The Emigrant Trail | Page 2

of the rival countries, and in
separating from old companies and joining new ones. It was an
important matter, this of traveling partnerships. A trip of two thousand
miles on unknown roads beset with dangers was not to be lightly

undertaken. Small parties, frightened on the edge of the enterprise,
joined themselves to stronger ones. The mountain men and trappers
delighted to augment the tremors of the fearful, and round the camp
fires listening groups hung on the words of long-haired men clad in
dirty buckskins, whose moccasined feet had trod the trails of the fur
trader and his red brother.
This year was one of special peril for, to the accustomed dangers from
heat, hunger, and Indians, was added a new one--the Mormons. They
were still moving westward in their emigration from Nauvoo to the
new Zion beside the Great Salt Lake. It was a time and a place to hear
the black side of Mormonism. A Missourian hated a Latter Day Saint
as a Puritan hated a Papist. Hawn's mill was fresh in the minds of the
frontiersmen, and the murder of Joseph Smith was accounted a
righteous act. The emigrant had many warnings to lay to heart--against
Indian surprises in the mountains, against mosquitoes on the plains,
against quicksands in the Platte, against stampedes among the cattle,
against alkaline springs and the desert's parching heats. And quite as
important as any of these was that against the Latter Day Saint with the
Book of Mormon in his saddlebag and his long-barreled rifle across the
pommel.
So they waited, full of ill words and impatience, while the rain fell.
Independence, the focusing point of the frontier life, housing
unexpected hundreds, dripped from all its gables and swam in mud.
And in the camps that spread through the fresh, wet woods and the
oozy uplands, still other hundreds cowered under soaked tent walls and
in damp wagon boxes, listening to the rush of the continuous showers.
CHAPTER II
On the afternoon of the fourth day the clouds lifted. A band of yellow
light broke out along the horizon, and at the crossings of the town and
in the rutted country roads men and women stood staring at it with its
light and their own hope brightening their faces.
David Crystal, as he walked through the woods, saw it behind a veining

of black branches. Though a camper and impatient to be off like the
rest, he did not feel the elation that shone on their watching faces. His
was held in a somber abstraction. Just behind him, in an opening under
the straight, white blossoming of dogwood trees, was a new-made
grave. The raw earth about it showed the prints of his feet, for he had
been standing by it thinking of the man who lay beneath.
Four days before his friend, Joe Linley, had died of cholera. Three of
them--Joe, himself, and George Leffingwell, Joe's cousin--had been in
camp less than a week when it had happened. Until then their life had
been like a picnic there in the clearing by the roadside, with the thrill of
the great journey stirring in their blood. And then Joe had been smitten
with such suddenness, such awful suddenness! He had been talking to
them when David had seen a suspension of something, a stoppage of a
vital inner spring, and with it a whiteness had passed across his face
like a running tide. The awe of that moment, the hush when it seemed
to David the liberated spirit had paused beside him in its outward flight,
was with him now as he walked through the rustling freshness of the
wood.
The rain had begun to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter
among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air
play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already longer
than city fashions dictated, and a first stubble of black beard was hiding
the lines of a chin perhaps a trifle too sensitive and pointed. Romantic
good looks and an almost poetic refinement were the characteristics of
the face, an unusual type for the frontier. With thoughtful gray eyes set
deep under a jut of brows and a nose as finely cut as a woman's, it was
of a type that, in more sophisticated localities, men would have said
had risen to meet the Byronic ideal of which the world was just then
enamored. But there was nothing Byronic or self-conscious about
David Crystal. He had been born and bred in what was then the Far
West, and that he should read poetry and regard life as an undertaking
that a man must face with all honor and resoluteness was not so
surprising for the time and place. The West, with