It was the spring gathering of the west-bound wagon-trains, stretching from old Independence to Westport Landing, the spot where that very year the new name of Kansas City was heard among the emigrants as the place of the jump-off.  It was now an hour by sun, as these Western people would have said, and the low-lying valley mists had not yet fully risen, so that the atmosphere for a great picture did not lack.

It was a great picture, a stirring panorama of an earlier day, which now unfolded.  Slow, swaying, stately, the ox teams came on, as though impelled by and not compelling the fleet of white canvas sails.  The teams did not hasten, did not abate their speed, but moved in an unagitated advance that gave the massed column something irresistibly epochal in look.

The train, foreshortened to the watchers at the rendezvous, had a well-spaced formation—­twenty wagons, thirty, forty, forty-seven—­as Jesse Wingate mentally counted them.  There were outriders; there were clumps of driven cattle.  Along the flanks walked tall men, who flung over the low-headed cattle an admonitory lash whose keen report presently could be heard, still faint and far off.  A dull dust cloud arose, softening the outlines of the prairie ships.  The broad gestures of arm and trunk, the monotonous soothing of commands to the sophisticated kine as yet remained vague, so that still it was properly a picture done on a vast canvas—­that of the frontier in ’48; a picture of might, of inevitableness.  Even the sober souls of these waiters rose to it, felt some thrill they themselves had never analyzed.

A boy of twenty, tall, blond, tousled, rode up from the grove back of the encampment of the Wingate family.

“You, Jed?” said his father.  “Ride on out and see if Molly’s there.”

“Sure she is!” commented the youth, finding a plug in the pocket of his jeans.  “That’s her.  Two fellers, like usual.”

“Sam Woodhull, of course,” said the mother, still hand over eye.  “He hung around all winter, telling how him and Colonel Doniphan whipped all Mexico and won the war.  If Molly ain’t in a wagon of her own, it ain’t his fault, anyways!  I’ll rest assured it’s account of Molly’s going out to Oregon that he’s going too!  Well!” And again, “Well!”

“Who’s the other fellow, though?” demanded Jed.  “I can’t place him this far.”

Jesse Wingate handed over his team to his son and stepped out into the open road, moved his hat in an impatient signal, half of welcome, half of command.  It apparently was observed.

To their surprise, it was the unidentified rider who now set spur to his horse and came on at a gallop ahead of the train.  He rode carelessly well, a born horseman.  In no more than a few minutes he could be seen as rather a gallant figure of the border cavalier—­a border just then more martial than it had been before ’46 and the days of “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight.”