It was a command, and the glance that went with it accented its authority.
The prairie schooner was now close at hand, and they straggled forward to meet it, one behind the other, through the brushing of the knee-high bushes. The child recognizing them ran screaming toward them, his hands out-stretched, crying out their names. Lucy appeared at the front of the wagon, climbed on the tongue and jumped down. She was pale, the freckles on her fair skin showing like a spattering of brown paint, her flaming hair slipped in a tousled coil to one side of her head.
"It's you!" she cried. "Glen didn't know whose camp it was till he saw David. Oh, I'm so glad!" and she ran to Susan, clutched her arm and said in a hurried lower key, "Bella's sick. She feels terribly bad, out here in this place with nothing. Isn't it dreadful?"
"I'll speak to her," said Susan. "You stay here."
The oxen, now at the outskirts of the camp, had come to a standstill. Susan stepping on the wheel drew herself up to the driver's seat. Bella sat within on a pile of sacks, her elbows on her knees, her forehead in her hands. By her side, leaning against her, stood the little girl, blooming and thoughtful, her thumb in her mouth. She withdrew it and stared fixedly at Susan, then smiled a slow, shy smile, full of meaning, as if her mind held a mischievous secret. At Susan's greeting the mother lifted her head.
"Oh, Susan, isn't it a mercy we've found you?" she exclaimed. "We saw the camp hours ago, but we didn't know it was yours. It's as if God had delayed you. Yes, my dear, it's come. But I'm not going to be afraid. With your father it'll be all right."
The young girl said a few consolatory words and jumped down from the wheel. She was torn both ways. Bella's plight was piteous, but to make her father rise in his present state of health and attend such a case, hours long, in the chill, night breath of the open—it might kill him! She turned toward the camp, vaguely conscious of the men standing in awkward attitudes and looking thoroughly uncomfortable as though they felt a vicarious sense of guilt—that the entire male sex had something to answer for in Bella's tragic predicament. Behind them stood the doctor's tent, and as her eyes fell on it she saw Lucy's body standing in the opening, the head and shoulders hidden within the inclosure. Lucy was speaking with the doctor.
Susan gave a sharp exclamation and stopped. It was too late to interfere. Lucy withdrew her head and came running back, crying triumphantly:
"Your father's coming. He says he's not sick at all. He's putting on his coat."
Following close on her words came the doctor, emerging slowly, for he was weak and unsteady. In the garish light of the afternoon he looked singularly white and bleached, like a man whose warm, red-veined life is dried into a sere grayness of blood and tissue. He was out of harmony with the glad living colors around him, ghostlike amid the brightness of the flowering earth and the deep-dyed heaven. He met his daughter's eyes and smiled.