They said no more, and Daddy John stole out of the tent. The next day the doctor was too ill to ask for a clergyman, to know or to care. At nightfall he died. The Emigrant Trail had levied its first tribute on them, taken its toll. END OF PART III PART IV The Desert CHAPTER I They were camped on the edges of that harsh land which lay between the Great Salt Lake and the Sierra. Behind them the still, heavy reach of water stretched, reflecting in mirrored clearness the mountains crowding on its southern rim. Before them the sage reached out to dim infinities of distance. The Humboldt ran nearby, sunk in a stony bed, its banks matted with growths of alder and willow. The afternoon was drawing to the magical sunset hour. Susan, lying by the door of her tent, could see below the growing western blaze the bowl of the earth filling with the first, liquid oozings of twilight. A week ago they had left the Fort. To her it had been a blank space of time, upon which no outer interest had intruded. She had presented an invulnerable surface to all that went on about her, the men's care, the day's incidents, the setting of the way. Cold-eyed and dumb she had moved with them, an inanimate idol, unresponsive to the observances of their worship, aloof from them in somber uncommunicated musings. The men respected her sorrow, did her work for her, and let her alone. To them she was set apart in the sanctuary of her mourning, and that her grief should express itself by hours of drooping silence was a thing they accepted without striving to understand. Once or twice David tried to speak to her of her father, but it seemed to rouse in her an irritated and despairing pain. She begged him to desist and got away from him as quickly as she could, climbing into the wagon and lying on the sacks, with bright, unwinking eyes fastened on Daddy John's back. But she did not rest stunned under an unexpected blow as they thought. She was acutely alive, bewildered, but with senses keen, as if the world had taken a dizzying revolution and she had come up panting and clutching among the fragments of what had been her life. If there had been some one to whom she could have turned, relieving herself by confession, she might have found solace and set her feet in safer ways. But among the three men she was virtually alone, guarding her secret with that most stubborn of all silences, a girl's in the first wakening of sex. She had a superstitious hope that she could regain peace and self-respect by an act of reparation, and at such moments turned with expiatory passion to the thought of David. She would go to California, live as her father had wished, marry her betrothed, and be as good a wife to him as man could have. And for a space these thoughts brought her ease, consoled her as a compensating act of martyrdom.