CHAPTER VII
It was Sunday afternoon, and the doctor and his daughter were sitting by a group of alders on the banks of the little river called Ham's Fork. On the uplands above, the shadows were lengthening, and at intervals a light air caught up swirls of dust and carried them careening away in staggering spirals.
The doctor was tired and lay stretched on the ground. He looked bloodless and wan, the grizzled beard not able to hide the thinness of his face. The healthful vigor he had found on the prairie had left him, each day's march claiming a dole from his hoarded store of strength. He knew—no one else—that he had never recovered the vitality expended at the time of Bella's illness. The call then had been too strenuous, the depleted reservoir had filled slowly, and now the demands of unremitting toil were draining it of what was left. He said nothing of this, but thought much in his feverish nights, and in the long afternoons when his knees felt weak against the horse's sides. As the silence of each member of the little train was a veil over secret trouble, his had hidden the darkest, the most sinister.
Susan, sitting beside him, watching him with an anxious eye, noted the languor of his long, dry hands, the network of lines, etched deep on the loose skin of his cheeks. Of late she had been shut in with her own preoccupations, but never too close for the old love and the old habit to force a way through. She had seen a lessening of energy and spirit, asked about it, and received the accustomed answers that came with the quick, brisk cheeriness that now had to be whipped up. She had never seen his dauntless belief in life shaken. Faith and a debonair courage were his message. They were still there, but the effort of the unbroken spirit to maintain them against the body's weakness was suddenly revealed to her and the pathos of it caught at her throat. She leaned forward and passed her hand over his hair, her eyes on his face in a long gaze of almost solemn tenderness.
"You're worn out," she said.
"Not a bit of it," he answered stoutly. "You're the most uncomplimentary person I know. I was just thinking what a hardy pioneer I'd become, and that's the way you dash me to the ground."
She looked at the silvery meshes through which her fingers were laced.
"It's quite white and there were lots of brown hairs left when we started."
"That's the Emigrant Trail," he smothered a sigh, and his trouble found words: "It's not for old men, Missy."
"Old!" scornfully; "you're fifty-three. That's only thirty-two years older than I am. When I'm fifty-three you'll be eighty-five. Then we'll begin to talk about your being old."