g. You'll be twenty and an
old maid first thing you know. Sam will make you a good husband. Heed
what I say."

But she did not heed, though she made no reply to him. Her eye,
"scornful, threatening and young," looked yonder where she knew her
lover was; not was it in her soul ever to return from following after
him. The name of her intended husband left her cold as ice.

"Roll out! Roll out! Ro-o-o-ll ou-t!"

The call went down the line once more. The pistolry of the wagon whips
made answer, the drone of the drivers rose as the sore-necked oxen bowed
their heads again, with less strength even for the lightened loads.

The old man who sat by the gate at Fort Laramie, twisting a curl around
his finger, saw the plain clearing now, as the great train swung out and
up the river trail. He perhaps knew that Jim Bridger, with his own
freight wagons, going light and fast with mules, was on west, ahead of
the main caravan. But he did not know the news Jim Bridger carried, the
same news that Carson was carrying east. The three old mountain men, for
a few hours meeting after years, now were passing far apart, never to
meet again. Their chance encountering meant much to hundreds of men and
women then on the road to Oregon; to untold thousands yet to come.

As for one Samuel Woodhull, late column captain, it was to be admitted
that for some time he had been conscious of certain buffetings of fate.
But as all thoroughbred animals are thin-skinned, so are all the
short-bred pachydermatous, whereby they endure and mayhap arrive at the
manger well as the next. True, even Woodhull's vanity and self-content
had everything asked of them in view of his late series of mishaps; but
by now he had somewhat chirked up under rest and good food, and was once
more the dandy and hail fellow. He felt assured that very presently
bygones would be bygones. Moreover--so he reasoned--if he, Sam Woodhull,
won the spoils, what matter who had won any sort of victory? He knew, as
all these others knew and as all the world knows, that a beautiful woman
is above all things _spolia opima_ of war. Well, in ten days he was to
marry Molly Wingate, the most beautiful woman of the train and the belle
of more than one community. Could he not afford to laugh best, in spite
of all events, even if some of them had not been to his own liking?

But the girl's open indifference was least of all to his liking. It
enraged his vain, choleric nature to its inner core. Alrea