The Emigrant Trail | Page 9

suffering.
"That's what he says a doctor's duties are," she said. "It isn't a
profession to make money with, it's a profession for helping people and
curing them. You yourself don't count, it's only what you do that does.
Why, my father had a very large practice, but he made only just enough
to keep us."
Of all she had said this seemed to the listener the best worth hearing.
The doctor now mounted to the top of the highest pedestal David's
admiration could supply. Here was one of the compensations with
which life keeps the balances even. Joe had died and left him friendless,
and while the ache was still sharp, this stranger and his daughter had
come to soothe his pain, perhaps, in the course of time, to conjure it
quite away.
Early in the preceding winter the doctor had been forced to decide on
the step he had been long contemplating. An attack of congestion of the
lungs developed consumption in his weakened constitution. A warm
climate and an open-air life were prescribed. And how better combine
them than by emigrating to California?
"And so," said the doctor's daughter, "father made up his mind to go
and sold out his practice. People thought he was crazy to start on such a
trip when he was sick, but he knows more than they do. Besides, it's not
going to be such hard work for him. Daddy John, the old man who
drives the mules, knows all about this Western country. He was here a
long time ago when Indiana and Illinois were wild and full of Indians.
He got wounded out here fighting and thought he was going to die, and
came back to New York. My father found him there, poor and lonely
and sick, and took care of him and cured him. He's been with us ever
since, more than twenty years, and he manages everything and takes

care of everything. He and father'll tell you I rule them, but that's just
teasing. It's really Daddy John who rules."
The mules were just behind them, and she looked back at the old man
and called in her clear voice:
"I'm talking about you, Daddy John. I'm telling all about your
wickedness."
Daddy John's answer came back, slow and amused:
"Wait till I get the young feller alone and I'll do some talking."
Laughing, she settled herself in her saddle and dropped her voice for
David's ear:
"I think Daddy John was quite pleased we missed the New York train.
It was a big company, and he couldn't have managed everything the
way he can now. But we'll soon catch it up and then"--she lifted her
eyebrows and smiled with charming malice at the thought of Daddy
John's coming subjugation. "We ought to overtake it in three or four
weeks they said in Independence."
Her companion made no answer. The cheerful conversation had
suddenly taken a depressing turn. Under the spell of Miss Gillespie's
loquacity and black eyes he had quite forgotten that he was only a
temporary escort, to be superseded by an entire ox train, of which even
now they were in pursuit. David was a dreamer, and while the young
woman talked, he had seen them both in diminishing perspective,
passing sociably across the plains, over the mountains, into the desert,
to where California edged with a prismatic gleam the verge of the
world. They were to go riding, and talking on, their acquaintance
ripening gradually and delightfully, while the enormous panorama of
the continent unrolled behind them. And it might end in three or four
weeks! The Emigrant Trail looked overwhelmingly long when he could
only see himself and Leff riding over it, and California lost its color
and grew as gray as a line of sea fog.

That evening's camp was pitched in a clearing near the road. The
woods pressed about them, whispering and curious, thrown out and
then blotted as the fires leaped or died. It was the first night's bivouac,
and much noise and bustle went to its accomplishment. The young men
covertly watched the Gillespie Camp. How would this ornamental party
cope with such unfamiliar labors? With its combination of a feminine
element which must be helpless by virtue of a rare and dainty fineness
and a masculine element which could hardly be otherwise because of ill
health, it would seem that all the work must devolve upon the old man.
Nothing, however, was further from the fact. The Gillespies rose to the
occasion with the same dauntless buoyancy that they had shown in ever
attempting the undertaking, and then blithely defying public opinion
with a servant and a cow. The sense of their unfitness which had made
the young men uneasy now gave way to secret wonder as the