Love, upon "The Journey"--O it was sure to come! Where will not love follow, where is it not to be found? Coquettishly the sun-bonnet may be worn; coquettishly the sun-flower may be placed at the waist, or the cactus bloom amid the dark-brown hair. By what strange and circuitous routes are lovers brought to meet! Through what strange and unforseen circumstances does love begin! In our Company were there not those maidens who could still walk coquettishly and with grace, although it was their truthful boast that their feet had measured each mile of the lengthened way? Were there not those in whose red cheeks the prairie sun kissed English blood? The man from the west, why should he not learn to love that beauty from Albion's Isle? How delightful when danger did not lie in ambush, to walk, arm locked in arm, far ahead of the leading wagon; how delightful to sit amid the flowers and to feel the solitude of the boundless prairie! Yet love is a danger that lurks everywhere. To linger, ever so short a distance behind the train was a grave offense. Each member of the Company knew this rule, they knew it was a rule that must not be broken. Of course one need not make a capture as did that savage brave; one need not, whirling by upon his desert horse, stoop sideways and lift to his side a screaming and unwilling bride. Nor did one care to imitate that enamored chieftain of the Cheyennes. Should one make an offer of a hundred ponies? Yet, if the Captain, upon his steed, like a Knight of old, should be found with a pretty girl riding beside him, what an example for others to follow! One there was in our Company, a youth, who had returned from the west, passing over the road again to find his father's grave. He had come, too, to meet his mother and sister by the Missouri's banks. Fate had willed, however, that the father's grave should not be found; two years had elapsed since it had been made, and nature, with storm and floods had hidden it away, and so the one who slept there, sleeps there still, and the mountain winds, the thunder, and the voice of the passing stream, still make his requiem. On that eastward trip our Captain had learned to love this youth. And on the westward trip he learned to love even more the sister. For she it was who later became our Captain's wife. But why repeat the romance?