great pine-tree, when his fire was built, and his faithful horse and himself had feasted together upon the bag of roasted wheat he had brought along for sustenance, a band of deer, kindly eyed, graceful, and not afraid, came near him, attracted by the blaze and smoke, and circled around his bed at a respectful distance long after he had retired among his blankets upon a couch of evergreen boughs.

“That’s right! Come close, my beauties!” he exclaimed, as a doe and her daughter came close enough to breathe in his face. “I wouldn’t shoot one of you for the world. Your confidence is not misplaced.” But when he put out his hand to fondle them, they bounded away as light as birds, only to approach again and paw the blankets with their nimble hoofs, and awaken him from his coveted sleep. Finally, to frighten them away, he fired his revolver into the air, and the entire herd scampered away into the darkness.

“The gun is the wild animal’s master,” he said as he fell asleep, to be awakened again by the neighing of his tethered horse.

The fire of pitch-pine was still burning, and a pair of eyes glowed near his face like coals.

“This is no deer,” he thought, as he very cautiously clasped his “pepper-box” repeater.

A heavy paw was placed upon his breast, and the hot breath of a bear came close enough to nauseate him. There was no time to lose. As a mountaineer, he knew the nature of his foe too well to await the inevitable embrace of Bruin. Little by little he moved his repeater, and, when the weight of the animal was wellnigh crushing him, he sent a bullet through his eye. But the danger was by no means past, as the beast, though wounded unto death, was yet alive, and furious with rage and pain.

Just how he extricated himself from the peril of that eventful encounter, Joseph Ranger never knew, but he lived to narrate the adventure to children and grandchildren, and preserved to his dying day that long-outdated “pepper-box” revolver with which his great-grandchildren now delight to fire a volley in his honor on Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July.

Once safely through the Cascade Mountains, Joseph found little to impede his progress. Some friendly Indians were encountered at the base of the Blue Mountains, who gave him a hearty meal of bear-meat and wapatoes, and supplied his weary horse with hay and oats.

“Mika closh cumtux Wahnetta. Heap good Injun squaw! Ugh! Wake Mika potlatch chickimin! Hy-as closh muck-a-muck! Heap good. Cultus potlatch!” was the way in which his Indian host expressed his hospitality and refused compensation. And Joseph Ranger, acquainted with the jargon of many native tribes, further ingratiated himself in the Indian’s favor by presenting his squaw with a few gaudy trinkets such as an experienced borderer always carries when crossing an Indian country.

On and on he hurried toward the valley of Great Salt Lake, impelled by an irresistible impulse he could not have explained to any one. The weather was in his favor in crossing the Blue Mountains, though the air was cold, and the wind sometimes blew furiously. Water was low in all the smaller streams, and the beds of many of them were dry. Ice formed at night in swampy places and thawed by day, making travelling slippery and tedious; but on and on he hurried, knowing time was precious and yet not clearly understanding why.

At the Ogden Gateway he gained some information that doubled his impatience and quickened his speed. A man was being held on a charge of murder at Salt Lake City who he instinctively felt was Ashleigh. His informant, a Spanish half-breed, did not know his name, but he said an Indian girl was the victim, and her name was Le-Le.

On and on he journeyed, till he reached the verge of the little border city of Salt Lake. The Mormon Temple was not yet built, but a tabernacle had already arisen as its herald; and the Bee Hive House and Lion House were filled with wives and children of the prophet, who regularly toiled and spun. Joseph hastened to the adobe jail, where, after a brief delay, which seemed to him like an age, he was conducted to a dingy little cell, reserved for criminals of the lowest type.

A tall man, unshaven and in his shirt-sleeves, was pacing back and forth in his narrow quarters like a caged animal. He paused as the bolt flew back; and, as the light fell upon the face of his astonished visitor, he exclaimed, “Good God! Joseph Addicks! Can this be you?”

“I am Joseph Ranger, my boy! And I have come here all the way from the farthest West. But sit down here on the edge of your bed, and tell me all about it.”

“You remember the Indian maiden, Le-Le, whom I purchased and ransomed?”

“Yes.”

“And you recall the fact that I left her with her brother, Siwash, at my Green River cave at the time I came to you?”

“I remember that you said so.”

“Can you recall the date of my visit to you at the trading-post?”

“No; but there must be memoranda somewhere that will settle that. Why?”

“Because nothing will save me, Joseph, from the hangman’s rope unless I can prove an alibi. I forwarded a letter to you at Oregon City—or tried to—after this mishap befell me; but a courier can be bribed sometimes, you know, and Henry Hankins, who failed to capture my bride, is bent upon revenge. His incarceration doesn’t keep him out of reach of pals. But how is my bonnie Jean?”

“I left home too hurriedly to get much information. But her father said she was strangely calm, and full of faith in you.”

“Then my darling is not ill?”

“I certainly did not leave her well, Ashleigh, but she is in good hands. Do you know the particulars of Le-Le’s death?”

“I only know that her body was found in an eddy in Green River about a fortnight after I last saw her. Just as I was on the eve of starting to Oregon to claim my bride, I was arrested, charged with murder, and brought to this villanous den.”

“Be of good cheer, Ashleigh; I will find Siwash. Say nothing to any one. The darkest hour of the night is just before the morning. Good-bye, and may God bless you!”

XLII TOO BUSY TO BE MISERABLE

Jean met her father and his wife at the breakfast-table with a welcoming smile, though her head ached, and on her countenance there was a deathly pallor.

“The last night’s storm played havoc with the cherished plans of Mr. and Mrs. Burns,” said Mary’s husband, adroitly turning the conversation into a diverting channel. “They were intending to spend their honeymoon with their camping outfit in the open air among the spicy odors of the October woods.”

“They are old enough, and ought to be wise enough, by this time, to spend their honeymoon at home. No bridegroom ever dreamed of taking his bride away from home during the honeymoon in my younger days; that is, nobody did with whom my lot was cast,” said Captain Ranger, beaming tenderly upon his wife, who, being a sensible woman, was not displeased to note the far-away look in his eyes which betrayed his straying thoughts.

“You needn’t make any plans for a new teacher, for the present at least, daddie,” said Jean; “I shall resume my duties in the schoolroom next week. Will you post the required notices for me at the Four Corners, and at the sawmill, sometime during the day?”

“I wouldn’t be in a hurry about teaching, daughter. Your Uncle Joseph has gone by private pony express in quest—”

He paused, uncertain as to the propriety of speaking the name that was uppermost in all their thoughts.

“I know it, daddie. I knew all that was going on when I lay yesterday in what seemed to you as a stupor. I can’t explain it, but I seemed to have a double, or second, self that told me everything. Ashton is in trouble, but he is not in bodily danger, and he will not die. I do not understand it clearly, for I saw conditions only as through a glass, darkly. I would have remained in that state of seeming torpor for a whole month if it had been possible, for my mind and body were in different places. But in spite of myself I am again in a normal condition.”

“I shall be able to devote two weeks’ work to the erection of that combined schoolhouse and meeting-house,” said Mary’s husband. “Can’t you wait, sister, to begin your school till then?”

“No, Mr. Buckingham. You are very kind, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart, but I cannot wait. There will be time enough for you to take the reins when I am gone, Mr. Rogers.”

During the remainder of the week she performed prodigies of labor, but the work lagged at the mess-house. The new cook was not a success, and there was much dissatisfaction among the workingmen. But the Chinaman learned his lessons rapidly under the guidance of the Ranger sisters, and was soon able to load the long tables with plain but savory food.

The storm left the face of Nature fresh and green and joyous, and Mr. Burns and the Little Doctor repaired to the woods and foot-hills for their honeymoon, after all.

Jean’s complexion grew more delicately beautiful, her form more and more symmetrical, and her eyes sparkled like stars. But her girlish exuberance of spirit was gone, and in its place had come a womanly dignity, commanding, gracious, and sweet. The departure of Mary and her husband, with Marjorie, added heavily to Jean’s duties as superintendent of the Sunday-school. But her spirit craved work; so she opened a singing-school and a metrical geography class.

“Still no tidings!” she cried to herself, after an unusually strenuous day. “But I will not despair, and I will do my duty though the heavens fall. The whole of this month’s salary goes to Grandpa and Grandma Ranger. And for this opportunity to show my appreciation of their lives of self-denial in the service of others, I devoutly thank God.”

A shadow darkened the door of the deserted schoolroom.

“Who is it? And what is wanted?” asked Jean, with a start.

“It is I,—the Reverend Thomas Rogers,” said a voice, as, stepping out of the shadow, the preacher met her face to face.

“I have just completed my day’s work, and was about to shut up shop,” she said, moving toward the door.

“Very well. I will walk homeward with you, if I may.”

“No, you won’t!” piped a tremulous, complaining voice; and Mrs. Rogers stepped between them and the doorsill.

“I came to see Miss Jean about a change in the management of the Sunday-school,” said the preacher, meekly.

“And I’ve come to remind you that you must chop some stove-wood and milk the cow.”

The voice was not tremulous now, but commanding. “I’ll teach you to be running after the schoolma’am at unseemly hours!” she said with a vehemence that startled Jean, who had thought her the personification of submission and humility. “And I’ll teach you to be courting my husband, Miss Jean!”

“You can divest yourself of all anxiety on that score, Mrs. Rogers. I never saw the time when I would have dreamed of ‘courting’ the Reverend Thomas Rogers, even before he was married; and I wouldn’t ‘court’ any woman’s husband.”

“To be explicit,” said the preacher, in a submissive tone, “I think it is high time for the pastor of this church to manage his Sunday-school. Miss Jean’s methods are not strictly orthodox. I didn’t mean to speak of this to her in the presence of any third person, but since you have come upon the scene, Mrs. Rogers, we may as well settle it here and now.”

“What’s the trouble?” asked Jean, laughing irreverently.

“The hymns she teaches the children are not solemn enough. They are all about happy days and care-free birds and joyous children, whose chief duty lies in obeying their parents and loving one another. I’ve looked on during the proceedings, carefully and anxiously, for four consecutive Sundays now, and I haven’t heard one word about eternal punishment, nor has she exhorted anybody to flee from the wrath to come!”

“Aren’t you ashamed of your fit of jealousy in the light of this revelation, Mrs. Rogers?” asked Jean, laughing aloud.

“I know he was once in love with your sister Mary!” was the evasive but crestfallen reply.

“Well, Mr. Rogers,” said Jean, closing and locking the door, “we may as well be ending this interview. I founded the Sunday-school, and I will not abdicate till I get ready to leave the country. I never could be made to believe by your preaching or teaching that God wasn’t as good as my daddie, or even yourself. I am teaching the children to love and serve a beneficent God, and to love their neighbors as themselves. If that is heresy, make the most of it. Good-night! And, Mrs. Rogers, the next time you feel the unseemly pangs of jealousy, don’t make a fool of yourself before folks.”

XLIII JEAN IS HAPPY—AND ANOTHER PERSON

December, gloomiest month in the year, had settled over the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. The steady mist of the rainy season was at its best, or worst, according to the point of view, mental and physical, of its beholder. The mighty colonnades of trees, that reared their pointed crests in the mist-enwrapped heavens, were busily engaged, at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, in storing away the moisture of the skies among the countless layers of vegetable mould and moss from which to draw their supplies for the next summer’s drouth.

The sawmill, planing-mill, and shingle-loom were running day and night. The skid roads, upon which the leviathans of the forest were dragged to their final doom, were sodden, slippery, and already badly worn. Relays of oxen tugged at the creaking chains and complaining logs. The mill-pond, a lake upon the mountain-side, very much enlarged by a dam, lay half asleep under a soft coating of ice; and higher up, at the snow line, lay the ice-clad creek that fed it, sheathed in a coat of mail which held in check the waters that were destined, when a thaw should come, to overflow their banks and send a flood into the valley below.

“Are you an angel from heaven, or are you Ashton Ashleigh?” cried Jean, as a tall man entered at the open door and stood before her with outstretched arms. The color faded from her cheeks, and her heart gave a violent thump and then stood still.

“Nothing angelic about me or near me this holy minute, unless it is Jean, my bonnie Jean!” exclaimed the intruder, as he clasped her tenderly in his arms. Jean was speechless for the moment with surprise and joy.

“Why don’t you ask for an explanation, little one?” he asked after an interval. “An explanation is due you, God knows!”

“I knew you would come,” she whispered timidly. “You have been forcibly detained, Ashton. Nothing else would, or could, have kept you away from your own.”

“Yes, darling; it was all the evil-doing of that man Hankins, to whom I intrusted my letter and my ring. Come in, Uncle Joseph. Tell the whole cruel story.”

“He was on his way to his wedding when he was arrested and thrown into prison!” exclaimed the uncle.

“You remember the slave girl Le-Le, my bonnie Jean? I was falsely accused of being her murderer; and they would surely have convicted me of the crime if your uncle had not appeared upon the scene, and after much delay and difficulty proved an alibi. Do you wonder that my hair has turned white?”

“Why, so it has, Ashton! I had not noticed it before; the light is dim. But you are all right. Your hair is beautiful. I like it best as it is.”

“I had a deuce of a time proving that alibi!” interrupted the uncle. “Our only witness was Siwash, who had left the scene of the tragedy and was nowhere to be found, though I sent scouts out for him in every direction. He had no idea that he was wanted, when he finally appeared upon the scene, but he came just in the nick of time.

“‘I saw my sister make the fatal leap into Green River,’” he deposed in excellent English. ‘She had been very despondent after Mr. Ashleigh left us, and I was often afraid she would take her life. But as the weeks passed, she apparently grew more reconciled; and I had ceased to worry about her, when one day, after getting my luncheon, she refused to wait upon the table, and left our cave in a manner that excited my alarm. So I followed her. I saw the fatal leap. She plunged into the rushing water through a hole in the ice, under which her body was imprisoned till last summer, when it was found three miles from the fatal scene. I never dreamed of anybody being accused of killing her,—least of all Mr. Ashleigh, our benefactor and friend.’

“‘Do the citizens of the village near the scene of the tragedy know of the suicide?’ asked the Court.

“‘They do, your Honor, a dozen of them!’ said the boy.

“No argument was offered on either side. Hankins was sent back to the penitentiary. Ashton was allowed to go forth a free man; and here, after a hard journey, are both of us to tell the tale!”

Sunday morning at the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. The skies, which have been humid and lowering for many days, are once more on their good behavior. The clouds have rolled away to the Northland, and the air and sunshine are as balmy as in springtime.

Once more there is a gathering,—this time at the combined schoolhouse and meeting-house; and Jean Ranger, handsomely attired in a well-made travelling suit of gray, with hat to match,—the handiwork of her stepmother and the Little Doctor,—is superintending for the last time (at least the last till after her return from abroad) her beloved Sunday-school. The tidings of the bridegroom’s arrival had spread from house to house, and everybody within a radius of a dozen miles had appeared upon the scene. The children of the district had decorated the room profusely with wild flowers, ferns, and evergreens.

Jean, in surrendering her school to the pastor, made a felicitous speech, exhorting her pupils to continue in the ways of well-doing. Then, bidding them a loving and hopeful good-bye, she formally resigned her post, and the Reverend Thomas Rogers assumed control.

At a given signal from Captain Ranger, a tall and handsome young Englishman, whose youthful face contrasted strangely with his snowy hair, stepped proudly down the aisle, where he was joined by his radiant bride, leaning on the arm of her father; and the preacher pronounced the words that legalized a union made in heaven. The tears that rose unbidden to the eyes of bronzed and bearded men and toilworn, plainly attired women were tears of joy and peace, good-will and gladness.

A bountiful basket-dinner, contributed, as by a common impulse, from the home of almost every family in the district, was served within the building.

“We leave to-morrow, by steamer from Portland, going by way of San Francisco, Acapulco, and the Isthmus, up the Atlantic coast to New York,” said the happy bridegroom, in his post-prandial speech, “whence we shall sail for Liverpool. I shall take my wife to London to visit my mother. Then, on our return to Oregon (for we will make this neighborhood of the Ranch of the Whispering Firs our permanent home), we shall stop over at Washington to see her sisters,—Mrs. Buckingham and Marjorie; and after that we can visit the home of her childhood.”

“But I prefer going first to the home of my grandparents, dearest,” said the bride. “We can get there easily by the way of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River and the Illinois, if we’ll be on hand before the rivers are frozen over. We can then go on to Washington, and to England afterwards. Don’t you think this will be the more economical, convenient, and reasonable plan?”

“As this journey is to be in your honor, it shall be as you say, my bonnie Jean.”

The bride blushed and beamed bewitchingly, while the crowd laughed and applauded, and her husband bowed and smiled in approval.

All eyes then turned upon the father, who took the happy and exultant bridegroom by the hand and said in a voice tremulous with emotion: “Ashton Ashleigh, my son through marriage, you have taken to yourself the priceless jewel that I once fondly thought was mine! Value not lightly the radiant gem of womanhood you guard!” Then to the bride he said, embracing her tenderly, while the eyes of the multitude filled afresh with tears: “Beloved daughter of thy sainted mother, go thy way with the husband of thy choice. But do not forget to hold thyself always as his equal before God and man. Then shalt thou be his best counsellor, his real helpmate, and his wisest friend.” To both he added, as he folded their clasped hands between his own broad palms: “Keep step together, my children; and, whether your way shall lead you up the mountain-sides of difficulty, or through the quagmires of sorrow, or into the glad valleys of happiness and peace, always march side by side, in time and tune to the eternal harmonies of religion, liberty, equality, justice, and progression.”

And here, patient reader, with Life before them, and Love leading the way, these chronicles shall bid adieu to the happy pair while they take temporary leave of the remnant of the Ranger household and the Ranch of the Whispering Firs.

THE END

FOOTNOTES

BOOKS RELATING TO THE NORTHWEST — The Conquest — McLoughlin and Old Oregon — The Bridge of the Gods — A Short History of Oregon — Letters from an Oregon Ranch — From the West to the West Across the Plains to Oregon — The Journals of Captains Lewis and Clark, 1804-5-6 (McClurg Library Reprints of Americana) — Gass’s Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (McClurg Library Reprints of Americana)

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These books are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by the publishers on receipt of price. An extra for postage will be made on “net” books.

A. C. McCLURG & CO., PUBLISHERS, CHICAGO