Ships and wagon trains came in on the Willamette from the East.  They met the coast news of gold.  Men of Oregon also left in a mad stampede for California.  News came that all the World now was in the mines of California.  All over the East, as the later ships also brought in reiterated news, the mad craze of ’49 even then was spreading.

But the men of ’48 were in ahead.  From them, scattering like driven game among the broken country over hundreds of miles of forest, plain, bench land and valley lands, no word could come out to the waiting world.  None might know the countless triumphs, the unnumbered tragedies—­none ever did know.

There, beyond the law, one man might trail another with murder stronger than avarice in his heart, and none ever be the wiser.  To hide secrets such as these the unfathomed mountains reached out their shadowy arms.

* * * * *

Now the winter wore on with such calendar as altitude, latitude, longitude gave it, and the spring of ’49 came, East and West, in Washington and New York; at Independence on the Missouri; at Deseret by the Great Salt Lake; in California; in Oregon.

Above the land of the early Willamette settlements forty or fifty miles up the Yamhill Valley, so a letter from Mrs. Caleb Price to her relatives in Ohio said, the Wingates, leaders of the train, had a beautiful farm, near by the Cale Price Mill, as it was known.  They had up a good house of five rooms, and their cattle were increasing now.  They had forty acres in wheat, with what help the neighbors had given in housing and planting; and wheat would run fifty bushels to the acre there.  They load bought young trees for an orchard.  Her mother had planted roses; they now were fine.  She believed they were as good as those she planted in Portland, when first she went through there—­cuttings she had carried with her seed wheat in the bureau drawer, all the way across from the Saganon.  Yes, Jesse Wingate and his wife had done well.  Molly, their daughter, was still living with them and still unmarried, she believed.

There were many things which Mrs. Caleb Price believed; also many things she did not mention.

She said nothing, for she knew nothing, of a little scene between these two as they sat on their little sawn-board porch before their door one evening, looking out over the beautiful and varied landscape that lay spread before them.  Their wheat was in the green now.  Their hogs reveled in their little clover field.  “We’ve done well, Jesse,” at length said portly Molly Wingate.  “Look at our place!  A mile square, for nothing!  We’ve done well, Jesse, I’ll admit it.”

“For what?” answered Jesse Wingate.  “What’s it for?  What has it come to?  What’s it all about?”

He did not have any reply.  When he turned he saw his wife wiping tears from her hard, lined face.

“It’s Molly,” said she.

CHAPTER XLII