The Covered Wagon | Page 2

wagon-trains, stretching
from old Independence to Westport Landing, the spot where that very
year the new name of Kansas City was heard among the emigrants as
the place of the jump-off. It was now an hour by sun, as these Western
people would have said, and the low-lying valley mists had not yet
fully risen, so that the atmosphere for a great picture did not lack.
It was a great picture, a stirring panorama of an earlier day, which now
unfolded. Slow, swaying, stately, the ox teams came on, as though
impelled by and not compelling the fleet of white canvas sails. The

teams did not hasten, did not abate their speed, but moved in an
unagitated advance that gave the massed column something irresistibly
epochal in look.
The train, foreshortened to the watchers at the rendezvous, had a
well-spaced formation--twenty wagons, thirty, forty, forty-seven--as
Jesse Wingate mentally counted them. There were outriders; there were
clumps of driven cattle. Along the flanks walked tall men, who flung
over the low-headed cattle an admonitory lash whose keen report
presently could be heard, still faint and far off. A dull dust cloud arose,
softening the outlines of the prairie ships. The broad gestures of arm
and trunk, the monotonous soothing of commands to the sophisticated
kine as yet remained vague, so that still it was properly a picture done
on a vast canvas--that of the frontier in '48; a picture of might, of
inevitableness. Even the sober souls of these waiters rose to it, felt
some thrill they themselves had never analyzed.
A boy of twenty, tall, blond, tousled, rode up from the grove back of
the encampment of the Wingate family.
"You, Jed?" said his father. "Ride on out and see if Molly's there."
"Sure she is!" commented the youth, finding a plug in the pocket of his
jeans. "That's her. Two fellers, like usual."
"Sam Woodhull, of course," said the mother, still hand over eye. "He
hung around all winter, telling how him and Colonel Doniphan
whipped all Mexico and won the war. If Molly ain't in a wagon of her
own, it ain't his fault, anyways! I'll rest assured it's account of Molly's
going out to Oregon that he's going too! Well!" And again, "Well!"
"Who's the other fellow, though?" demanded Jed. "I can't place him this
far."
Jesse Wingate handed over his team to his son and stepped out into the
open road, moved his hat in an impatient signal, half of welcome, half
of command. It apparently was observed.

To their surprise, it was the unidentified rider who now set spur to his
horse and came on at a gallop ahead of the train. He rode carelessly
well, a born horseman. In no more than a few minutes he could be seen
as rather a gallant figure of the border cavalier--a border just then more
martial than it had been before '46 and the days of "Fifty-Four Forty or
Fight."
A shrewed man might have guessed this young man--he was no more
than twenty-eight--to have got some military air on a border opposite to
that of Oregon; the far Southwest, where Taylor and Scott and the less
known Doniphan and many another fighting man had been adding
certain thousands of leagues to the soil of this republic. He rode a
compact, short-coupled, cat-hammed steed, coal black and with a
dashing forelock reaching almost to his red nostrils--a horse never
reared on the fat Missouri corn lands. Neither did this heavy embossed
saddle with its silver concho decorations then seem familiar so far
north; nor yet the thin braided-leather bridle with its hair frontlet band
and its mighty bit; nor again the great spurs with jingling rowel bells.
This rider's mount and trappings spoke the far and new Southwest, just
then coming into our national ken.
The young man himself, however, was upon the face of his appearance
nothing of the swashbuckler. True, in his close-cut leather trousers, his
neat boots, his tidy gloves, his rather jaunty broad black hat of felted
beaver, he made a somewhat raffish figure of a man as he rode up,
weight on his under thigh, sidewise, and hand on his horse's quarters,
carelessly; but his clean cut, unsmiling features, his direct and grave
look out of dark eyes, spoke him a gentleman of his day and place, and
no mere spectacular pretender assuming a virtue though he had it not.
He swung easily out of saddle, his right hand on the tall, broad Spanish
horn as easily as though rising from a chair at presence of a lady, and
removed his beaver to this frontier woman before he accosted her
husband. His bridle he flung down over his horse's head, which
seemingly anchored the animal, spite of its loud whinnying challenge
to these near-by