“And I’ll promise you another thing”—­her strained nerves now were speaking truth for her—­“if by any means I ever learn—­if I ever believe—­that Major Banion is not what I now think him, I’ll go on my knees to him.  I’ll know marriage was wrong and love was right all the time.”

“Fine, my dear!  Much happiness!  But unfortunately for Major Banion’s passing romance, the official records of a military court-martial and a dishonorable discharge from the Army are facts which none of us can doubt or deny.”

“Yes, that’s how it is.  So that’s why.”

“What do you really mean then, Molly—­you say, that’s why?”

“That’s why I’m going to marry you, Sam.  Nine days from to-day, at the Independence Rock, if we are alive.  And from now till then, and always, I’m going to be honest, and I’m going to pray God to give you power to make me forget every other man in all the world except my—­my—­” But she could not say the word “husband.”

“Your husband!”

He said it for her, and perhaps then reached his zenith in approximately unselfish devotion, and in good resolves at least.

The sun shone blinding hot.  The white dust rose in clouds.  The plague of flies increased.  The rattle and creak of wheel, the monotone of the drivers, the cough of dust-afflicted kine made the only sounds for a long time.

“You can’t kiss me, Molly?”

He spoke not in dominance but in diffidence.  The girl awed him.

“No, not till after, Sam; and I think I’d rather be left alone from now till then.  After—­Oh, be good to me, Sam!  I’m trying to be honest as a woman can.  If I were not that I’d not be worth marrying at all.”

Without suggestion or agreement on his part she drew tighter the reins on her mules.  He sprang down over the wheel.  The sun and the dust had their way again; the monotony of life, its drab discontent, its yearnings and its sense of failure once more resumed sway in part or all of the morose caravan.  They all sought new fortunes, each of these.  One day each must learn that, travel far as he likes, a man takes himself with him for better or for worse.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE BROKEN WEDDING

Banion allowed the main caravan two days’ start before he moved beyond Fort Laramie.  Every reason bade him to cut entirely apart from that portion of the company.  He talked with every man he knew who had any knowledge of the country on ahead, read all he could find, studied such maps as then existed, and kept an open ear for advice of old-time men who in hard experience had learned how to get across a country.

Two things troubled him:  The possibility of grass exhaustion near the trail and the menace of the Indians.  Squaw men in from the north and west said that the Arapahoes were hunting on the Sweetwater, and sure to make trouble; that the Blackfeet were planning war; that the Bannacks were east of the Pass; that even the Crows were far down below their normal range and certain to harass the trains.  These stories, not counting the hostility of the Sioux and Cheyennes of the Platte country, made it appear that there was a tacit suspense of intertribal hostility, and a general and joint uprising against the migrating whites.