The Way West Part 14

"They won't be so bad oncet we roll. Ain't hardly a stir of air."

It was cool enough, but the sun was beginning to work. In the direction of it he saw Courthouse Rock, looming big yet, its near side purple with shadow. Off to his right apiece Chimney Rock rose slim and rusty. In a land that was all pretty much the same a man wouldn't think to see so much color-purple and rust, the gray of the sandbars, the sun slanted yellow as b.u.t.ter on the long flats, the sky so blue it hurt the eye. In all the sky there wasn't a cloud.

He said, "I never feel so sure as on a good morning."

"Sure?"

"About everything." He stepped across and lifted the cookbox and put it in the wagon and brought the cover snug with its drawstring. "Nothing left but to hitch."

He stepped back into the corral and angled through the oxen, looking to see if anyone needed help, and came to where Hig and Fairman were wrestling with an ornery steer. They had a rope over its horns that Hig was trying to hold while Fairman lifted the yoke. They held up when they saw him.

Hig gave Evans his thin smile while he bent back with the rope. "I'd as lief yoke a buffalo as this d.a.m.n ox."

"Whyn't you take a hitch on a spoke?"

"Comin' to that," Hig answered. "On'y I hate to. I got a bet up with this critter, by G.o.d, that I'll hold him or bust." Keeping the rope tight with one hand, he took the loose end of it with the other and looped it over a wheel spoke and drew it up. "I'm busted."

Evans clapped the ox on the rump. It stepped ahead balkily while Hig snubbed it.

"I'm shy of good work stock," Fairman said, his forehead wrinkled with the thought of it. He rubbed the mosquitoes off the back of one hand. "Sore feet. The sand wears the hoofs down to nothing."

"Same with all of us. By and by the hoofs'll get tougher, they tell me. I been cleanin' 'em off and puttin' hot tar in the cracks."

Evans walked on. d.i.c.k Summers was throwing packs on a couple of horses, packs that held his little plunder and that of Brother Weatherby. Weatherby stood by, as always, looking as if he'd like to help if only he knew how. Evans spoke to them and got d.i.c.k's quiet grin and a solemn nod from Weatherby.

"Ready," d.i.c.k said, tying one horse to the pack saddle of the other. He took the lead rope. "Reckon they'd foller all right, but maybe I better tie on to your wagon again. Might scour off."

"I'll be along."

It seemed everybody was about ready, even the McBees, who couldn't ever seem to be on time. Until lately they couldn't, that was. "Mornin'." His idea was working all right, Evans thought, feeling again part proud and part guilty that it was. He hadn't been captain long until he called the men together one night, to find what was on their minds and to hear any grumbles and especially to cure the fault of late and ragged starting. He had told Mack his idea, and Mack had helped him, asking the men how about it: if a man was late he lost his place in line and had to bring up the rear? They had thought it was Mack's plan and had voted yes and now no one was late; but ,till Evans felt a little guilty. It struck him as somehow sneaky, this trick of rigging a meeting. It was better, though, than laying down the law on his own, better than cracking an ox whip.

McBee said, "How be you?" and Mrs. McBee stuck her head f rom the tail of the wagon and gave him a pleasant good morning. Three McBee boys were chasing each other. They circled around and stopped, looking at Evans from under hair that didn't know a comb. Evans didn't see Mercy around.

"What we waitin' fer?" McBee asked, set up over being ready. His whiskers moved to a smile.

Evans consulted his watch. "'Bout time." Looking between the wagons, he saw the horse herd, out for its quick morning graze, and the loose cattle that Brownie and the other drivers had brought close.

"Been meanin' to talk to you," McBee told him as if he had something important on his mind.

"About what?"

"I'll be seein' you. It's personal-like."

So it was personal. Evans didn't like the thought. "Any time."

He went over to his own wagons and hitched the teams and saw Rebecca to her perch and took out his watch again. It was time, lacking a minute or so. Summers sat a horse at the wagon that would break the circle. It was already pulled out a little, ready for the start. Mounted near Summers were Shields and Carpenter and Brewer, who would ride ahead today. Evans could see Tadlock standing alongside Summers, holding his silver trumpet. Evans had asked Tadlock if he wouldn't keep on sounding the horn, just as he did while captain. Out of a kind of sympathy he'd asked him, thinking maybe Tadlock prized the task. Besides, the trumpet was Tadlock's. Evans had to grin at himself, wondering which was the real reason. Anyhow, Tadlock had agreed, in that new and hard-eyed way of his.

Tadlock looked across at him, and Evans raised his arm, and the trumpet sounded. Teamsters spoke. Whips popped. Oxen pushed into the yokes. Axles whined. Dust puffed up. With commands and pops, with whines and dust the circle unwound. The On-to-Oregon train was rolling. Evans' place was near the tail of the line. Walking out a little from his team, he could see Summers and the hors.e.m.e.n and the wagons lurching along behind them, the distance from wagon to wagon growing as the train settled to the drive. They would be farther spread before the morning was over. It was a thing he must watch, he reminded himself. They could be too far spread for safety against Indians. Back of him the loose stock was ambling into line.

Indians could raise the devil if they wanted to, though he didn't look for them to do it, not since a bunch of mounted soldiers had pa.s.sed by. Dragoons, they called themselves, the First Dragoons, led by a Colonel Kearny, who said their purpose was to awe the Indians and to warn them they'd better leave the emigrants alone. Three hundred men or thereabouts were in the bunch, not to mention wagons drawn by mules and two wheeled cannons and butcher beef and sheep that came along behind. They were in a hurry, bound for Laramie and onward to the Southern Pa.s.s, where they'd turn back. Watching them press on, their blues and golds proud in the rising dust, Evans had felt easier in his captaincy.

Other things were right enough. People were in good spirit and in good health except for the diarrhea that Platte water or too much fresh meat brought on. They had got across the South Platte, double-yoking every wagon on the advice of Summers and stringing ropes between some and splashing through the quicksand fast. For a while they had followed along the north sh.o.r.e and then angled across and come to Ash Hollow and the North Fork. It was a good place to remember, Ash Hollow was. "There was shade there and cool-water springs and good gra.s.s, and the wagons had got down the hills that ringed it with no more damage than one tip-over.

So, in time, they had reached Courthouse Rock and the tower that stood close by and had camped on a creek there, and people had felt like celebrating, as if, coming to a known name, they could be sure they were on the right track. Or more as if they were nearing home and had caught sight of a thing to mark it by. The celebration was quiet, though. Weatherby had field services, and n.o.body had made light of him, thinking of Martin and the Turleys.

For a long time the Turleys had been in sight after the train pulled out. They had squatted there with their old wagon and their few head of stock, refusing to go with the company but still not starting the other way, as if quitting the bunch had taken all their get-up and now they would just wait for whatever. They had squatted, Turley and Mrs. Turley and their two thin children, watching out of stubborn eyes, saying thanks and no more for the sweetening and flour and bacon that Rebecca and Mrs. Mack and Mrs. Tadlock had left with them against the time that buffalo and antelope ran out. To watch them, to hear their noisy mouths now held to a bare word or two, a man would think that the company was treating them wrong. It wasn't so, but still no one felt quite easy. Like the others, Evans kept turning his head as the train went on, realizing as the distance grew how small the Turleys were a man and his woman and his young ones and a ramshackle outfit pressed on all sides by the great emptiness, or not pressed but loose and lost on the long flats, among the bald sand hills.

After what seemed a long time the Turleys had got moving, pulling a little tail of dust and shrinking with distance until at last distance swallowed them. Trying to spot them, Evans couldn't be sure but what he saw was just a fleck in the eye. He wasn't extra religious, but he felt better because Weatherby had prayed for them, begging G.o.d to keep the Indians off, and the storms and the accidents, and please, G.o.d, guard Thy sheep.

Just before, Weatherby had given Martin into G.o.d's keeping. Evans and Summers and Tadlock himself had dug the grave, dug it in silence while each man thought his own thoughts, and when it was ready they laid Martin by it, and Weatherby came and read out of the Book, taking Ephesians again. Not having a coffin or wood for one, they wrapped Martin in the blanket he laid on and lowered him and shoveled the sand in. Then d.i.c.k burned gunpowder over the grave and had them trail the stock across. That way, he said, wolves or Indians weren't likely to find the body. Neither, Evans figured, was anyone else, or anything. It was a lost grave as soon as left, and Martin's bones would lie in it till kingdom come, and buffalo would gallop over the spot and wolves trot across and wagon trains track it, and none would know that here lay what was left of a man -a dull-eyed man with bowed shoulders but with hankerings and troubles and rights of his own, who had set out for Oregon and got sick and cried out to Jesus and died.

Evans thought with a little turn about shaving Martin. Rebecca said he ought to do that. A man should go to his grave looking decent, she said. And so he had sc.r.a.ped off the wiry whiskers, and they had dressed Martin up in the best clothes he had, which weren't much, though Martin made a nice-enough looking corpse, considering.

The train had got under way then, Evans feeling low in his timid and small in his new place as captain, as if he couldn't come it, and d.i.c.k had ridden up and unforked his horse and walked along with him.

He was glad for d.i.c.k's friendship. He leaned on d.i.c.k. He was stronger inside because of him. Maybe that showed he wasn't fit for captain. Maybe a captain ought to be stout enough to stand alone, wanting no help from anyone except the help hat would be expected of any pilot, like advice on crossings and routes and watch-outs for Indians. Well, that wasn't how he was cut. Never, anywhere, had he wanted to be boss. So he would lean on d.i.c.k, and when hard questions came up he would call the council together. They would have solid ideas. But there would still be times, he realized uncomfortably, when he would have to act. A captain had to be more than a leaner and a caller of meetings. He had to give confidence to people, and encouragement. He had to see, one way or another, that the train kept together and kept going. He had to lead, no matter if he didn't want to, else the train would fail. He wished he had just his own family to watch out for.

Evans blew the dust out of his nose and brought a hand up and wiped his eyes. The valley was deeper here and narrower, and a traveler saw new kinds of plants, like the spiny clumps that Summers called Spanish bayonet and Weatherby said was Adam's needle. Flowers he didn't have a name for waved along the way, some coned and some daisied, colored purple and white and yellow. The women and children were forever picking posies if the day was fair. Here they would have to be careful. Rattlesnakes were getting thick. It would be just luck if someone didn't get bit. The thought troubled him. It added itself to his feeling of burden.

In a way it was as if all hands had entrusted their future to him, expecting him to have the sense and force to see them through. And some of them he hardly knew, except to pa.s.s a good morning! There was Fairman's man, Botter, and Mack's tiand, Moss, and Shields and Carpenter and Insko and Davisworth. They had voted for him, he reckoned, or anyhow not against him. He made a note to himself to get better acquainted. Because they were not forward men or easy met, he had let himself stand off. A captain ought to know his company down to the last pup.

He looked back and saw that Rebecca had climbed from the wagon and was walking alongside. He winked at her. She had thinned some on the road, but she didn't seem so worn as before or to get so tired and sore. He didn't know when he had seen more life in her face.

He cleaned his nose again, holding one nostril closed with his finger and then the other. He figured he would arrive in Oregon with some of the Platte sand on him. Sandy water didn't wash off sand.

Anyhow the wind wasn't pushing at them today. The dust puffed straight up and powdered him and settled back slow, so that, turning again, he saw the hanging trail of it far beyond the cattle. The sun rode friendly, just warm enough for comfort. A few white clouds had come into the sky. The mosquitoes had thinned out, likely resting for the night siege.

The Tadlock wagons rolled ahead of him, Tadlock walking by the side, still wearing the many-pocketed coat he had put on in the chill of early morning. He walked straight and square, with his head up. Tadlock had taken his upset fairly well, Evans said to himself, feeling easier at the thought. He had stuck mostly to himself, not marching around with his eye out for fault, but he stood his turn at guard and spoke civil enough, though spare-worded and unsmiling; and he had made a deal with Brewer, now that Martin was dead, for Brewer's twelve-year-old to help with the stock and spell Mrs. Tadlock at his second wagon.

Evans hawed his team, following the swing-out of the line. The wagons creaked and jolted and in some places ground in the sand. Now and then he could hear the rattle of a loose tire that Hig, the handyman, would have to fix. He had a system better than driving wedges between tire and felloe. He took the tire off and shaved a thin hoop and tacked it to the felloe and heated the tire and put it back on. Made something extra doing it, too, though he would rather play his fiddle for a reel.

At Laramie there would be a bellows and other tools, probably, and they could cut and weld the tires and fit them snug. But til then Hig's system was all right. They would buy supplies at Laramie, too, if they could, stuff like flour and smoked buffalo tongues. And some were talking about buying oxen or trading their sore-footed ones. How far to Laramie? How far did d.i.c.k say from Chimney Rock? Sixty miles or so? With good going they would be there in four days, five anyhow. Ahead and to the left the hills were beginning to run high and ragged, leading, Evans supposed, to Scott's Bluffs. Closer at hand he saw A half dozen wild horses gazing down from the ridge, their heads held high. While Evans watched, McBee came riding up from the cow column, his whiskers gray with dust. He spit and smiled. "Critters are gettin' along all right. I'll keep my eye back."

It was the report, Evans understood, of a man to his captain, the report unasked and needless, said to show the sayer knew the due of leadership. He didn't like it or the manner of its saying.

McBee got off his horse and walked along with Evans. "'Y G.o.d, she's a fair day."

"Good enough for anyone." Without thinking why until afterwards, Evans turned and saw old Rock following at his heels. He wondered then if the only reason he didn't take to McBee was that McBee had wanted to kill his dog. No, he decided. He wouldn't go for McBee regardless. He was dirty and shiftless, and there was nothing to him anyhow. Not to him or his wife, either -and how they got a pretty thing like Mercy beat him. He had to admit she was not only pretty but seemed to be a good-enough girl. She couldn't be much underneath, though, not with that breeding. Give her a few years and a few young ones and she'd be just like Ma and Pa, he guessed, and then brought himself up. He reckoned the Lord had the right to visit the sins of the father -but not Lije Evans. He owed her a chance, just as a man owed anyone a chance, but still he was relieved that Brownie wasn't following after her.

"I said to my woman today, 'y G.o.d, we're a-goin' to make it. Fer a time I didn't know, fer a fact."

Evans tried to imagine what McBee's face was like under the mat of whiskers. Slack-jawed, probably, and loose-lipped. Weak. And yet there was something tough about him, as there was often about ornery people, something that kept him going, something tougher than the stuff of Turleys.

"Yes, sir, we're a-goin' to make it." McBee grinned, showing teeth broken and dirty beyond believing, and bobbed his head.

Watching him, hearing him, Evans knew. This was it, plain in the words, the smiles, the bobs of the head. McBee meant them to be admiring. McBee was courting the captain. He was honey-fuggling, wanting the importance of the shadow of importance. He would have something especial to say; he would have something to bring up-but this was it.

"We always were going to make it," Evans said.

"That is as may be. Anyhow, we are now."

Evans didn't give him an answer. He knew what he ought to do. He ought to tell McBee to go to h.e.l.l; but it was a hard thing. Somehow a man balked at slapping the compliment out of another's mouth. Not that it was the compliment, either. Compliments didn't fool him. He just hated to speak blunt to friendliness, even if the friendliness was only a show.

McBee said, "I been meanin' to tell you, I don't hold no hard feelin's. About the dog and all. Nary one."

"All right. None here, either. Over that."

"Like my woman was sayin' today, you was bound to work up to captain."

"I didn't work for it."

"Course not."

Evans turned on him then and spoke with more than the needed stress because he disliked what he had to say. "McBee, you better stick with Tadlock."

McBee's loose mouth closed. Deep in his puddled brown eyes Evans saw the sudden, skulky glint of hatred. "Oh, sure. I aim to do that." He walked along in silence for a while, leading his horse, and then said, "Reckon I better be gettin' back." He climbed the horse and rode away.

Evans watched him and then shortened his gaze, seeing Rebecca smiling the twisted smile of knowing and old Rock padding between them.

Now, more than ever, he told himself, he would have to watch the man, not for any open act but for some sly and miserable trick. He would ask Brownie to keep close watch on their stock, as he would himself. It was hard to believe anyone was underhanded, though, until the proof came out.

Chapter Fourteen.

FROM THE SLOPE to the southeast the forts shone white in afternoon sun except where the long shadows of the trees fell across. Spotted on the bottom were the tepees that the Sioux had pitched, looking white, too, or tan, depending on their age. There was movement below, men and women coming and going, children dodging among the lodges, the thin Indian dogs limping, nosing low for sc.r.a.ps, and, farther out, the horses beginning to graze as the afternoon cooled.

Summers sat his horse and watched, thinking how things had changed. This country was young, like himself, when he saw it first, young and wild like himself, without the thought of age. There wasn't a post on it then, nor any tame squaw begging calico, but only buffalo and beaver and the long gra.s.s waving in the Laramie bottoms. The wind had blown lonesome, the sound of emptiness in it, the breath of far-off places where no white foot had stepped. A man snuggling in his robe had felt alone and strong and good, telling himself he would see where the wind came from.

Now there wasn't a buffalo within fifty miles or beaver either -the few that were left of them- and the wind brought words and the hammer of hammers and the bray of mules and the smells of living under roof. The far post near the neck of the Laramie and the Platte would be Fort Platte, built after Summers had left the mountains; the near one Fort Laramie, or William, as some had called it, but even it had changed. Change coming on change, he thought. He remembered it from 'thirtysix -or was it 'thirty-seven?- when it was a cottonwood post like any other. Now it was 'dobe and white and spiked at the top like a castle might be, and the trade was in buffalo skins that a true mountain man wouldn't mess with.

Beyond, the Black Hills climbed away, dark with their scrub cedar and pine, with Laramie Peak rising oversized among iliem. Farther on, out of sight, there were the Red b.u.t.tes and the Sweet.w.a.ter and the Southern Pa.s.s and the Green, where he had spent his young years like a trapper spent his beaver, thinking there was always more where that came from. On the near side of the pa.s.s, to the north, the Popo Agie. The Popo Agie. He formed the words with his lips, remembering how a Crow girl had got the sound of running water in them. Ashia, the Crow word for stream. Popo Ashia. The liquid sound, the girl warm at his side and both of them fulfilled for the time and easy, and she laughing while he practiced the tongue. Even her name was lost to him now, and she was dead or old, one, and the laughter gone from her, and did she remember at all the Long Knife who had bedded with her? He couldn't bring her face back. What he remembered was the warmness and swell of her and the young-skinned thighs. They went along with the Popo Agie, with water running white and blue and the green trees rising and the Wind Mountains higher still and the rich lift from the dam that never had seen a trap before.

He ought to be getting back to the train, but he stayed a minute longer while memory wakened to things seen. Laramie. It was the gate to the mountains once and before that a part of the mountains themselves, and a man traveling had to keep his eye out and his hand ready, watching the way of his horse for Indian sign, watching the way of buffalo while he hung to his Hawken rifle. There was danger still, from p.a.w.nees and Sioux and maybe Blackfeet farther on, but it struck him as different, different, as somehow piddling. A cornfield, even like the sorry patch by the fort, didn't belong with war whoops and scalping knives. It belonged with cabins and women and children playing safe in the sun. It belonged with the dull pleasures, with the fat belly and the dim eye of safety.

He hadn't let himself think, back there in Missouri, how much of the old mountains there was still in him. He had butchered hogs and tended crops and d.i.c.kered for oxen or mules and laid down at night by Mattie, shutting out the thought of beaver streams and canyons opening sweet to the eye and squaws who had comforted him and gone on, joining with the lost and wanted things. Popo Ashia, like running water.

He was a mountain man underneath, and always would be, even if he went to plowing and hoeing and slopping hogs again -and there was no place in the world these days for a mountain man, and less and less of it all the time. A few years more and a man fool enough to trap like as not would stumble on to a picnic. The buffalo were thinning, for all that greenhorns said that three calves were dropped for every cow killed. In not so long a time now people in the mountains would be living on hog meat, unknowing the flavor and strength of fleece fat and hump ribs. Unknowing, either, how keen an enemy the Rees and the Blackfeet were. He almost wished for the old Rees, for the old Blackfeet that the white man's pox had undone. They had given spirit to life; every day lived was a day won.

Well, he had set out, hunting old things remembered as new, and he would go on hunting, finding a kind of pleasure in awakening memory, feeling the heart turn at the proof in mountain or park or river that, sure enough, once he had played here, once he had set traps and counted beaver and spreed at rendezvous and seen the wild moon rise. At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger -were they just names for his young time?

Summers shook himself. Christ, a man could moon his life away! Better to make the most of what was left. There wasn't anything in feeling sorry for yourself.

He reined around and rode back to the train.

Rebecca Evans said, "I can't hardly wait to get to the fort." She had stepped ahead, so as to walk beside Lije, letting the single yoke of oxen hitched to her wagon follow by itself.

"That much farther along," Lije said as if he knew what she meant. "Be there pretty soon."

"How long will we be stayin'?"

"No longer'n need be. Day and a half. Maybe two days. We got to get on."

"Ain't Laramie halfway, Lije?"

"Now, Becky, hopin' it's so won't make it so."

"How far?"

"d.i.c.k says somep'n over six hundred mile."

"And from there on?"

"Maybe thirteen hundred."

"An' it's the worst?"

He didn't answer to that but walked along pulling on a dead pipe, his face cheery, watching the wagons ahead and now and then looking back, making sure all was right. They had slanted out a piece from the river, to upland where the gra.s.s ran crisp tinder the wagon tires. With the thought of Laramie in their heads the teamsters were popping their whips or punching the oxen with sticks. The oxen didn't pay much notice. A sorefooted or worn-out ox never did.

"We might have to stay longer, the way the critters limp," Rebecca said, but Lije just got a bite on his pipe and shook his head.

She sighed inside, thinking it would be good to stay at the fort the rest of her life and so be done with dirt and hard travel ;itrd eyes teary with camp smoke and the back sore from stooping over a fire and the legs cramped from sitting on the ground. There she wouldn't have the grainy feel of sand forever in her shoes.

"We're comin' along fine."

"Yes," she said. "Fine." Men were queer, she thought. Even Lije was queer, taking such a real and simple pleasure in the work of his muscles and the roll of wheels. The more miles they made the better-spirited he was, as if there wasn't any aim in life but to leave tracks, no time in it but for go. He didn't mind eating mush with blown sand in it.

She knew they had to get to Oregon all right. She knew they had to travel, but she couldn't be so all-fired pleased, come night, that they were far gone from the morning. At night she felt tired and a little sad with tiredness and didn't like to think about tomorrow; and she got to wondering then if Oregon was what it was cracked up to be.

Lije liked the sun and even the wind and walked through the dust as if he had put it out of his mind, since he couldn't still it. She found the sun cruel sometimes, lonely-cruel for allits brightness, and the wind sad-rough, and she hated the grind of sand between shoe and foot.

"There's d.i.c.k."

Ahead she saw Summers in his buckskins, waving the train on. She had to squint to see him, for the sun shone straight in her face unless she kept it tucked down under the shade of her poke bonnet. Her face, she knew, was a sight, reddened by the sun and coa.r.s.ened by the wind until it was more man's face than woman's. For all that G.o.d had made her big and stout and not dainty, she wanted to feel womanlike, to be clean and smooth-skinned and sometimes nice-dressed, not for Lije alone but for herself, for herself as a woman, so's to feel she was a rightful being and had a rightful place. She thought ahead to the fort, to clear, hot water and time to wash up and maybe to ease the long ache of her bones; and she thought backwards, too, to Missouri and the old springhouse and the fresh coolness of it and the milk creaming there in its pans. She thought of oak shade and trees fruiting and cupboards for dishes and victuals and chests for clothes and cookies baking and the smell of them following her around as the smell of camp smoke followed her now. She had had a home in Missouri, a place that stayed fixed, and, looking out door or window, she had known what she would see. She had been cozy there, seeing the hills and trees close and the sky bent down. And when she was tired, she had had a place to rest.

It was the time of the month, she knew, for she had been doing better lately in body and mind both, but now she felt she couldn't go on. Lije or no Lije, Brownie or no Brownie; she couldn't go beyond Laramie. She wanted to slack down right here on the prairie and let the train roll on while the wind blew and the sun burned and the dog-tiredness eased away and the disquiet died and dust went back to dust.

She stood still, not wanting Lije to catch sight of her face, and watched him push ahead while her own team came up. She fell into step alongside, saying to herself Lije was so gone on to Oregon he wouldn't think there was anything in her mind but to see to her wagon.

She bent her head from the sun, watching one foot step out and then the other and wondering that they did so, the way it was with her. Rock trotted up from somewhere and brushed her side and slowed and gazed into her face as if he could scent the trouble inside her. While she patted Rock, she head Summers' voice. Summers had ridden up and turned about and was riding half around in the saddle while he talked to Lije. "Laramie Fork ain't so high. We can ford, I'm thinking."

"Good."

"Best camp is west of the fort, on the bank."