The Way West Part 10

"Sand hills, and not as high as you'd think from here."

It turned out d.i.c.k was right. As they drew closer, weaving among a long set of badger holes, the hills shrank, until at last they were just piles of sand forty to sixty feet high, blown up by the wind and held together by cactus and thistle and, Evans saw as he rode into them, by fine gra.s.ses that his horse kept tugging for. A powderlike salt patched the ground with white.

Evans had heard about the Platte. He had pictured it in his mind. He thought he knew what he was going to see, but now that his horse stood on the summit, he couldn't believe. He couldn't believe that flat could be so flat or that distance ran so far or that the sky lifted so dizzy-deep or that the world stood so empty. He saw old Rock chase a badger into a hole, saw a bunch of antelope drifting, saw the river sluiced and the woods rising on its islands and the sand in a great gray waste, but it was something he couldn't put a name to that held him. He thought he never had seen the world before. He never had known distance until now. He had lived shut off by trees and hills and had thought the world was a doll's world and distance just three hollers away and the sky no higher than a rifle shot.

He said, "By G.o.d, d.i.c.k! By G.o.d!" and d.i.c.k nodded, knowing how it was with him, and silence stronger than any sound closed in on the words as if he had broken the rules by speaking.

He held his horse up, d.i.c.k on one side of him, Patch on the other, and Martin riding up from the rear. Feeling rose in him, a shudder of feeling that left the skin cold and grained. "I never knew it would be like this," he said aloud but still to himself. He was humbled and set up at the same time and proud how with a fierce, unworded pride that he had put out for Oregon. It wouldn't be easy. It wouldn't be what people called it in. Great was the name for it, the only name he could find in his mind.

He felt greatness coming into himself, greatness coming from greatness, and he renounced it, thinking of Tadlock and his self-importance, but still he felt greatness.

d.i.c.k clucked to his horse, and together the four of them rode down the rough slope, and d.i.c.k set a flag at a swale, and they crossed the level plain and came to the river.

Chapter Ten.

HIGGINS had to smile to himself. People tickled him, especially maybe men when it came to women. Like now when the wagon train had been corralled. Like here on the Platte bank where the men had drawn off so's to be able to take up the subject of what Byrd kept calling manure. Manure, that was it, or buffalo chips or dung. To most of them, even to some of them that used the word regular, it wouldn't be fittin' to give it the name it was known by best, since women, although absent, figured in the argument. In something like the same way people talked nice in the presence of a corpse.

The question was, with wood getting scarce was it right and proper for the women to cook over fires made of buffalo chips? A tomfool like himself might think the women ought to have some say in the answer. But no. The husbands would decide and go back to their wives, serious and wise, and tell them what was right. How would they say it? Higgins wondered. How would Mr. Byrd inform his lady? "Ma'am, for want of wood we'll have to use the waste of buffaloes"?

This wasn't a called meeting. It just came on by itself. The men were standing mostly. A little to one side d.i.c.k Summers leaned on his rifle and listened and looked, looked at them and away from them to the sun sinking across a million miles of prairie. Higgins tried to guess what was in his mind. Maybe he thought there were rules out there, too, rules of making out with what there was to make out with, of cooking over buffalo chips if no wood was handy.

Byrd was speaking, saying, "I for one don't like it."

Byrd was a man Higgins hadn't come to know, except as he had seen him, plump and fair, and crack-lipped now from the wind, sitting proper at his fire or urging his team along in the way of a man not used to animals. He was an in-between-sized man, from the East somewhere, who carried himself straight and had solemn manners with the ladies and said amen to Brother Weatherby's prayers. It was natural, Higgins thought, that on this subject, if not on any others, he should have ideas.

"None of us like it," Tadlock said, speaking, as always, as if what he said left nothing over. He said to Summers, "Are you sure?"

Summers just nodded. He was still looking across the million miles of plain. Higgins guessed he was a little put out and a little amused by what must seem silly talk to him.

Higgins followed Tadlock's gaze down to the river. There was a little flanking of bushes there and some ragged stumps and three dead trees, and Botter and Brownie Evans and some others were working with axes, trying to get enough fuel for fires. Tadlock's eyes traveled upstream where the Platte, except for one wooded island, ran bare in its great wrinkles of sand.

"No wood," Tadlock said, not as a question, while he looked for it upriver. "No wood at all."

"Not enough," Summers answered.

"How about buffalo chips?"

"Plenty. We're comin' into buffler country."

"Mightn't they be scarce, too? Mightn't they have been used up?"

"They grow fast."

It was a keen answer, Higgins thought, but Tadlock didn't smile. "I can't understand it. Why are there trees on the islands?"

Fairman -who was a nice boy and good to work for- stooped and picked up a pinch of soil and rubbed it between his thumb and fingers. "This stuff won't grow anything except gra.s.s and cactus. It's straight sand."

Tadlock spoke slowly, as if coming to a deep answer. "It must be that the island soil is richer."

The men thought it over, nodding thoughtfully, until Summers said, "Injuns fire the prairies. Fire don't reach to the islands."

Tadlock looked as if he didn't care much for the answer. "At any rate," he said, "that isn't the question. Could we pick up enough fuel while traveling -bushes and drift and such?"

As if to touch him up Summers answered, "It would slow us."

A cloud came on Tadlock's face. "We have to make time."

"If there's nothing else for it, there's nothing else for it," Lije Evans put in. He stood close to Tadlock. Measuring the two of them, Higgins figured there wasn't much difference in the size. Evans was taller, Tadlock thicker through the chest.

"I think we ought to give the question due consideration," Byrd said, solemn as a barn owl. "It's not something to be decided offhand. What do you say, Brother Weatherby?"

Weatherby stood gaunt and stooped in a piece of blue shirt and a pair of knee-sprung pants with a tear in them. He didn't answer right away but turned his eyes up and beyond them, as if drawing off to talk to G.o.d.

"I don't want to do all the talking here," Byrd said, licking his sore lip, "but it seems to me not appropriate. We shouldn't ask the ladies to do it if we can avoid it. It's not a ladylike thing."

Evans said, "Shoo!" and Byrd started a little, studying Evans as if surprised that anyone could feel different from himself. "My woman'll use it and think no more to it."

"Still," Byrd said, sounding less sure of himself, "the idea is offensive."

Higgins eased himself down on the ground. It struck him that Byrd and some of the others, for all that they knew better, stuck to queer ideas of women, not liking to think of them as flesh and blood and stomach and guts but as something different, something a cut above earthy things, so that no one should let on to them that critters had hind ends. Higgins didn't set himself up as a judge of women, though a pewter tinker like he used to be did learn some things, but still he bet they'd think all this palaver funny. Women had harder heads than men liked to believe. Even Mrs. Byrd did, probably.

McBee had been quiet, which was unusual for him. He spit now and spoke the awful word. "A little s.h.i.t ain't going to hurt anyone. Dried out, it ain't. Let 'em cook over buffalo s.h.i.t."

Patch sided with Byrd then. He spoke quietly out of his sharp face. "It is precisely language like that and sentiments like that that make the thing objectionable."

McBee glanced at Tadlock and, getting no sign from him, let himself bristle like a feist. "I guess your woman knows enough not to step in it."

"No doubt, though gentlewomen wouldn't know it by that name."

McBee started to answer, but Tadlock turned on him and said, "Shut up!" and McBee just grinned through his whiskers and spit again and after a little pause answered, "That was all I had to allow."

Tadlock spoke both as if to warn McBee and give comfort to the others. "At any rate we can call it chips."

Higgins might not have put his oar in if he hadn't seen Byrd nodding. He asked, "Why don't you call it puddin', or cake?"

"How's that?"

"If a name makes it different from what it is, a sweet name ought to make it sure-enough tasty."

Tadlock thought about that, while Summers and Evans exchanged grins. Then he said, "This isn't a time for foolishness." He stared down at Higgins as if, by sitting, Higgins didn't show the case the right respect. "You don't seem much concerned."

"When I work I work hard, but when I set I set loose," Higgins answered.

"And you don't have to think about the protection of a wife."

"Last wife I had, I was the one needed pertection."

Brother Weatherby had pulled away from heaven long enough to give McBee a look. It wasn't his hardest look, though, and Higgins guessed it was the G.o.ddams and holy jesuses that really got his dander up.

"What do you say, Mack?" Tadlock asked.

"Nothing," Mack answered. He was looking down toward the river, where the women were doing around.

"Well," Tadlock said as if explaining to children, "let's examine the possibilities." He counted the points off on his fingers. "One, we can try to sc.r.a.pe up enough wood as we go along. Two, maybe enough food can be cooked tonight to enable us to get along without fires for a few days. Three-"

"Or us men can cook," Evans put in. "I don't see the use of talk."

"We want the general sentiment."

"I don't want to cook," Evans answered.

Mack had left the group, left it without speaking, like a man tired of talk. He wasn't, though. Higgins saw him down by the corral talking to the girl, Mercy McBee, and smiling while he talked.

It was Evans who kept the men pointed to the question. "You want to do your own cooking?" he asked them all.

Byrd and Patch didn't like to face up to the choice, Byrd especially. They looked at the ground and scuffed it and shook their heads slow, like a drammer being told he would have to quit or die. Higgins figured Patch had a heap more head on him than Byrd, though they were on the same side now. Patch had his proper Yankee ways but he had thought in his face, too, while all Byrd had along with his politeness was helplessness with animals, a big family, and a cracked lip.

Brother Weatherby came back to earth. "What the Lord wills, the Lord wills," he said.

"Meaning what?" asked Tadlock.

"If He has left us nothing to cook with except buffalo dung, He means us to cook with buffalo dung."

"Us?"

"Those who cook regularly."

"Suits me," McBee said, forgetting Tadlock had silenced him. "What is not offensive in His sight should not be so in ours." The men were nodding again, even Byrd, feeling better since G.o.d had taken sides.

Holdridge spoke for the first time then. He had been at the edge of the crowd, listening and watching out of a face made black as a kettle by beard and weather. Higgins took him for a shy man, though he didn't look it. "Who's goin' to pick the cow chips?" he asked.

"The younger ones can bring them in," Tadlock told him.

Sure, Higgins thought, the little ones and the boys not quite grown up would pick the chips and the women would cook over them and the men would make out not to notice. All but the pups could keep their put-on. All this palaver was just a bow to manners. From the first they knew they'd have to vote for chips.

Returning to the wagons, Higgins heard Evans say to Summers, "Well?"

"Heap of doin's over a cow dab," Summers answered.

Chapter Eleven.

HIS NAME was Brownie Evans, and he was seventeen and the dust rose under the slow feet of the cattle and powdered a man's skin and filled his nose, and the sun bore through it, hot as a near fire, though summer was just coming on, until his neck and cheeks and hands turned dark as the saddle he rode on. The dust phlegmed the throat and gritted between the teeth. It settled in the ears, feeling like meal under the finger that tried to clear it out. Keep footin' it, critters. Stay with the bunch, you. Git along! Far off, on sky lines clear as water, heat waves ran.

His name was Brownie Evans and he was seventeen and bound for Oregon, and this hand that held the reins was his, this fixing of bone and joint and broken nails, made to answer his orders; and the feet in the peg boots were his, and the arms in the shirt and the legs in the homespun pants; and he lived inside himself, under the ribs or beneath the skull, thinking thoughts and feeling feelings like maybe hadn't been thought or felt before, they were so kind of crazy . . . or it would rain, out of a sky gray as ashes, and a wind would rise, pushing the clouds along, and the skin inside the clothes would bunch up against the cold, as the herd itself bunched up, looking sad and scraggly. Giddup, and d.a.m.n the loose horses! A horse wanted to eat his head off.

The day would drag by, the long day would drag by -gettingup time, nooning time, camping time, while the mind ran loose and the eye looked right and left, for Indians and buffalo and varmints like the prairie dogs the wagon train had come on to lately and the owls that sat by the holes, or like the thing called a porcupine that one of the men had shot. d.i.c.k Summers said it was a p.r.i.c.kly beaver, and the children had plucked it clean of quills.

Ahead the eye would see the train winding, the men walking by their teams and the women and children tagging alongside if the day was fair, and the arched covers of the wagons, more gray than white now, swaying to the road. Farther on, sometimes, the outriders would come into view -Summers and Pa and Mr. Patch or Mr. Fairman and Mr. Tadlock or others, depending, and one of the rifle barrels would catch the sun and flash it back, across the long flat, over the wagons, through the dust, to where a man poked the loose stock along. Come on to noon, the riders ahead would get off their horses and begin digging holes along the sh.o.r.e of the river so as to get water that didn't run so thick with mud. Hig said the trouble with the Platte was it flowed bottom side up.

Hig's name was Higgins and Martin's was Martin and Botter's was Botter and Mr. McBee's was Henry McBee, and they rode often at the tail of the cow line, along with others who changed day by day. Hig talked to himself, out of a mouth that barely had room between nose and chin, or reined over when he thought of something good and told you about it and grinned afterwards, his mouth looking like a knife cut in his withered face. Martin rode stoop-shouldered and chewed tobacco and hardly ever smiled or talked, acting as if life was sorry and no help for it. People called Botter a steady man. When he spoke it was about horses or mules or cattle.

Those were their names, the names they were known by, but to know a name wasn't to know a man. The man lay deep, inside his name, underneath his talk and acts, as he did himself who went by the name of Brownie Evans and spoke and moved like everybody else but still lived secret and alone. People would say he was skinny and big-jointed and had too much of him turned under for feet, or they might say he was friendly and good-turned but bashful, but they wouldn't know him. He couldn't let them know him, for it would be the same as standing naked and maybe not looking like other folks but looking outlandish and shameful. What a person wondered was, were other people like him underneath or, more likely, solider and properer and not moved by crazy notions?

He wouldn't want to tell about how it was with him, not even about the way his chest filled sometimes when he came to a rise and looked over the country or how his heart turned just at the smell of camp smoke or the lonely voices of the wild geese that had nested along the river. He would know then that good things awaited him, great things that he couldn't put a word to or set out in thought. He could trail cattle in the hot sun or in the winds that sprang up fierce. Or he could trail them in the rain, while storm clouds trailed over him and the feet of the stock sucked and slipped in the mud. With him would be the knowing -while he ran the work stock in and helped yoke up or went for water or poked a team or greased the axles from the tar bucket that swung underneath the wagon. It was his secret, this knowing that good things lay ahead, and probably people would smile, but sometimes at night he would wake up to the crying of wolves or the rustle of the breeze, and the goodness would lie with him like something he could squeeze to himself.

Just tomorrow they might meet Indians -p.a.w.nees with roached hair, or Cheyennes or Arapahoes or Sioux, war-party Indians painted red and black. They came streaming on to the prairie and held up and looked while the wagons jolted into a circle and women cried and the men examined their rifles. They came on then, the Indians did, their head feathers bent to the wind of the charge, their war whoops breaking hoa.r.s.e on the ear.

"Steady," d.i.c.k Summers said. He lay underneath a wagon, his rifle resting on a spoke of the wheel, and Brownie lay with him. Around the circle other men had posted themselves, and inside it the women and children peeked, white-faced, from behind the boxes and gear they had yanked from the wagons.

"They can't come it," d.i.c.k said, his cool gray eyes looking along the barrel. "They'll circle."

"Course not," Brownie said, and d.i.c.k switched his gaze over and gave him a half-smile, seeing Brownie's eye cool, too, and his hands easy on his rifle.

The Indians were all shining shields and yelling mouths and pounding hoofs, and then the two steady guns spoke and knocked two Indians from their horses, and the others broke then, flaring out like a covey of birds. They ran a bigger circle around the circle of wagons, just the tops of their heads showing or an arm or a leg, or a bow bent sharp and then the arrow streaking.

"Rifle!" Brownie pitched his empty gun back of him. His voice sounded keen as a shot.

"Here." Someone shoved a loaded piece into his reached-back hand. "Here." He let himself take one quick look behind him, and saw it was Mercy McBee, already charging the rifle he had emptied.

"Down! Down, Mercy!" But she just went on loading while the arrows pattered around her like hail.

"Two," d.i.c.k counted.

"Two for me, too. Rifle!"

"Three."

"Three. Rifle!"

It was too much for the Indians. It wasn't likely they had seen shooting like that before. They drew off, howling, and began fading into distance, and d.i.c.k Summers was saying, "Hang me, hoss, but you're a smart shot."

So it came to be that he was more like d.i.c.k Summers all the time. He had the same easy slouch in the saddle, the same seeing eye, the half-sad smile that showed just a little of what he might be thinking. He came to be like d.i.c.k Summers, except younger, and men and women looked at him as he rode by and listened to him while he leaned on his rifle, thinking how much he was and him just a boy, too, and they said to one another, "That Brownie Evans takes after d.i.c.k Summers like one pea to another."

Or a herd of buffalo might show up. They made a great, brown, rolling shadow on the slope north of the river, and men's eyes kindled while they counted b.a.l.l.s and measured powder, but d.i.c.k Summers said, "Best leave this to me'n Brownie Evans. You all'll get a heap of shootin' later. Right now we're froze for meat." He turned, "Git your bow and arrers, Brownie."

"Bow and arrows." It was Mr. Tadlock, who didn't know beans about buffalo hunting.