Then Bella wept and Glen swore, and the men had pulled up the picket stakes, cinched their girths tight and started off in Indian file toward the distant spurs of the hills. Susan had said little. If it did not violate her conscience to keep silent, it did to pretend a surprise that was not hers. She sat at her tent door most of the day watching for the return of the search party. She was getting supper when she looked up and saw them, gave a low exclamation, and ran to the outskirts of the camp. Here she stood watching, heard Daddy John lounge up behind her and, turning, caught his hand. "Is she there?" she said in an eager whisper. "I can't see her." They both scrutinized the figures, small as toy horsemen, loping over the leathern distance. "Ain't there only four?" he said. "You can see better'n I." "Yes," she cried. "Four. I can count them. She isn't there. Oh, I'm glad!" The old man looked surprised: "Glad! Why?" "I don't know. Oh, don't tell, Daddy John, but I wanted her to get away. I don't know why, I suppose it's very wicked. But--but--it seemed so--so--as if she was a slave--so unfair to drag her away from her own life and make her lead some one else's." Lucy gone, lost as by shipwreck in the gulfs and windings of the mountains, was a fact that had to be accepted. The train moved on, for on the Emigrant Trail there was no leisure for fruitless repining. Only immediate happenings could fill the minds of wanderers struggling across the world, their energies matched against its primal forces. The way was growing harder, the animals less vigorous, and the strain of the journey beginning to tell. Tempers that had been easy in the long, bright days on the Platte now were showing sharp edges. Leff had become surly, Glen quarrelsome. One evening Susan saw him strike Bob a blow so savage that the child fell screaming in pain and terror. Bella rushed to her first born, gathered him in her arms and turned a crimsoned face of battle on her spouse. For a moment the storm was furious, and Susan was afraid that the blow would be repeated on the mother. She tried to pacify the enraged woman, and David and the doctor coaxed Glen away. The child had struck against an edge of stone and was bleeding, and after supper the father rocked him to sleep crooning over him in remorseful tenderness. But the incident left an ugly impression.