“How’s your journal getting on, Jean?” asked her father, one evening, after all was still in camp.
Mrs. Ranger had been unusually nervous and timid all day, and Susannah had been in constant attendance upon the wagon-bed full of little ones,—seven in all,—who had been more than usually unruly, fretful, and quarrelsome.
Jean looked ruefully at her father. “The pesky thing isn’t getting along at all!” she exclaimed. “There’s nothing to inspire one to write. There’s no grass for the cattle, no wood for the fires, and no comfort anywhere.”
“Then write up the facts. Don’t allow yourself to get morbid. Don’t be so listless and lackadaisical.”
It was now the twentieth of May; and under this date, in restive obedience to her father’s command, Jean began her entries again:—
“We came about eighteen miles to-day. And such a day! It has been drizzly, disagreeable, and cold from morning till night, with no cheery prospects ahead. We hear of an epidemic of measles having broken out on the road, endangering much life among children and such grown folks as didn’t have sense enough to get the disgusting disease before they left their mothers’ apron-strings. We passed several newly made graves by the roadside to-day,—a melancholy fact which interested mother deeply.
“Indians, for some reason, are keeping out of our sight. As we are right in the midst of the summer haunts of many tribes, we are shunned, possibly on account of the contagious diseases among the whites, which are said to kill off Indians as the Asiatic plague kills Europeans. Our company has escaped the epidemic so far; so there is one blessing for which we may be thankful.
“We forded a stream to-day, called the Little Sandy, in the midst of a driving rainstorm, and are now encamped in a deep, dry gulch; that is, we call it dry, because the water runs away nearly as fast as it falls. There is a fine spring on the hillside; and some green cottonwood which we found at the head of the gulch is being slowly coaxed into the semblance of a fire.
“May 21. The skies cleared this morning, and we have found some good grazing for the poor, half-famished stock. We haven’t travelled over a dozen miles, but we must stop and give the animals a feed. We have passed extensive beds of iron ore to-day, outcroppings of which are seen in every direction.
“May 22. We yoked up early this morning and came three miles, to the banks of the Big Sandy. The day is clear, but the roads are still muddy after the rain. The early morning was dark and foggy, the air was raw and cold, and the outlook was cheerless in the extreme. Some of the horses in a neighbor’s outfit stampeded, and it has taken nearly the whole day to recapture them.
“May 23. We hear rumors of Indian raids ahead of us, and mother is much alarmed. We must not stop for Sunday, but must hurry on to get past the danger-point. If the Indians knew how defenceless we really are, they would rout the camp before morning.
“The sluggish waters of the Big Sandy are swarming with larvæ. Daddie says it’s lucky they’re not mosquitoes yet; but the trains coming along a week hence will be terribly annoyed by the intruders, who are now unable to molest us.
“May 24. We are following the Little Blue,—a muddy stream about a hundred feet in width.
“May 25. We met to-day a long train of heavily loaded wagons coming from Fort Laramie with great mountains of buffalo robes. At this rate, the buffalo will all be killed off in a very few years. The frightened creatures are now so wild that it is next to impossible to get a shot at one of them; and the antelope are even more timid. Why is man such a destructive animal, I wonder?
“The men driving the freight-teams we met were a mixed-up lot of Indians, Spaniards, and French and Indian half-breeds. Their speech was to us an unintelligible jargon in everything but its profanity, which was English, straight. There was one white man in the crowd, or maybe two of them. They were on horseback, and kept aloof from the common herd. A peculiar apprehension overcame me as I gazed at one of these strangers. He was large, bronzed, and portly, and sat his horse like a centaur; or perhaps I should come nearer the truth if I said like an Englishman. My heart beat a strange tattoo as I watched him. Somehow, it seemed to me that he was in some way concerned with some of our company. I did not understand the feeling, but it wasn’t comfortable.”
“There, daddie!” she cried, exhibiting the written pages. “Don’t say I’m neglecting my journal now!”
The twilight had deepened. Below the camp ran a deep ravine, at the base of which a little brook sang merrily. Clumps of cottonwood, badly crippled by wayfarers’ axes, struggled for existence here and there. In her haste to reach the covert of the bushes unobserved, Jean ran diagonally over a settlement of prairie dogs, near which the campers had inadvertently pitched their tents. The Lilliputian municipality was evidently well disciplined, for at the sound of approaching footsteps the same sharp, staccato bark, of mingled warning and authority, that had for an instant startled the foremost team at camping-time, was heard, and every little rodent dropped instantly out of sight. Profound silence fell at once upon the little city, which had before been a bedlam of voices.
Jean reached the foot of the ravine and stopped to listen, her heart beating hard. “I am sure Sally made an appointment to meet somebody in this ravine to-night,” she said to herself, “and I’m just as sure she’ll need a friend. Women are such fools where men are concerned.” She heard the sound of human voices, and pressed her hand hard over her heart.
“I know you think you’re safe from arrest,” said a voice she knew to be Sally O’Dowd’s. “As your wife, I may not be able to give legal testimony that will send you to the gallows; but you’re not beyond the pale of lynch law.”
A mocking laugh was the only audible response.
“I haven’t even told the Squire,” resumed the woman’s voice. “Nobody knows about it but you and me and the unseen messengers of God.”
Again that mocking, brutal laugh, followed by oaths, with words of commingled anger and exultation. Jean held her breath.
“S’posing you could testify,—which you can’t, for that divorce is tied up on appeal,— my oath would be as binding as yours, Mrs. O’Dowd. And I would swear to God that it was you did the deed. It would be easy enough to make any court believe my story, for it was common talk that you rebelled all the time against such a litter of babies.”
“O God, have mercy!”
“Nobody saw me kill the brat but you, Sally. It would have been bad enough if the young ones had come one at a time, being only a year apart; but when it came to two pairs of twins inside o’ thirteen months, it was time to call a halt.”
“Are you never to have any mercy on me, Sam?”
“Come back to me as my lawful wife, and you’ll see. I’ll be easy enough to get along with if you’ll treat me right.”
The wife was struck dumb with astonishment.
“Come back to me, darling!” The mocking tone gave way to one of cooing tenderness. Jean saw his dusky figure through the shadows. “You see you’re in my power, Sally. Better make a virtue of necessity. You can coax the Squire to let me join his train. I will even be a teamster, if necessary, for your sake and the children’s.”
“What?” cried the woman, in sincere alarm. “Could I be your wife after I’ve seen you kill one of our children before my very eyes? No, no! Go your way, and let me go mine in peace. If you will leave me and the three surviving babies alone, I’ll never tell anybody about the murder. I swear it!”
Again that brutal laugh.
“Do your worst, Sally O’Dowd! You can’t prove that I killed the brat. You haven’t any witness.”
“I have the silent witness of my own conscience; and so have you, Sam O’Dowd. Do you think that I am such an idiot as to come out here to meet you alone?”
“She knows he’s a coward,” thought Jean, “and she’s bluffing.”
“Now see here, Sally! You love me; you know you do; you’ve told me so a thousand times.”
“I did love you once, Sam; but that was so long ago that it seems like a far-off dream. I despise, I loathe, I abhor you now!”
“Then this’ll settle it. I’ll go to the Squire and tell him we’ve buried the hatchet, and I’m going with you to Oregon. I don’t care a rap whether you hate me or not. But if you give me any trouble, I’ll swear that you did that killing.”
“Oh, help me, pitying Christ!” wailed the unhappy woman. “Is there, in all this world, no Canada to which a fugitive wife may flee, and no underground railroad by which to reach it?”.
Again arose that brutal laugh upon the air. The belated bird in the bushes cooed to its mate, and the prairie dogs chattered in the distance.
“Don’t be afraid of him, Sally,” cried a clear voice from the depths of the cottonwoods. “A tyrant is always a coward. I heard your confession, Sam O’Dowd; and as I am not your wife, I can be a witness.”
There was no more brutal laughter. A horse stood picketed and stamping at the head of the gulch, and the murderer hurried toward it with heavy strides. Jean listened with eager attention till he mounted and rode rapidly away.
“Are you still there, Sally?” she asked, as the hoof-beats died away in the distance.
“Yes, Jean; but where are you, and why are you here?”
“The Holy Spirit guided me, I reckon. I was just possessed to come. I didn’t know I was following you, or why I came; but I just did it ’cause I had to.”
“It was hazardous, Jean. He might have killed us both.”
“He’s too big a coward to kill a more formidable foe than his own baby. But you were an idiot to meet him out here, Sally.”
“He was with that freighters’ outfit, but on horseback. He came to me a few minutes before camping-time, when I was walking for exercise. I didn’t want a scene at camp, so I agreed to meet him out here alone, if he would keep out of sight.”
“You’re a bigger fool than Thompson’s colt, and he swam the river to get a drink,” said Jean. “But we mustn’t linger here. He may have a confederate.”
“Not he, Jean. He’s too suspicious to trust a confederate.”
“Let’s go back to camp, anyhow, Sally; mother will be missing us. But you needn’t be afraid of Sam again. I’ve settled his hash,” she said, as they hurried to the open. “Isn’t it a terrible thing to be married?” she added, as soon as she could speak again.
“No, Jean. Marriage under right conditions is the world’s greatest blessing. All enlightened men and women prefer to live in pairs, and make each other and their children as happy as possible. I admit that I made a big mistake when I married; but your mother didn’t, because your father is one of God’s noblemen. The fault isn’t in marriage, but in the couple, one or both of whom make the trouble, when there is trouble. But the conditions between husbands and wives are not equal. Law and usage make the husband and wife one, and the husband that one. Where both the parties to the compact are better than the law, it doesn’t pinch either one; but when a woman finds herself chained for life to a sordid, disagreeable, stingy, domineering man, the advantages of law and custom are all on his side. It is no wonder that trouble ensues in such cases.”
“But, young as I am, I have seen wives that could discount almost any man for meanness,” said Jean. “There are women, now and then, who take all the rights in the matrimonial category, and their husbands haven’t any rights at all.”
“Women sometimes inherit the strongest traits of their fathers; I admit that. And such women can outwit the very best husbands.”
“I’ve read of a woman,” said Jean, musingly, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton by name, who went before a legislative assembly in New York a few years ago, and secured the passage of a law enabling a married woman of that State to hold, in her own right, the property bequeathed to her by her father. And then, as if to prove that women are idiots, there were women in Albany who refused to associate with their financial savior any more. They said she had left her sphere. But never mind. The world is moving, and women are moving with it.”
The camp-fires had died to heaps of embers, the lights were out in the tents and wagons, and all except themselves were settled for the night.
“Don’t say anything to anybody about my meeting with Sam, will you, Jean?”
“Not unless he annoys you again. Then I’ll be ready to meet him with facts.”
“He might put your life in jeopardy, my dear.”
“Jeopardy nothin’!” cried Jean, adopting the slang of the road. “He’s too big a coward to put his neck in danger. But just you wait! I’ll live to see an end to one-sided laws and a one-sexed government. See if I don’t! And the men will fight our battle for us, too, as soon as they are wise enough.”
“If you don’t come across a matrimonial fate that’ll change your tune, my name isn’t Sally O’Dowd,” exclaimed her companion, as they drew near the camp.
“Your name isn’t O’Dowd, but Danover,” cried Jean. “You’re safe in making such a prophecy on such a basis.”