“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.