Barbara saw, in the firelight, that Felix's face flushed, then turned white. No one but herself could know just how such words would hurt him, how his pride, his love for his brother, and his sturdy independence were all cut to the very quick. He went out of the room without a word and could be heard climbing the ladderlike stairs that led to the room he had made for himself under the eaves. Ralph sat down by the fire, muttering uneasily something about "it all blowing over." With lagging steps Barbara went on setting the table.
They were not prepared to see Felix come down the stairs a few minutes later with his coat and cap and with his violin under his arm.
"I will take no man's charity, not even my brother's," he said huskily, as he stood still for a moment on the threshold. Then he was gone.
Barbara leaned over the half door and watched him go down the path, saw him pass through the lane of tiny apple trees, saw the dusk gather about him as he went on, a smaller and smaller, plodding figure that disappeared at last into the dark. The autumn wind in the oak tree sounded blustering and cold as she closed the door and turned back to the room again.
"He has only gone down to the town, he will come back to-morrow," growled Ralph, but Barbara knew better.
"He has gone to look for gold," she cried, and, sitting down on the bench by the fire, she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.
Felix used to think, as the days and weeks passed, and as that strange journey upon which he had launched so suddenly dragged on and on, that the grassy slope above the orchard and the cool dark foliage of the oak tree must be the very greenest and fairest things on earth. There was no green now before his aching eyes, only the wide stretch of yellow-brown prairie, a rough trail, deep in dust, winding across it, a line of white-topped wagons crawling like ants over the vast plain, and a blue arch of sky above, blinding-bright with the heat.
It was October when he went away from home, it was a month later when, by leisurely stage and slow canal boat, he arrived at the Mississippi River, the outpost of established travel. Here he was obliged to wait until spring, for even in the rush of '49 there were few bold enough to attempt the overland trail in winter. He turned his hand to every sort of work, he did odd jobs during the day and played his violin for dancing at night, he grew lean and out-at-elbows and graver than he used to be. He slept in strange places and ate stranger food, he suffered pangs of hunger and of homesickness, but he never thought of going back. His violin went everywhere with him, and in more than one of the little towns along the big river, people began to demand the boy fiddler who could make such gay music for their merrymakings.
When at last the snow melted, the wild geese flew northward, and the wilderness trail was open again, he had no difficulty in finding an emigrant party to which to attach himself. Abner Blythe was a lean, hard Yankee, but he had lived for years in the Middle West and had made journeys out into the prairie, although he had never gone the whole of the way to the mountains and the coast. He knew how to drive cattle with the long black-snake whip, whose snapping lash alone can voice the master's orders and which can flick the ear or flank of a wandering steer at the outermost limit of reach. His frail, eager-eyed little wife was to go with them, their boy of five, and a company of helpers who were to drive the wagons of supplies and to serve for protection against Indians.