The doctor was for going on. There was no necessity to stay in camp because one man happened to wheeze and cough, he said, and anyway, he could do that just as well when they were moving. So they started out and crossed the plateau to where the road dropped into the cleft of Ash Hollow. Here they stopped and held a conference. The doctor was worse. The interior of the wagon, the sun beating on the canvas roof, was like a furnace, where he lay sweltering, tossed this way and that by the jolting wheels. Their dust moved with them, breezes lifting it and carrying it careening back to them where it mingled with new dust, hanging dense like a segment of fog in the scene's raw brilliancy.

Ash Hollow looked a darkling descent, the thin pulsations of the little leaves of ash trees flickering along its sides. The road bent downward in sharp zigzags, and somewhere below the North Fork ran. The plain was free, blue clothed and blue vaulted, with "the wonderful winds of God" flowing between. The conference resulted in a unanimous decision to halt where they were, and stay in camp till the doctor improved, moving him from the wagon to a tent.

For four days he lay parched with fever, each breath drawn with a stifled inner rustling, numerous fine wrinkles traced in a network on his dried cheeks. Then good care, the open air, and the medicine chest prevailed. He improved, and Susan turned her face again to the world and smiled. Such was the changefulness of her mood that her smiles were as radiant and generously bestowed as her previous demeanor had been repelling. Even Leff got some of them, and they fell on David prodigal and warming as the sunshine. Words to match went with them. On the morning of the day when the doctor's temperature fell and he could breathe with ease, she said to her betrothed:

"Oh, David, you've been so good, you've made me so fond of you."

It was the nearest she had yet come to the language of lovers. It made him dizzy; the wonderful look was in his mind.

"You wouldn't let me be good," was all he could stammer. "You didn't seem as if you wanted me at all."

"Stupid!" she retorted with a glance of beaming reproach, "I'm always like that when my father's sick."

It was noon of the fifth day that a white spot on the plain told them the New York Company was in sight. The afternoon was yet young when the dust of the moving column tarnished the blue-streaked distance. Then the first wagons came into view, creeping along the winding ribbon of road. As soon as the advance guard of horsemen saw the camp, pieces of it broke away and were deflected toward the little group of tents from which a tiny spiral of smoke went up in an uncoiling, milky skein. Susan had many questions to answer, and had some ado to keep the inquirers away from the doctor, who was still too weak to be disturbed. She was sharp and not very friendly in her efforts to preserve him from their sympathizing curiosity.

Part of the train had gone by when she heard from a woman who rode up on a foot-sore nag that the McMurdo's were some distance behind. A bull boat in which the children were crossing the river had upset, and Mrs. McMurdo had been frightened and "took faint." The children were all right - only a wetting - but it was a bad time for their mother to get such a scare.