University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
AN IDYL OF THE ROCKYS.

I shall make short work of our journey to
Laramie.

We bent northeastwardly by ways known to
our leader, — alas! leader no more. He could
guide, but no more gallop in front and beckon
on the cavalcade.

It was a grand journey. A wild one, and
rough for a lady. But this lady was made of
other stuff than the mistresses of lapdogs.

We crossed the backbone of the continent,
climbing up the clefts between the ragged vertebræ,
and over the top of that meandering spine,
fleshed with great grassy mounds; then plunging
down again among the rifts and glens.

A brilliant quartette ours would have been,
but for my friend's wound. Four people, all
with fresh souls and large and peculiar experience.

Except for my friend's wound!

My friend, closer than a brother, how I felt for
him every mile of that stern journey! He never

complained. Only once he said to me, “Bodily
agony has something to teach, I find, as well as
mental.”

Never one word of his suffering, except that.
He wore slowly away. Every day he grew a
little weaker in body; but every day the strong
spirit lifted the body to its work. He must live
to be our guide, that he felt. He must be cheerful,
gay even, lest the lady he had saved should
too bitterly feel that her safety was daily paid
for by his increasing agony. Every day that
ichor of love baptized him with new life. He
breathed love and was strong. But it was love
confined to his own consciousness. Wounded,
and dying perhaps, unless his life could beat
time by a day or an hour, he would not throw
any share of his suffering on another, on her,
by calling for the sympathy which a woman
gives to her lover.

Did she love him? Ah! that is the ancient
riddle. Only the Sphinx herself can answer.
Those fair faces of women, with their tender
smiles, their quick blushes, their starting tears,
still wear a mask until the moment comes for
unmasking. If she did not love him, — this
man of all men most lovable, this feminine soul
in the body of a hero, this man who had spilled
his blood for her, whose whole history had
trained him for those crowning hours of a chivalric

life when the lover led our Gallop of Three;
if she did not love him, she must be, I thought,
some bloodless creature of a type other than
human, an angel and no woman, a creature
not yet truly embodied into the body of love
we seemed to behold.

She was sweetly tender to him; but that the
wound, received for her sake, merited; that was
hardly more than the gracious thankfulness she
lavished upon us all. What an exquisite woman!
How calmly she took her place, lofty and
serene, above all the cloudy atmosphere of such
a bewildering life as hers had been! How large
and deep and mature the charity she had drawn,
even so young, from the strange contrasts of her
history! How her keen observation of a woman
of genius had grasped and stored away the diamond,
or the dust of diamond, in every drift
across her life!

She grew more beautiful daily. Those weary
days when, mile after dreary mile, the listless
march of the Mormon caravan bore her farther
and farther away into hopeless exile, were gone
forever. She breathed ruddy hope now. Before,
she had filtered hope from every breath and only
taken the thin diet of pale endurance. All future
possibility of trial, after her great escape,
seemed nothing. She was confident of Brent's
instant recovery, with repose, and a surgeon

more skilful than she, at Fort Laramie. She
was sure that now her father's wandering life
was over, and that he would let her find him a
home and win him a living in some quiet region
of America, where all his sickly fancies would
pass away, and his old age would glide serenely.

It would be long, too long, for the movement
of this history, should I attempt to detail the
talks and minor adventures of that trip by which
the character of all my companions became better
known to me.

For the wounded man's sake we made lengthened
rests at noonday, and camped with the earliest
coming of twilight. Those were the moonlight
nights of brilliant October. How strange
and solemn and shadowy the mountains rose
about our bivouacs! It was the poetry of camp-life,
and to every scene by a fountain, by a torrent,
in a wild dell, on a mountain meadow with
a vision of a snow-peak watching us all the starry
night and passing through rosiness into splendor
at sunrise, — to every scene, stern or fair, our
comrade gave the poetry of a woman's presence
and a woman's fine perception of the minuter
charm of nature.

And then — think of it! — she had a genius
for cookery. I have known this same power in
other fine poetic and artistic beings. She had a
genius for imaginative cookery, — a rich inheritance

from her father's days of poverty and
coal-mining. She insisted upon her share of
camp-duty; and her great gray eyes were often
to be seen gravely fixed upon a frying-pan, or
watching a roasting bird, as it twirled slowly
before the fire, with a strip of pork featly disposed
overhead to baste that succulent revolver;
while Brent, poor fellow, lay upon the grass,
wrapped in blankets, slowly accumulating force
for the next day's journey, and watched her with
wonderment and delight that she could condescend
to be a household goddess.

“Ther ain't her ikwill to be scared up,” would
Armstrong say on these occasions. “I 'm gittin'
idees to make my Ellen the head woman on
all the Umpqua. I wish I had her along; for
she 's a doughcyle gal, and takes nat'ral to pooty
notions in thinkin' and behavior and fixin' up
things ginerally.”

Armstrong became more and more the paternal
element in our party. Memory of the Ellen
on the Umpqua made him fatherly thoughtful for
the Ellen here, a wanderer across the Rocky
Mountains. And she returned more than he
gave, in the sweet civilizing despotism of a lady.
That grizzly turban presently disappeared from
his head. Decorous bandages replaced it. With
that token went from him the sternness. He
was a frank, honest, kindly fellow, shrewd and

unflinching, but one who would never have lifted
his hand against a human being except for that
great, solemn duty of an exterminating vengeance.
That done, he was his genial self again.
We never tired of his tales of plains and Oregon
life, told in his own vivid dialect. He was the
patriarchal pioneer, a man with the personal
freedom of a nomad, and the unschooled wisdom
of a founder of states in the wilderness. A
mighty hunter, too, was Armstrong. No day
passed that we did not bag an antelope, a deer,
or a big-horn. It was the very land of Cocaigne
for game. The creatures were so hospitable that
it hardly seemed proper gratitude to kill them;
even that great brown she-bear, who one night
“popped her head into the shop,” and, muttering
something which in the Bruin lingo may have
been, “What! no soap!” smote Armstrong with
a paw which years of sucking had not made
tender.

Except for Brent's wound, we four might
have had a joyous journey, full of the true savor
of brave travel. But that ghastly, murderous
hurt of his needed most skilful surgery, and
needed most of all repose with a mind at peace.
He did not mend; but all the while

But he did not mend. He wasted daily. His
sleeps became deathly trances. We could not
wear him out with haste. Brave heart! he bore
up like a brave.

And at last one noon we drew out of the
Black Hills, and saw before us, across the spurs
of Laramie Peak, the broad plain of Fort
Laramie.

Brent revived. We rode steadily. Just before
sunset, we pulled up at our goal.