Parish's eyes narrowed painfully as he stood looking over the stretches of Washington's estate. The vista typified many well-beloved things that he was being called upon to leave behind him—ordered acres, books, the human contacts of kindred association. It was when he thought of his young wife and his daughter that he flinched. 'Twould go hard with them, who had been gently nurtured.
"Do women and children go, too?" inquired Parish, brusquely.
"There are women and children there," came the swift reply. "We seek to lay foundations of permanence and without the family we build on quicksand."
* * *
Endless barriers of wilderness peaks rose sheer and forbidding about a valley through which a narrow river flashed its thin loop of water. Down the steep slopes from a rain-darkened sky hung ragged fringes of cloud-streamer and fog-wraith.
Toward a settlement, somewhere westward through the forest, a drenched and travel-sore cortège was plodding outward. A handful of lean and briar-infested cattle stumbled in advance, yet themselves preceded by a vanguard of scouting riflemen, and back of the beef-animals came ponies, galled of wither and lean of rib under long-borne pack saddles.
Behind lay memories of hard and seemingly endless journeying, of alarms, of discouragement. Ahead lay a precarious future—and the wilderness.
The two Dorothys, Captain Caleb Parish's wife and daughter, were ending their journey on foot, for upon them lay the duties of example and noblesse oblige—but the prideful tilt of their chins was maintained with an ache of effort, and when the cortège halted that the beasts might blow, Caleb Parish hastened back from his place at the front to his wife and daughter.
"It's not far now," he encouraged. "To-night, at least, we shall sleep behind walls—even though they be only those of a block-house—and under a roof tree."
Both of them smiled at him—yet in his self-accusing heart he wondered whether the wife whose fortitude he was so severely taxing would not have done better to choose his brother.