"Yes," she said, looking down. "Yes—but—let me wait a little while longer."
"As long as you like. I'll never ask you to marry me till you say you're willing."
She held out her hand shyly, as if fearing a repulse. He took it, and feeling it relinquished to his with trust and confidence, swore that never again would he disturb her, never demand of her till she was ready to give.
CHAPTER VIII
Fort Bridger was like a giant magnet perpetually revolving and sweeping the western half of the country with its rays. They wheeled from the west across the north over the east and down to the south. Ox teams, prairie schooners, pack trains, horsemen came to it from the barren lands that guarded the gates of California, from the tumultuous rivers and fragrant forests of the Oregon country, from the trapper's paths and the thin, icy streams of the Rockies, from the plains where the Platte sung round its sand bars, from the sun-drenched Spanish deserts. All roads led to it, and down each one came the slow coil of the long trains and the pacing files of mounted men. Under its walls they rested and repaired their waste, ere they took the trail again intent on the nation's work of conquest.
The fort's centripetal attraction had caught the doctor's party, and was drawing it to the focus. They reckoned the days on their fingers and pressed forward with a feverish hurry. They were like wayworn mariners who sight the lights of a port. Dead desires, revived, blew into a glow extinguished vanities. They looked at each other, and for the first time realized how ragged and unkempt they were, then dragged out best clothes from the bottom of their chests and hung their looking-glasses to the limbs of trees. They were coming to the surface after a period of submersion.
Susan fastened her mirror to the twig on an alder trunk and ransacked her store of finery. It yielded up a new red merino bodice, and the occasion was great enough to warrant breaking into her reserve of hairpins. Then she experimented with her hair, parted and rolled it in the form that had been the fashion in that long dead past—was it twenty years ago?—when she had been a girl in Rochester. She inspected her reflected image with a fearful curiosity, as if expecting to find gray hairs and wrinkles. It was pleasant to see that she looked the same—a trifle thinner may be. And as she noted that her cheeks were not as roundly curved, the fullness of her throat had melted to a more muscular, less creased and creamy firmness, she felt a glow of satisfaction. For in those distant days—twenty-five years ago it must be—she had worried because she was a little too fat. No one could say that now. She stole a look over her shoulder to make sure she was not watched—it seemed an absurdly vain thing to do—and turned back the neck of her blouse. The faintest rise of collar bone showed under the satiny skin, fine as a magnolia petal, the color of faintly tinted meerschaum. She ran her hand across it and it was smooth as curds yielding with an elastic resistance over its bedding of firm flesh. The young girl's pride in her beauty rose, bringing with it a sense of surprise. She had thought it gone forever, and now it still held, the one surviving sensation that connected her with that other Susan Gillespie who had lived a half century ago in Rochester.
It was the day after this recrudescence of old coquetry that the first tragedy of the trail, the tragedy that was hers alone, smote her.
The march that morning had been over a high level across which they headed for a small river they would follow to the Fort. Early in the afternoon they saw its course traced in intricate embroidery across the earth's leathern carpet. The road dropped into it, the trail grooved deep between ramparts of clay. On the lip of the descent the wayward Julia, maddened with thirst, plunged forward, her obedient mates followed, and the wagon went hurling down the slant, dust rising like the smoke of an explosion. The men struggled for control and, seized by the contagion of their excitement, the doctor laid hold of a wheel. It jerked him from his feet and flung him sprawling, stunned by the impact, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his lips. The others saw nothing, in the tumult did not hear Susan's cry. When they came back the doctor was lying where he had fallen, and she was sitting beside him wiping his lips with the kerchief she had torn from her neck. She looked up at them and said: