The Emigrant Trail | Page 7

and
his daughter appeared at the head of their caravan. Two handsome
figures, well mounted and clad with taste as well as suitability, they

looked as gallantly unfitted for the road as armored knights in a modern
battlefield. Good looks, physical delicacy, and becoming clothes had as
yet no recognized place on the trail. The Gillespies were boldly and
blithely bringing them, and unlike most innovators, romance came with
them. Nobody had gone out of Independence with so confident and
debonair an air. Now advancing through a spattering of leaf shadows
and sunspots, they seemed to the young men to be issuing from the first
pages of a story, and the watchers secretly hoped that they would go
riding on into the heart of it with the white arch of the prairie schooner
and the pricked ears of the six mules as a movable background.
There was no umbrella this morning to obscure Miss Gillespie's vivid
tints, and in the same flat, straw hat, with her cheeks framed in little
black curls, she looked a freshly wholesome young girl, who might be
dangerous to the peace of mind of men even less lonely and susceptible
than the two who bid her a flushed and bashful good morning. She had
the appearance, however, of being entirely oblivious to any
embarrassment they might show. There was not a suggestion of
coquetry in her manner as she returned their greetings. Instead, it was
marked by a businesslike gravity. Her eyes touched their faces with the
slightest welcoming light and then left them to rove, sharply inspecting,
over their wagon and animals. When she had scrutinized these, she
turned in her saddle, and said abruptly to the driver of the six mules:
"Daddy John, do you see--horses?"
The person thus addressed nodded and said in a thin, old voice,
"I do, and if they want them they're welcome to them."
He was a small, shriveled man, who might have been anywhere from
sixty to seventy-five. A battered felt hat, gray-green with wind and sun,
was pulled well down to his ears, pressing against his forehead and
neck thin locks of gray hair. A grizzle of beard edged his chin, a poor
and scanty growth that showed the withered skin through its sparseness.
His face, small and wedge-shaped, was full of ruddy color, the cheeks
above the ragged hair smooth and red as apples. Though his mouth was
deficient in teeth, his neck, rising bare from the band of his shirt,

corrugated with the starting sinews of old age, he had a shrewd vivacity
of glance, an alertness of poise, that suggested an unimpaired spiritual
vitality. He seemed at home behind the mules, and here, for the first
time, David felt was some one who did not look outside the picture. In
fact, he had an air of tranquil acceptance of the occasion, of adjustment
without effort, that made him fit into the frame better than anyone else
of the party.
It was a glorious morning, and as they fared forward through the
checkered shade their spirits ran high. The sun, curious and determined,
pried and slid through every crack in the leafage, turned the flaked
lichen to gold, lay in clotted light on the pools around the fern roots.
They were delicate spring woods, streaked with the white dashes of the
dogwood, and hung with the tassels of the maple. The foliage was still
unfolding, patterned with fresh creases, the prey of a continuous, frail
unrest. Little streams chuckled through the underbrush, and from the
fusion of woodland whisperings bird notes detached themselves, soft
flutings and liquid runs, that gave another expression to the morning's
blithe mood.
Between the woods there were stretches of open country, velvet smooth,
with the trees slipped down to where the rivers ran. The grass was as
green as sprouting grain, and a sweet smell of wet earth and seedling
growths came from it. Cloud shadows trailed across it, blue blotches
moving languidly. It was the young earth in its blushing promise,
fragrant, rain-washed, budding, with the sound of running water in the
grass and bird voices dropping from the sky.
With their lighter wagons they passed the ox trains plowing stolidly
through the mud, barefoot children running at the wheel, and women
knitting on the front seat. The driver's whip lash curled in the air, and
his nasal "Gee haw" swung the yoked beasts slowly to one side. Then
came detachments of Santa Fé traders, dark men in striped serapes with
silver trimmings round their high-peaked hats. Behind them stretched
the long line of wagons, the ponderous freighters of the Santa Fé Trail,
rolling into Independence from the Spanish towns that lay beyond the
burning deserts of the Cimarron. They filed by in slow procession, a

vision of faded colors and