_ CHAPTER XL. OREGON! OREGON!
THE freakish resolves of the old-time trapper at least remained unchanged for many days, but at last one evening he came to Molly's wagon, his face grim and sad.
"Miss Molly," he said, "I'm come to say good-by now. Hit's for keeps."
"No? Then why? You are like an old friend to me. What don't I owe to you?"
"Ye don't owe nothin' ter me yit, Miss Molly. But I want ye ter think kindly o' old Jim Bridger when he's gone. I allow the kindest thing I kin do fer ye is ter bring Will Banion ter ye."
"You are a good man, James Bridger," said Molly Wingate. "But then?"
"Ye see, Miss Molly, I had six quarts o' rum I got at Boise. Some folks says rum is wrong. Hit ain't. I'll tell ye why. Last night I drinked up my lastest bottle o' that Hundson's Bay rum. Hit war right good rum, an ez I lay lookin' up at the stars, all ter oncet hit come ter me that I was jest exactly, no more an' no less, jest ter the ha'r, ez drunk I was on the leetle spree with Kit at Laramie. Warn't that fine? An' warn't hit useful? Nach'erl, bein' jest even up, I done thought o' everything I been fergettin'. Hit all come ter me ez plain ez a streak o' lightnin'. What it was Kit Carson told me I know now, but no one else shall know. No, not even you, Miss Molly. I kain't tell ye, so don't ask.
"Now I'm goin' on a long journey, an' a resky one; I kain't tell ye no more. I reckon I'll never see ye agin. So good-by."
With a swift grasp of his hand he caught the dusty edge of the white woman's skirt to his bearded lips.
"But, James--"
Suddenly she reached out a hand. He was gone.
* * * * *
One winter day, rattling over the icy fords of the road winding down the Sandy from the white Cascades, crossing the Clackamas, threading the intervening fringe of forest, there broke into the clearing at Oregon City the head of the wagon train of 1848. A fourth of the wagons abandoned and broken, a half of the horses and cattle gone since they had left the banks of the Columbia east of the mountains, the cattle leaning one against the other when they halted, the oxen stumbling and limping, the calluses of their necks torn, raw and bleeding from the swaying of the yokes on the rocky trail, their tongues out, their eyes glassy with the unspeakable toil they so long had undergone; the loose wheels wabbling, the thin hounds rattling, the canvas sagged and stained, the bucket under each wagon empty, the plow at each tail gate thumping in its lashings of rope and hide--the train of the covered wagons now had, indeed, won through. Now may the picture of our own Ark of Empire never perish from our minds.
On the front seat of the lead wagon sat stout Molly Wingate and her husband. Little Molly's cart came next. Alongside the Caleb Price wagon, wherein now sat on the seat--hugging a sore-footed dog whose rawhide boots had worn through--a long-legged, barefoot girl who had walked twelve hundred miles since spring, trudged Jed Wingate, now grown from a tousled boy into a lean, self-reliant young man. His long whip was used in baseless threatenings now, for any driver must spare cattle such as these, gaunt and hollow-eyed. Tobacco protuberant in cheek, his feet half bare, his trousers ragged and fringed to the knee, his sleeves rolled up over brown and brawny arms, Jed Wingate now was enrolled on the list of men.
"Gee-whoa-haw! You Buck an' Star, git along there, damn ye!" So rose his voice, automatically but affectionately.
Certain French Canadians, old-time
engages of the fur posts, now become
habitants, landowners, on their way home from Sunday chapel, hastened to summon others.
"The families have come!" they called at the Falls, as they had at Portland town.
But now, though safely enlarged at last of the confinement and the penalties of the wagon train, the emigrants, many of them almost destitute, none of them of great means, needed to cast about them at once for their locations and to determine what their occupations were to be. They scattered, each seeking his place, like new trout in a stream. _