"We won't be alone," with a note of protest making her voice plaintive. "My father and Daddy John will be there. I couldn't be separated from them. I'd never get over missing them. They've been with me always." Bella did not notice the tone, or maybe saw beyond it. "You won't miss them when you're married," she said with her benign content. "Your husband will be enough." Lucy, with romance instead of a husband, agreed to this, and arranged the programme for the future as she would have had it: "They'll probably live near you in tents. And you'll see them often; ride over every few days. But you'll want your own log house just for yourselves." This time Susan did not answer, for she was afraid to trust her voice. She pretended a sudden interest in the prospect while the unbearable picture rose before her mind--she and David alone, while her father and Daddy John were somewhere else in tents, somewhere away from her, out of reach of her hands and her kisses, not there to laugh with her and tease her and tell her she was a tyrant, only David loving her in an unintelligible, discomforting way and wanting to read poetry and admire sunsets. The misery of it gripped down into her soul. It was as the thought of being marooned on a lone sand bar to a free buccaneer. They never could leave her so; they never could have the heart to do it. And anger against David, the cause of it, swelled in her. It was he who had done it all, trying to steal her away from the dear, familiar ways and the people with whom she had been so happy. Lucy looked at her with curious eyes, in which there was admiration and a touch of envy. "You must be awfully happy?" she said. "Awfully," answered Susan, swallowing and looking at the rain. When she went back to her own wagon she found a consultation in progress. Daddy John, streaming from every fold, had just returned from the head of the caravan, where he had been riding with the pilot. From him he had heard that the New York Company on good roads, in fair weather, made twenty miles a day, and that in the mountains, where the fodder was scarce and the trail hard, would fall to a slower pace. The doctor's party, the cow long since sacrificed to the exigencies of speed, had been making from twenty-five to thirty. Even with a drop from this in the barer regions ahead of them they could look forward to reaching California a month or six weeks before the New York Company. There was nothing to be gained by staying with them, and, so far, the small two-wagon caravan had moved with a speed and absence of accident, which gave its members confidence in their luck and generalship. It was agreed that they should leave the big train the next morning and move on as rapidly as they could, stopping at Fort Laramie to repair the wagons which the heat had warped, shoe the horses, and lay in the supplies they needed.