"Oh, it's grand!" Her voice was gay, but there was a strange undertone in it that Joe could not understand. He looked quizzically at Emma. She lowered her voice.
"Barbara isn't really in the wagon, Joe. She's gone to Oregon ahead of us."
She said softly, "Our little girl has grown up, Joe. But she isn't so grown-up that she can't dream, and I hope she never will be. What were you thinking of when you were her age?"
She became a little coy. "You hadn't even met me!"
"Just the same I was thinking about you. Doggone it, Emma, I didn't have a very good life before I met you. Oh, I don't mean it that way at all. I had everything most other people did, but it just seemed that I was lost. There was nobody at all I could tell things to, or share with, and the first day I saw you I knew I could never leave."
She said, "Oh, but you _did_ leave, running out of that store like a streak, with the maple syrup jug in your hand!"
They laughed heartily, for the sheer joy of laughing, and back in the wagon the children laughed too. But they had not kept their voices low enough. Barbara had heard, and she knelt staring dreamily out of the open flaps. All behind her was forever behind, and she knew that. What--and who--would lie ahead? Emma, who knew her daughter, was right. Barbara's spirit had winged past the slow-moving mules and taken her to Oregon long before the rest would ever get there.
Despite the mud, Tad had not forsworn his announced intention of walking every inch of the way to Oregon. He hadn't had a bad time because of his weight; places where the wagon bogged down, he could skip over. Where the Trail was too muddy, Tad sought the knolls and rises on one side or the other and often these were short cuts. Now, the faithful Mike close beside him, he was waving from a knoll about a hundred yards ahead and his voice carried back.
He drove to the foot of the knoll, looked in the direction Tad indicated, and knit his brows in wonder. Three hundred yards farther on, almost squarely in the center of the Trail, was another wagon. It was oddly still and only half real, a ghost that haunted the Trail. Its once taut canvas cover sagged, and the back flaps gaped emptily. Emma turned puzzled eyes on Joe.