Here as the evening deepened they comfortably gossiped, their voices dropping lower as the camp sunk to rest. They exchanged vows of the friendship that was to be renewed in California, and then, drawing closer together, watching the fires die down to sulky red sparks and the sentinel's figure coming and going on its lonely beat, came to an exchange of opinions on love and marriage.

Susan was supposed to know most, her proprietorship of David giving her words the value of experience, but Lucy had most to say. Her tongue loosened by the hour and a pair of listening ears, she revealed herself as much preoccupied with all matters of sentiment, and it was only natural that a love story of her own should be confessed. It was back in Cooperstown, and he had been an apprentice of Glen's. She hadn't cared for him at all, judging by excerpts from the scenes of his courtship he had been treated with unmitigated harshness. But her words and tones - still entirely scornful with half a continent between her and the adorer - gave evidence of a regret, of self-accusing, uneasy doubt, as of one who looks back on lost opportunities. The listener's ear was caught by it, indicating a state of mind so different from her own.

"Then you did like him?"

"I didn't like him at all. I couldn't bear him."

"But you seem sorry you didn't marry him."

"Well - No, I'm not sorry. But" - it was the hour for truth, the still indifference of the night made a lie seem too trivial for the effort of telling"I don't know out here in the wilds whether I'll ever get anyone else."

CHAPTER VII

By noon the next day the doctor's train had left the New York Company far behind. Looking back they could see it in gradual stages of diminishment - a white serpent with a bristling head of scattered horsemen, then a white worm, its head a collection of dark particles, then a white thread with a head too insignificant to be deciphered. Finally it was gone, absorbed into the detailless distance where the river coiled through the green.

Twenty-four hours later they reached the Forks of the Platte. Here the trail crossed the South Fork, slanted over the plateau that lay between the two branches, and gained the North Fork. Up this it passed, looping round the creviced backs of mighty bluffs, and bearing northwestward to Fort Laramie. The easy faring of the grassed bottom was over. The turn to the North Fork was the turn to the mountains. The slow stream with its fleet of islands would lose its dreamy deliberateness and become a narrowed rushing current, sweeping round the bases of sandstone walls as the pioneers followed it up and on toward the whitened crests of the Wind River Mountains, where the snows never melted and the lakes lay in the hollows green as jade.

It was afternoon when they reached the ford. The hills had sunk away to low up-sweepings of gray soil, no longer hiding the plain which lay yellow against a cobalt sky. As the wagons rolled up on creaking wheels the distance began to darken with the buffalo. The prospect was like a bright-colored map over which a black liquid has been spilled, here in drops, there in creeping streams. Long files flowed from the rifts between the dwarfed bluffs, unbroken herds swept in a wave over the low barrier, advanced to the river, crusted its surface, passed across, and surged up the opposite bank. Finally all sides showed the moving mass, blackening the plateau, lining the water's edge in an endless undulation of backs and heads, foaming down the faces of the sand slopes. Where the train moved they divided giving it right of way, streaming by, bulls, cows, and calves intent on their own business, the earth tremulous under their tread. Through breaks in their ranks the blue and purple of the hills shone startlingly vivid and beyond the prairie lay like a fawn-colored sea across which dark shadows trailed.