The Way West Part 13

"Delays we can't avoid."

Evans changed his position on the ground. When he spoke he looked at the others. "It don't seem to me we have to be so h.e.l.lbent to beat everybody. Way I figure, we'll pa.s.s and be pa.s.sed before this jig is over."

Mack said, "You're half racehorse, Irvine. You're bred to run in front."

"Ya. Better to keep ahead, you bet," Brewer said.

In his astonishment at Mack, in his rising vexation, Tadlock spoke sharply. "If someone didn't push, the whole company would sit on its tail."

"If one of us was sick, I think we'd want the train to wait." Fairman put in.

So they were all against him, Tadlock thought incredulously, all but the thickheaded German. He had led them, he had worked, organized, directed, pushed -and they were all against him. Or were they? When it came finally to decision, wouldn't Mack and Fairman side with him? "Let's vote," he said. "Mack, Fairman, I a.s.sume you'll support my recommendation."

Mack answered, "No." The smile was gone from his face. Fairman was shaking his head.

"No!"

"No," Mack said again. Fairman kept shaking his head.

Evans tossed a piece of buffalo dung at his old gray-whiskered dog, which was digging in a hole near by. "Reckon you'll have to wait, Tadlock," he said.

Tadlock felt the blood hot in his face. "All I have to say is that it's a G.o.ddam-fool decision."

Mack spoke quietly. "I have to tell you something else."

"What?"

"There's a meeting tonight."

"Meeting?"

"Whole company."

"For what?"

"Can't you guess?"

"This is a guessing game, is it?"

"They're going to unseat you, Irvine."

"You're a G.o.ddam liar!"

"I'll wait for your apology."

The meaning of Mack's words, the full import, came to Tadlock slowly. He clenched words back while he considered it. They meant to kick him out. They meant to elect a new captain. He could see how the thing had come about. Patch, the little, stiff-necked New Englander, Daugherty, Gorham, Carpenter -these men, he had known, opposed him, and now they had politicked around, trading on the unpopularity of leadership, making big this little issue of the sick man. "We'll see about that," he said to Mack. "I'll stand on my position about Martin."

"Can't you see it's not just that?" Mack asked.

"I see. I called you a fool, and that's what you were."

"The world is all a fool to you," the Irishman put in.

"I was a fool all right," Mack said, the color climbing in his face, "but it's not that either, Irvine. It's the airs you have. It's overbearance."

"And it is your animals and not enough men for them that slow the train -and you forever cryin' for speed," Daugherty added. "And it is you and your pushiness that sour us, and that's the G.o.d's truth."

"You say you're not sore," Tadlock said to Mack. "Then where do you stand?"

"I've got to vote for harmony."

"What about you, Fairman?"

Fairman said, "Same here."

"You can't get away with it."

"You tell him, Brewer," Daugherty said.

"I be for you," the German explained. "McBee, too. But ve not be enough."

So it was true. So they had conspired against him. So he had to resign or suffer the humiliation of being voted out. Brewer wouldn't lie to him. "That's the thanks a man gets. I've worked, figured, risked my neck."

Evans said -and Mack nodded to the words- "That's what makes it hard, Tadlock."

"I can split this train in two. I have a few friends."

"You're losin' 'em by the minute," Evans said with what for him was heat.

Tadlock lurched to his feet. "To h.e.l.l with all of youl" Not until he had taken a half a dozen steps away could he bring himself to throw back, "I resign."

Tadlock walked to his lead wagon. "I just quit," he told his wife.

She was seated on a box, mending a pair of trousers that he had ripped in loading the wagon. She gazed at him without speaking.

"It was resign or get kicked out," he went on, getting a kind of perverse satisfaction out of the admission.

Still she didn't speak. In ten years of married life, he thought with a stir of pleasure, she had learned better than to inquire into his business. What he wanted her to know, he would tell her. He waited, almost hoping she would put a question so that he could spend his outrage on her.

When he didn't go on, she said, "Martin's worse."

"I guess that's my fault!"

"I didn't mean it was anybody's fault."

"If we'd been traveling, everyone would have said it was mine. They'd have been glad to say that."

"I'm glad you resigned."

"So you're glad, are you!"

"You take it so hard."

He grunted, disarmed. She was one, anyhow, who knew how much he gave.

She st.i.tched quietly for a minute as if thinking about him and his resignation, but when she spoke it was to say, "Martin depended on you. I think you were the only friend he had."

"I don't know anything to do for him."

"I know, but-"

He walked around to Martin's tent. Brother Weatherby was outside, holding an old Bible.

Tadlock asked, "Well?"

"I have been praying. The Lord's will be done." "Out of his head?"

"Now. Yes."

Tadlock stuck his head inside the tent. Martin lay on his back, his mouth open and his eyeb.a.l.l.s showing white through lids not quite closed. Listening, Tadlock heard the light, fast breath of fever. He stepped back, repelled by the sight and sound and smell of sickness. There was nothing he could do, he told himself. What did they think he was? A doctor?

Weatherby said, "I think he saw the light."

"Calomel work?"

Weatherby nodded, and Tadlock went back to his wagon.

He spent a bitter, fiddley day. He kept going over what had happened and experienced each time a renewed injury and anger. He examined and repaired wagons and equipment and went back twice to Martin's tent. On his second trip he found Martin alone and soiled and senseless. Here was something he could do. Here was something, by G.o.d, he would do. No one could say he was indifferent or neglectful or heedless of the discipline he asked of others. Washing Martin off, he wondered fiercely who would do as much. As he finished, Byrd came in. Byrd had a lancet and thought, like others, that bleeding would be good for Martin. Tadlock helped bleed him.

The meeting of the men at night was what might have been expected -a common hurly-burly made more orderless by the women and children who were allowed to press around. Thinking about it afterwards, Tadlock was still surprised that Evans and not Patch was elected to succeed him. He would have sworn that Patch was agitating in the interests of himself. Evans himself had acted honestly astonished when Mack put his name in nomination. He had turned and looked at his wife and then stumbled ahead. "Nope, Mr. Chairman. I ain't cut out for it."

Seated at a little distance where he could hear and see enough but still not dignify the meeting with his presence, Tadlock had caught the look on Mrs. Evans' face. It was an expression he couldn't describe, of motherliness, concern, pride, a.s.surance, Ambition -he didn't know what. But for an instant, before he thrust it aside, he had the feeling it would be good to be looked at that way. His second thought was that only big, dull, forceless men ever could be so regarded.

Another thing stuck in his memory as he sat by his wagon in the gathering dark after the meeting had adjourned. It was the parliamentary disorder that was allowed to prevail, the promise of the general disorder to come. While Evans' name was still in nomination, Turley piped up, irrelevant to the subject, and Patch let him proceed. "We're a-turnin' back." Turley's voice was a high whine. "Me and my woman and young'uns, we're a-turnin' back, by Moses!"

Mrs. Turley shouted from among the women, "Amen! Amen!" Tadlock heard her crying hysterically afterwards, as he had heard overwrought women cry at revivals.

"We're headin' backwards for the Meramec," Turley went on, "seein's this company won't wait for others and seein's everybody is at outs besides. Who wants to turn back with us, welcome."

Patch asked, "What about it, Summers?"

Summers stood off to Patch's right. He said one word: "Dangerous."

A little silence followed -except for Mrs. Turley's crying that Patch broke by asking, "Anyone else want to turn back?" He waited. "Byrd?"

That, Tadlock had thought through his bitterness, was good management, was one accidental stroke of good management. Let Byrd say yes or no. Get him committed and hold him to it.

Byrd said he'd stick.

Patch went on, "If anyone plans to split off from the train, we'd like to know it now." He didn't look toward Tadlock but others turned to do so. Tadlock stared back, silent and unmoving. Split off? How could he split off? It was an impulsive threat he'd made. Who would go with him? Brewer and McBee and Martin, maybe, if he lived. A sorry lot, without oxen enough and some of those already sore of foot. He sat stiff and wordless, but he wanted to jump up and cry out, calling them the ingrates that they were. He felt like rising with his whip and lashing them one and all until they saw the truth of things. Cattle? Drivers? The charge was just a cheap excuse. Hadn't he brought Martin along and scoured Independence for a man and finally made a deal with Hank McBee to help out with the hundred and ten head of stock he had? Hadn't he done the best he could -and not because they forced him to it, either?

For a long time after the session was over Tadlock sat still, seeing but still not seeing the people who pa.s.sed gingerly, knowing his wife had gone somewhere and wondering how she could mix with those who had mistreated him.

The camp quieted to low, good-night tones and by and by they quieted, too, and of human voices there was just a murmur from Martin's tent, which had been pitched at the other side of the corral where water was close. One by one the fires winked out. The stars came on, cold-bright as faraway suns. Southward Tadlock could see the horizon rolling against the sky. A child cried in one of the tents, cried a frail cry that silence closed around.

Tadlock, he thought, trying to see the name apart from himself. Irvine Tadlock, who'd left a paying business in Peoria to try his talents in a bigger field and had been undone by ragtag emigrants. Tadlock, who liked discipline and method and knew how to organize, who, but for the stories this crowd would take along, might in time have been the territorial governor, the governor of the eventual state.

What now? he asked. What, since these chuckleheads could blight him? Texas? Could he get to Texas? Just this past spring it had been asked into the Union. It would need leaders -a governor, senators, representatives. California? Some said California was a better place than Oregon. It would offer opportunities. It would stand in need of able men.

He felt his wife's hand on his shoulder. "You'd better come to bed, Irvine."

"I know when it's bedtime. You don't need to tell me when to go to bed."

"It's late, Irvine."

"What of it? I've got to look at Martin yet."

"I've been there. There's nothing more you can do. They're trying mustard."

"You go on to bed."

He waited a few minutes, just to a.s.sert himself, and then got up and went into the tent and took off his coat and hat and shoes. Texas? California? They needed men all right. They needed leaders.

He stepped outside in his bare feet and picked up the whip that he had forgotten on the ground and put it in his wagon and went back into the tent and lay down by his wife.

He was just getting to sleep, after what seemed a lifetime of sleeplessness, when Weatherby came by to tell him Martin had died.

Chapter Thirteen.

EVANS LAID the yoke on one of his oxen and pinned the bow and spoke to the teammate, holding the yoke up while the second animal stepped into place, its ankles creaking. It was a satisfaction to a man to have well-trained stock, he told himself while he worked. Saved time and trouble.

When he had his teams yoked and ready to hitch, he looked at the watch Mack had lent him. Six-forty. He would be ready in good time, as befitted the captain. Not all the tents were struck yet, nor the wagons loaded. Inside the corral where he stood some of the other men were beginning to get busy with oxen just driven in, and outside it others were pulling tent pegs and lowering poles and folding the tents afterwards and then lifting their plunder into the wagons. They worked fast, grunting to their ch.o.r.es as men did with sleep still in them and the muscles stiff from the night. The women had sc.r.a.ped and scoured the breakfast things and stood inside the wagons, helping arrange the loads. Or they had wandered off, some with their young ones in tow, to empty themselves and so be ready for the morning drive.

Morning, Evans thought, was a time of fret, before the circle broke and the train got strung out on the trail. When the men quit their grunting it was to speak sharp, and to be answered sharp by women who were tired, too, and felt the load of the day too heavy. The young ones cried or yelled, being cranky or frisky, one. The boxes made a clatter as they were pitched into wagon beds. Now and then one of the oxen driven in for yoking would line out neck and head and let out a long bawl. Underneath the louder noises was the steady hum of mosquitoes that made a little cloud around every head.

Evans stooped and gave Rock a pat on the head and straightened and stretched, pulling in a deep breath through his mouth.

The air had a taste to it here, a taste light and sharp as highspirit drink. For all the fret he felt good.

"Be a nice day, Becky," he said, looking between the wagons to where she worked outside. She had just closed and latched with its leather hasp the box that held pots and kettles and tools to eat with.

"I almost wish it would blow and clear out the mosquitoes," she said.