She leaned her lips to his ear.
"It was gold!"
He stood, the magic name of that metal which shows the color in the shade electrifying even his ignorance of the truth.
"Gold?"
She told him then, breaking her own promise magnificently, as a woman will.
"Go, ride with Bridger," she went on. "Don"t tell him you ever knew me.
He"ll not be apt to speak of me. But they found it, in California, the middle of last winter--gold! Gold! Carson"s here in our camp--Kit Carson. He"s the first man to bring it to the Valley of the Platte. He was sworn to keep it secret; so was Bridger, and so am I. Not to Oregon, Will--California! You can live down your past. If we die, G.o.d bless the man I do love. That"s you, Will! And I"m going to marry--him. Ten days!
On the trail! And he"ll kill you, Will! Oh, keep away!"
She paused, breathless from her torrent of incoherent words, jealous of the pa.s.sing moments. It was vague, it was desperate, it was crude. But they were in a world vague, desperate and crude.
"I"ve promised my men I"d not leave them," he said at last. "A promise is a promise."
"Then G.o.d help us both! But one thing--when I"m married, that"s the end between us. So good-by."
He leaned his head back on his saddle for a time, his tired horse turning back its head. He put out his hand blindly; but it was the muzzle of his horse that had touched his shoulder. The girl was gone.
The Indian drums at Laramie thudded through the dark. The great wolf in the breaks lifted his hoa.r.s.e, raucous roar once more. The wilderness was afoot or bedding down, according to its like.
CHAPTER XXVIII
WHEN A MAID MARRIES
Carson, Bridger and Jackson, now reunited after years, must pour additional libations to Auld Lang Syne at Laramie, so soon were off together. The movers sat around their thrifty cooking fires outside the wagon corral. Wingate and his wife were talking heatedly, she in her nervousness not knowing that she fumbled over and over in her fingers the heavy bit of rock which Molly had picked up and which was in her handkerchief when it was requisitioned by her mother to bathe her face just now. After a time she tossed the nugget aside into the gra.s.s. It was trodden by a hundred feet ere long.
But gold will not die. In three weeks a prowling Gros Ventre squaw found it and carried it to the trader, Bordeaux, asking, "Shoog?"
"Non, non!" replied the Laramie trader. "Pas de shoog!" But he looked curiously at the thing, so heavy.
"How, cola!" wheedled the squaw. "Shoog!" She made the sign for sugar, her finger from her palm to her lips. Bordeaux tossed the thing into the tin can on the shelf and gave her what sugar would cover a spoon.
"Where?" He asked her, his fingers loosely shaken, meaning, "Where did you get it?"
The Gros Ventre lied to him like a lady, and told him, on the South Fork, on the Creek of Bitter Cherries--near where Denver now is; and where placers once were. That was hundreds of miles away. The Gros Ventre woman had been there once in her wanderings and had seen some heavy metal.
Years later, after Fort Laramie was taken over by the Government, Bordeaux as sutler sold much flour and bacon to men hurrying down the South Fork to the early Colorado diggings. Meantime in his cups he often had told the mythical tale of the Gros Ventre woman--long after California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana were all afire. But one of his halfbreed children very presently had commandeered the tin cup and its contents, so that to this day no man knows whether the child swallowed the nugget or threw it into the Laramie River or the Platte River or the sagebrush. Some depose that an emigrant bought it of the baby; but no one knows.
What all men do know is that gold does not die; nay, nor the news of it.
And this news now, like a multiplying germ, was in the wagon train that had started out for Oregon.
As for Molly, she asked no questions at all about the lost nugget, but hurried to her own bed, supperless, pale and weeping. She told her father nothing of the nature of her meeting with Will Banion, then nor at any time for many weeks.
"Molly, come here, I want to talk to you."
Wingate beckoned to his daughter the second morning after Banion"s visit.
The order for the advance was given. The men had brought in the cattle and the yoking up was well forward. The rattle of pots and pans was dying down. Dogs had taken their places on flank or at the wagon rear, women were climbing up to the seats, children clinging to pieces of dried meat. The train was waiting for the word.
The girl followed him calmly, high-headed.
"Molly, see here," he began. "We"re all ready to move on. I don"t know where Will Banion went, but I want you to know, as I told him, that he can"t travel in our train."
"He"ll not ask to, father. He"s promised to stick to his own men."
"He"s left you at last! That"s good. Now I want you to drop him from your thoughts. Hear that, and heed it. I tell you once more, you"re not treating Sam Woodhull right."
She made him no answer.
"You"re still young, Molly," he went on. "Once you"re settled you"ll find Oregon all right. Time you were marrying. You"ll be twenty and an old maid first thing you know. Sam will make you a good husband. Heed what I say."
But she did not heed, though she made no reply to him. Her eye, "scornful, threatening and young," looked yonder where she knew her lover was; not was it in her soul ever to return from following after him. The name of her intended husband left her cold as ice.
"Roll out! Roll out! Ro-o-o-ll ou-t!"
The call went down the line once more. The pistolry of the wagon whips made answer, the drone of the drivers rose as the sore-necked oxen bowed their heads again, with less strength even for the lightened loads.
The old man who sat by the gate at Fort Laramie, twisting a curl around his finger, saw the plain clearing now, as the great train swung out and up the river trail. He perhaps knew that Jim Bridger, with his own freight wagons, going light and fast with mules, was on west, ahead of the main caravan. But he did not know the news Jim Bridger carried, the same news that Carson was carrying east. The three old mountain men, for a few hours meeting after years, now were pa.s.sing far apart, never to meet again. Their chance encountering meant much to hundreds of men and women then on the road to Oregon; to untold thousands yet to come.
As for one Samuel Woodhull, late column captain, it was to be admitted that for some time he had been conscious of certain buffetings of fate.
But as all thoroughbred animals are thin-skinned, so are all the short-bred pachydermatous, whereby they endure and mayhap arrive at the manger well as the next. True, even Woodhull"s vanity and self-content had everything asked of them in view of his late series of mishaps; but by now he had somewhat chirked up under rest and good food, and was once more the dandy and hail fellow. He felt a.s.sured that very presently bygones would be bygones. Moreover--so he reasoned--if he, Sam Woodhull, won the spoils, what matter who had won any sort of victory? He knew, as all these others knew and as all the world knows, that a beautiful woman is above all things _spolia opima_ of war. Well, in ten days he was to marry Molly Wingate, the most beautiful woman of the train and the belle of more than one community. Could he not afford to laugh best, in spite of all events, even if some of them had not been to his own liking?
But the girl"s open indifference was least of all to his liking. It enraged his vain, choleric nature to its inner core. Already he planned dominance; but willing to wait and to endure for ten days, meantime he employed innocence, reticence, dignity, attentiveness, so that he seemed a suitor misunderstood, misrepresented, unjustly used--to whose patient soul none the less presently must arrive justice and exoneration, after which all would be happier even than a marriage bell. After the wedding bells he, Samuel Woodhull, would show who was master.
Possessed once more of horse, arms and personal equipment, and having told his own story of persecution to good effect throughout the train, Woodhull had been allowed to resume a nominal command over a part of the Wingate wagons. The real control lay in the triumvirate who once had usurped power, and who might do so again.
Wingate himself really had not much more than nominal control of the general company, although he continued to give what Caleb Price called the easy orders. His wagons, now largely changed to ox transport, still traveled at the head of the train, Molly continuing to drive her own light wagon and Jed remaining on the cow column.
The advance hardly had left Fort Laramie hidden by the rolling ridges before Woodhull rode up to Molly"s wagon and made excuse to pa.s.s his horse to a boy while he himself climbed up on the seat with his fiancee.
She made room for him in silence, her eyes straight ahead. The wagon cover made good screen behind, the herdsmen were far in the rear, and from the wagons ahead none could see them. Yet when, after a moment, her affianced husband dropped an arm about her waist the girl flung it off impatiently.
"Don"t!" she exclaimed. "I detest love-making in public. We see enough of it that can"t be hid. It"s getting worse, more open, the farther we get out."
"The train knows we are to be married at the halfway stop, Molly. Then you"ll change wagons and will not need to drive."
"Wait till then."
"I count the hours. Don"t you, dearest?"
She turned a pallid face to him at last, resentful of his endearments.