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Pack trains dropped from the line, spreading themselves along the rim of earth between the trail and the shrunken current. Courant's party moved on, going higher, veiled in a cloud of brick-colored dust. The hills swept up into bolder lines, the pines mounted in sentinel files crowding out the lighter leafage.
As the hours passed the shadow of the wagon shrunk and the girl moved with it till her back was pressed against the wheel. She was making a calico jacket, and as she moved it the crisp material emitted low cracklings. Each rustle was subdued and stealthy, dying quickly away as if it were in conspiracy with the silence and did not want to disturb it. Courant's back was toward her.
Alone, with no eye looking, she pressed her lips on his forehead. Courant's callousness roused a fierce, perverse tenderness in her. He might sneer at David's lack of force, but she understood. She crooned over him, moved his hair back with caressing fingers, pressing him against herself as if the strength of her hold would assure her of the love she did not feel and wanted to believe in.
The two men had told him he must ride if he died for it, and met his offended answer that he intended to do so with sullen silence. In advance, Courant's figure brushed between the bushes, his hair a moving patch of copper color in the last light. Darkness quickly gathered round them. The bowl of sky became an intense Prussian blue that the earth reflected.
It required but little effort on his part to discover that they were officers from the capital, and that they were looking for the place where Courant's body was found. The good Father also learned that detectives from Brussels were in the party, and that one of the men was a prince.
It had seemed to come from the crest of the rock, and the old man had listened and hearing no more had thought it the yell of some animal far on the mountains. This gave color to Courant's theory that the lost man had been seized by the Diggers. Borne away along the summit of the ridge he would have shouted to them and in that dry air the sound would have carried far.
In Courant's camp Bella was regarded as the best man of the two. To her multiform duties she added that of assistant in the diggings, squatting beside her husband in the mud, keeping the rocker going, and when Glen was worked out, not above taking a hand at the shovel.
She dwelt even more persistently on Courant's hatefulness, impressed upon herself his faults. He was hard and she had seen him brutal, a man without feeling, as he had shown when the Mormon boy died, a harsh and remorseless leader urging them on, grudging them even their seventh day rest, deaf to their protests, lashing them forward with contempt of their weakness.
"He's sun mad," the old man said. "Half crazy. I've seen 'em go that way before. How'll he get through the desert I'm asking you?" There were some contusions on the head that looked bad, the doctor said, but nothing seemed to be broken. He'd been half strangled; they'd have to get him into the wagon. "Leave him at Fort Bridger," came Courant's voice through the haze. "Leave him there to rot."
As he moved away he heard her burst into sudden tears, such tears as she had shed at the Fort, and turning back with arms ready for her comforting, saw her throw herself against Courant's knees, her face buried in the folds of her shawl. He stood arrested, amazed not so much by the outburst as by the fact that it was to Courant she had turned and not to him.
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