"Mebbe, but everybody's not as slow as you at getting at what they want."

This appeared to put Susan's retirement in a light that gave rise to pondering. There was a pause, then came the young man's heavy footsteps slouching back to his wagon. Daddy John settled down on the seat.

"I'm almighty glad it weren't him, Missy," he said, over his shoulder. "I'd 'a' known then why you cried."

CHAPTER V

Late the same day Leff, who had been riding on the bluffs, came down to report a large train a few miles ahead of them. It was undoubtedly the long-looked-for New York Company.

The news was as a tonic to their slackened energies. A cheering excitement ran through the train. There was stir and loud talking. Its contagion lifted Susan's spirits and with her father she rode on in advance, straining her eyes against the glare of the glittering river. Men and women, who daily crowded by them unnoted on city streets, now loomed in the perspective as objective points of avid interest. No party Susan had ever been to called forth such hopeful anticipation. To see her fellows, to talk with women over trivial things, to demand and give out the human sympathies she wanted and that had lain withering within herself, drew her from the gloom under which she had lain weeping in the back of Daddy John's wagon.

They were nearing the Forks of the Platte where the air was dryly transparent and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a congeries of broken white dots on the river's edge, they could hear the bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a woman's voice.

It was like a handclasp across space. Drawing nearer the sounds of men and life reached forward to meet them - laughter, the neighing of horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they still longed for.

The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day's labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring, the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night's bivouac. It shone bright on the darkness of the grass, a cordon of flame that some kindly magician had drawn about the resting place of the tired camp.

With the night pressing on its edges it was a tiny nucleus of life dropped down between the immemorial plains and the ancient river. Home was here in the pitched tents, a hearthstone in the flame lapping on the singed grass, humanity in the loud welcome that rose to meet the newcomers. The doctor had known but one member of the Company, its organizer, a farmer from the Mohawk Valley. But the men, dropping their ox yokes and water pails, crowded forward, laughing deep-mouthed greetings from the bush of their beards, and extending hands as hard as the road they had traveled.