"Chief!" with even greater emphasis, "that poor dirty creature a chief!"
The muse relinquished her hold. The young man explained, not with impatience, but as one mortified by a betrayal into foolish enthusiasm:
"I didn't mean that he was a chief. I was just imagining."
"Oh," with the falling inflexion of comprehension. "You often imagine, don't you? Let's ride on to where the road goes down into that hollow."
They rode on in silence, both slightly chagrined, for if David found it trying to have his fine flights checked, Susan was annoyed when she said things that made him wear a look of forbearing patience. She may not have had much imagination, but she had a very observing eye, and could have startled not only David, but her father by the shrewdness with which she read faces.
The road sloped to a hollow where the mottled trunks of cotton woods stood in a group round the dimpling face of a spring. With well-moistened roots the grass grew long and rich. Here was the place for the night's camp. They would wait till the train came up. And even as they rested on this comfortable thought they saw between the leaves the canvas top of a wagon.
The meeting of trains was one of the excitements of life on the Emigrant Trail. Sometimes they were acquaintances made in the wet days at Independence, sometimes strangers who had come by way of St. Joseph. Then the encountering parties eyed one another with candid curiosity and from each came the greeting of the plains, "Be you for Oregon or California?"
The present party was for Oregon from Missouri, six weeks on the road. They were a family, traveling alone, having dropped out of the company with which they had started. The man, a gaunt and grizzled creature, with long hair and ragged beard, was unyoking his oxen, while the woman bent over the fire which crackled beneath her hands. She was as lean as he, shapeless, saffron-skinned and wrinkled, but evidently younger than she looked. The brood of tow-headed children round her ran from a girl of fourteen to a baby, just toddling, a fat, solemn-eyed cherub, almost naked, with a golden fluff of hair.
At sight of him Susan drew up, the unthinking serenity of her face suddenly concentrated into a hunger of admiration, a look which changed her, focused her careless happiness into a pointed delight.
"Look at the baby," she said quickly, "a lovely fat baby with curls," then slid off her horse and went toward them.