The Emigrant Trail

by Geraldine Bonner

David rose from his crouching posture to his knees. The other, all his savage instincts primed for onslaught, saw menace in the movement, and stood braced and ready. Like Susan he understood that David had guessed the secret. He could judge him only by his own measure, and he knew the settling of the score had come. There was no right or justice in his claim, only the right of the stronger to win what he wanted, but that to him was the supreme right.

David's sick fury shot up into living flame. He judged Susan innocent, a tool in ruthless hands. He saw the destroyer of their lives, a devil who had worked subtly for his despoilment. The air grew dark and in the center of the darkness, his hate concentrated on the watching face, and an impulse, the strongest of his life, nerved him with the force to kill. For once he broke beyond himself, rose outside the restrictions that had held him cowering within his sensitive shell. His rage had the vehemence of a distracted woman's, and he threw himself upon his enemy, inadequate now as always, but at last unaware and unconscious.

They clutched and rocked together. From the moment of the grapple it was unequal—a sick and wounded creature struggling in arms that were as iron bands about his puny frame. But as a furious child fights for a moment successfully with its enraged elder, he tore and beat at his opponent, striking blindly at the face he loathed, writhing in the grip that bent his body and sent the air in sobbing gasps from his lungs. Their trampling was muffled on the stone, their shadows leaped in contorted waverings out from their feet and back again. Broken and twisted in Courant's arms, David felt no pain only the blind hate, saw the livid plain heaving about him, the white ball of the sun, and twisting through the reeling distance the pale thread of the Emigrant Trail, glancing across his ensanguined vision like a shuttle weaving through a blood-red loom.

They staggered to the edge of the plateau and there hung. It was only for a moment, a last moment of strained and swaying balance. Courant felt the body against his weaken, wrenched himself free, and with a driving blow sent it outward over the precipice. It fell with the arms flung wide, the head dropped backward, and from the open mouth a cry broke, a shrill and dreadful sound that struck sharp on the plain's abstracted silence, spread and quivered across its surface like widening rings on the waters of a pool. The mountain man threw himself on the edge and looked down. The figure lay limp among the bushes thirty feet below. He watched it, his body still as a panther's crouched for a spring. He saw one of the hands twitch, a loosened sliver of slate slide from the wall, and cannoning on projections, leap down and bury itself in the outflung hair. The face looking up at him with half-shut eyes that did not wink as the rock dust sifted into them, was terrible, but he felt no sensation save a grim curiosity.

He stole down a narrow gulley and crept with stealthy feet and steadying hands toward the still shape. The shadows were cool down there, and as he touched the face its warmth shocked him. It should have been cold to have matched its look and the hush of the place. He thrust his hand inside the shirt and felt at the heart. No throb rose under his palm, and he sent it sliding over the upper part of the body, limp now, but which he knew would soon be stiffening. The man was dead.

Courant straightened himself and sent a rapid glance about him. The bushes among which the body lay were close matted in a thick screen. Through their roots the small trickle of the spring percolated, stealing its way to the parched sands outside. It made a continuous murmuring, as if nature was lifting a voice of low, insistent protest against the desecration of her peace.

The man standing with stilled breath and rigid muscles listened for other sounds. Reassured that there were none, his look swept right and left for a spot wherein to hide the thing that lay at his feet. At its base the rock wall slanted outward leaving a hollow beneath its eave where the thin veneer of water gleamed from the shadows. He took the dead man under the arms and dragged him to it, careful of branches that might snap under his foot, pausing to let the echoes of rolling stones die away—a figure of fierce vitality with the long, limp body hanging from his hands. At the rock he crouched and thrust his burden under the wall's protecting cope, the trickle of the water dying into a sudden, scared silence. Stepping back he brushed the bushes into shape, hiding their breakage, and bent to gather the scattered leaves and crush them into crevices. When it was done the place showed no sign of the intruder, only the whispering of the streamlet told that its course was changed and it was feeling for a new channel.

Then he crept softly out to the plain's edge where the sunlight lay long and bright. It touched his face and showed it white, with lips close set and eyes gleaming like crystals. He skirted the rock, making a soft, quick way to where the camp lay. Here the animals stood, heads drooped as they cropped the herbage round the spring. Daddy John sat in the shade of the wagon, tranquilly cleaning a gun. The mountain man's passage was so soundless that he did not hear it. The animals raised slow eyes to the moving figure, then dropped them indifferently. He passed them, his step growing lighter, changing as he withdrew from the old man's line of vision, to a long, rapid glide. His blood-shot eyes nursed the extending buttresses, and as he came round them, with craned neck and body reaching forward, they sent a glance into each recess that leaped round it like a flame.

Susan had remained in the same place. She made no note of the passage of time, but the sky between the walls was growing deeper in color, the shadows lengthening along the ground. She was lying on her side looking out through the rift's opening when Courant stood there. He made an instant's pause, a moment when his breath caught deep, and, seeing him, she started to her knees with a blanching face. As he came upon her she held out her hands, crying in uprising notes of terror, "No! No! No!" But he gathered her in his arms, stilled her cries with his kisses, and bending low carried her back into the darkened cavern over which the rocks closed like hands uplifted in prayer.