_ CHAPTER XXVIII. WHEN A MAID MARRIES
Carson, Bridger and Jackson, now reunited after years, must pour additional libations to Auld Lang Syne at Laramie, so soon were off together. The movers sat around their thrifty cooking fires outside the wagon corral. Wingate and his wife were talking heatedly, she in her nervousness not knowing that she fumbled over and over in her fingers the heavy bit of rock which Molly had picked up and which was in her handkerchief when it was requisitioned by her mother to bathe her face just now. After a time she tossed the nugget aside into the grass. It was trodden by a hundred feet ere long.
But gold will not die. In three weeks a prowling Gros Ventre squaw found it and carried it to the trader, Bordeaux, asking, "Shoog?"
"Non, non!" replied the Laramie trader. "Pas de shoog!" But he looked curiously at the thing, so heavy.
"How, cola!" wheedled the squaw. "Shoog!" She made the sign for sugar, her finger from her palm to her lips. Bordeaux tossed the thing into the tin can on the shelf and gave her what sugar would cover a spoon.
"Where?" He asked her, his fingers loosely shaken, meaning, "Where did you get it?"
The Gros Ventre lied to him like a lady, and told him, on the South Fork, on the Creek of Bitter Cherries--near where Denver now is; and where placers once were. That was hundreds of miles away. The Gros Ventre woman had been there once in her wanderings and had seen some heavy metal.
Years later, after Fort Laramie was taken over by the Government, Bordeaux as sutler sold much flour and bacon to men hurrying down the South Fork to the early Colorado diggings. Meantime in his cups he often had told the mythical tale of the Gros Ventre woman--long after California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana were all afire. But one of his halfbreed children very presently had commandeered the tin cup and its contents, so that to this day no man knows whether the child swallowed the nugget or threw it into the Laramie River or the Platte River or the sagebrush. Some depose that an emigrant bought it of the baby; but no one knows.
What all men do know is that gold does not die; nay, nor the news of it. And this news now, like a multiplying germ, was in the wagon train that had started out for Oregon.
As for Molly, she asked no questions at all about the lost nugget, but hurried to her own bed, supperless, pale and weeping. She told her father nothing of the nature of her meeting with Will Banion, then nor at any time for many weeks.
"Molly, come here, I want to talk to you."
Wingate beckoned to his daughter the second morning after Banion's visit.
The order for the advance was given. The men had brought in the cattle and the yoking up was well forward. The rattle of pots and pans was dying down. Dogs had taken their places on flank or at the wagon rear, women were climbing up to the seats, children clinging to pieces of dried meat. The train was waiting for the word.
The girl followed him calmly, high-headed.
"Molly, see here," he began. "We're all ready to move on. I don't know where Will Banion went, but I want you to know, as I told him, that he can't travel in our train."
"He'll not ask to, father. He's promised to stick to his own men."
"He's left you at last! That's good. Now I want you to drop him from your thoughts. Hear that, and heed it. I tell you once more, you're not treating Sam Woodhull right."
She made him no answer.
"You're still young, Molly," he went on. "Once you're settled you'll find Oregon all right. Time you were marrying. You'll be twenty and an old maid first thing you know. Sam will make you a good husband. Heed what I say."
But she did not heed, though she made no reply to him. Her eye, "scornful, threatening and young," looked yonder where she knew her lover was; not was it in her soul ever to return from following after him. The name of her intended husband left her cold as ice.
"Roll out! Roll out! Ro-o-o-ll ou-t!"
The call went down the line once more. The pistolry of the wagon whips made answer, the drone of the drivers rose as the sore-necked oxen bowed their heads again, with less strength even for the lightened loads.
The old man who sat by the gate at Fort Laramie, twisting a curl around his finger, saw the plain clearing now, as the great train swung out and up the river trail. He perhaps knew that Jim Bridger, with his own freight wagons, going light and fast with mules, was on west, ahead of the main caravan. But he did not know the news Jim Bridger carried, the same news that Carson was carrying east. The three old mountain men, for a few hours meeting after years, now were passing far apart, never to meet again. Their chance encountering meant much to hundreds of men and women then on the road to Oregon; to untold thousands yet to come.
As for one Samuel Woodhull, late column captain, it was to be admitted that for some time he had been conscious of certain buffetings of fate. But as all thoroughbred animals are thin-skinned, so are all the short-bred pachydermatous, whereby they endure and mayhap arrive at the manger well as the next. True, even Woodhull's vanity and self-content had everything asked of them in view of his late series of mishaps; but by now he had somewhat chirked up under rest and good food, and was once more the dandy and hail fellow. He felt assured that very presently bygones would be bygones. Moreover--so he reasoned--if he, Sam Woodhull, won the spoils, what matter who had won any sort of victory? He knew, as all these others knew and as all the world knows, that a beautiful woman is above all things
spolia opima of war. Well, in ten days he was to marry Molly Wingate, the most beautiful woman of the train and the belle of more than one community. Could he not afford to laugh best, in spite of all events, even if some of them had not been to his own liking?
But the girl's open indifference was least of all to his liking. It enraged his vain, choleric nature to its inner core. Already he planned dominance; but willing to wait and to endure for ten days, meantime he employed innocence, reticence, dignity, attentiveness, so that he seemed a suitor misunderstood, misrepresented, unjustly used--to whose patient soul none the less presently must arrive justice and exoneration, after which all would be happier even than a marriage bell. After the wedding bells he, Samuel Woodhull, would show who was master.
Possessed once more of horse, arms and personal equipment, and having told his own story of persecution to good effect throughout the train, Woodhull had been allowed to resume a nominal command over a part of the Wingate wagons. The real control lay in the triumvirate who once had usurped power, and who might do so again.
Wingate himself really had not much more than nominal control of the general company, although he continued to give what Caleb Price called the easy orders. His wagons, now largely changed to ox transport, still traveled at the head of the train, Molly continuing to drive her own light wagon and Jed remaining on the cow column.
The advance hardly had left Fort Laramie hidden by the rolling ridges before Woodhull rode up to Molly's wagon and made excuse to pass his horse to a boy while he himself climbed up on the seat with his fiancee.
She made room for him in silence, her eyes straight ahead. The wagon cover made good screen behind, the herdsmen were far in the rear, and from the wagons ahead none could see them. Yet when, after a moment, her affianced husband dropped an arm about her waist the girl flung it off impatiently.
"Don't!" she exclaimed. "I detest love-making in public. We see enough of it that can't be hid. It's getting worse, more open, the farther we get out."
"The train knows we are to be married at the halfway stop, Molly. Then you'll change wagons and will not need to drive."
"Wait till then."
"I count the hours. Don't you, dearest?"
She turned a pallid face to him at last, resentful of his endearments.
"Yes, I do," she said. But he did not know what she meant, or why she was so pale.
"I think we'll settle in Portland," he went on. "The travelers' stories say that place, at the head of navigation on the Willamette, has as good a chance as Oregon City, at the Falls. I'll practice law. The goods I am taking out will net us a good sum, I'm hoping. Oh, you'll see the day when you'll not regret that I held you to your promise! I'm not playing this Oregon game to lose it."
"Do you play any game to lose it?"
"No! Better to have than to explain have not--that's one of my mottoes."
"No matter how?"
"Why do you ask?"
"I was only wondering."
"About what?"
"About men--and the differences."
"My dear, as a school-teacher you have learned to use a map, a blackboard. Do you look on us men as ponderable, measurable, computable?"
"A girl ought to if she's going to marry."
"Well, haven't you?"
"Have I?"
She still was staring straight ahead, cold, making no silent call for a lover's arms or arts. Her silence was so long that at length even his thick hide was pierced.
"Molly!" he broke out. "Listen to me! Do you want the engagement broken? Do you want to be released?"
"What would they all think?"
"Not the question. Answer me!"
"No, I don't want it broken. I want it over with. Isn't that fair?"
"Is it?"
"Didn't you say you wanted me on any terms?"
"Surely!"
"Don't you now?"
"Yes, I do, and I'm going to have you, too!"
His eye, covetous, turned to the ripe young beauty of the maid beside him. He was willing to pay any price.
"Then it all seems settled."
"All but one part. You've never really and actually told me you loved me."
A wry smile.
"I'm planning to do that after I marry you. I suppose that's the tendency of a woman? Of course, it can't be true that only one man will do for a woman to marry, or one woman for a man? If anything went wrong on that basis--why, marrying would stop? That would be foolish, wouldn't it? I suppose women do adjust? Don't you think so?"
His face grew hard under this cool reasoning.
"Am I to understand that you are marrying me as a second choice, and so that you can forget some other man?"
"Couldn't you leave a girl a secret if she had one? Couldn't you be happier if you did? Couldn't you take your chance and see if there's anything under the notion about more than one man and more than one woman in the world? Love? Why, what is love? Something to marry on? They say it passes. They tell me that marriage is more adjustable, means more interests than love; that the woman who marries with her eyes open is apt to be the happiest in the long run. Well, then you said you wanted me on any terms. Does not that include open eyes?"
"You're making a hard bargain--the hardest a man can be obliged to take."
"It was not of my seeking."
"You said you loved me--at first."
"No. Only a girl's in love with love--at first. I've not really lied to you. I'm trying to be honest before marriage. Don't fear I'll not be afterward. There's much in that, don't you think? Maybe there's something, too, in a woman's ability to adjust and compromise? I don't know. We ought to be as happy as the average married couple, don't you think? None of them are happy for so very long, they say. They say love doesn't last long. I hope not. One thing, I believe marriage is easier to beat than love is."
"How old are you, really, Molly?"
"I am just over nineteen, sir."
"You are wise for that; you are old."
"Yes--since we started for Oregon."
He sat in sullen silence for a long time, all the venom of his nature gathering, all his savage jealousy.
"You mean since you met that renegade, traitor and thief, Will Banion! Tell me, isn't that it?"
"Yes, that's true. I'm older now. I know more."
"And you'll marry me without love. You love him without marriage? Is that it?"
"I'll never marry a thief."
"But you love one?"
"I thought I loved you."
"But you do love him, that man!"
Now at last she turned to him, gazing straight through the mist of her tears.
"Sam, if you really loved me, would you ask that? Wouldn't you just try to be so gentle and good that there'd no longer be any place in my heart for any other sort of love, so I'd learn to think that our love was the only sort in the world? Wouldn't you take your chance and make good on it, believing that it must be in nature that a woman can love more than one man, or love men in more than one way? Isn't marriage broader and with more chance for both? If you love me and not just yourself alone, can't you take your chance as I am taking mine? And after all, doesn't a woman give the odds? If you do love, me--"
"If I do, then my business is to try to make you forget Will Banion."
"There is no other way you could. He may die. I promise you I'll never see him after I'm married.
"And I'll promise you another thing"--her strained nerves now were speaking truth for her--"if by any means I ever learn--if I ever believe--that Major Banion is not what I now think him, I'll go on my knees to him. I'll know marriage was wrong and love was right all the time."
"Fine, my dear! Much happiness! But unfortunately for Major Banion's passing romance, the official records of a military court-martial and a dishonorable discharge from the Army are facts which none of us can doubt or deny."
"Yes, that's how it is. So that's why."
"What do you really mean then, Molly--you say, that's why?"
"That's why I'm going to marry you, Sam. Nine days from to-day, at the Independence Rock, if we are alive. And from now till then, and always, I'm going to be honest, and I'm going to pray God to give you power to make me forget every other man in all the world except my--my--" But she could not say the word "husband."
"Your husband!"
He said it for her, and perhaps then reached his zenith in approximately unselfish devotion, and in good resolves at least.
The sun shone blinding hot. The white dust rose in clouds. The plague of flies increased. The rattle and creak of wheel, the monotone of the drivers, the cough of dust-afflicted kine made the only sounds for a long time.
"You can't kiss me, Molly?"
He spoke not in dominance but in diffidence. The girl awed him.
"No, not till after, Sam; and I think I'd rather be left alone from now till then. After--Oh, be good to me, Sam! I'm trying to be honest as a woman can. If I were not that I'd not be worth marrying at all."
Without suggestion or agreement on his part she drew tighter the reins on her mules. He sprang down over the wheel. The sun and the dust had their way again; the monotony of life, its drab discontent, its yearnings and its sense of failure once more resumed sway in part or all of the morose caravan. They all sought new fortunes, each of these. One day each must learn that, travel far as he likes, a man takes himself with him for better or for worse. _