The letter asked that every courtesy be shown the minister and his daughter, who were going West as missionaries to teach the Indians at the agencies. For several days the train wended its way westward, making slow marches on account of its size and the large number of cattle along.
At night, when gathered around the camp fires, the train people tried to draw the dismal-looking parson and his veiled daughter into their enjoyment. The girl pleaded illness, and the parson said he never indulged in light amusement, and besought them to prayer and psalm singing.
This course naturally caused the cheerful members of the outfit to leave the parson and his daughter severely alone, a circumstance with which they seemed to be pleased. Each day the daughter, whom persons at first thought to be shamming, grew more indisposed, until at last she was unable to leave her ambulance, and her condition excited the sympathy of all.
Like a tender, loving nurse her father hung over her, riding in the ambulance, supporting her head through the long day’s march, and attentive to her every want. Touched by the suffering of the girl, several of the emigrants’ wives and daughters offered their services; but the father said he alone would care for her, and she seemed unhappy if he was out of her sight for an instant.
At last, one beautiful moonlight night, when a hush had fallen on the train encampment, the spirit of the young girl took its flight.
The wails of the stricken old man were pitiful to hear. Two of the women of the train dressed her for her grave, a shroud of blankets encircled the fair form, and in a snowy bank, by the edge of a crystal creek, her grave was dug and the body was placed in it just as the sun arose above the prairie horizon.
“Do not hide her from my sight; I will fill the grave myself; leave me, my kind friends, leave me, and ere long I will follow you,” said the parson.
One by one the people departed, the train pulled out of camp, the last wagon disappeared over a rise in the prairie, and the voices of the cattle drivers grew fainter and fainter in the distance. Still the old man stood, his hands resting on the spade, which had been left with him.
His dead daughter lay in the shallow grave, enveloped in the blanket shroud, and her face veiled as she had worn it in life. A short distance away stood his horse, and no sound broke the silence after the shouts of the cattle drivers had died away.
At length he went to work and shoveled the earth into the grave with a strength and quickness one would not have looked for in a man of his age.