The Way West Part 24

"I said drop it!" Evans took a step and then another and shoved at Daugherty when he tried to come between. "Rest of you ain't really in this, 'less you're bound to be. This is between me and Tadlock, and long a-comin'."

Tadlock threw the rope aside and squared away.

Evans never had hit a man before. Never in his grown life had he struck out. Now, seeing Tadlock's hands lift and rage darken his square face, it was as if it wasn't him that swung but someone kin to him and far off in his feelings.

The swing missed and left him open, and Tadlock struck twice, the short and heavy blows of one who knew the use of fists. Evans swung and missed again and felt the double hammer of the practiced hands.

The blows shook him. They jarred his brain and struck lights in his skull and dizzied his aim and step, and he knew he fought clumsily, flaying out at air while his feet staggered under him. His strength was no good to him. The slow strength that could lift an end of log that two men couldn't hold was no good; it worked wild and awkward, leaving face and belly open for the stunning fists.

A lick landed high on his cheek and nearly knocked him over, and when he found his balance he stood rattled and let Tadlock work on his face before he could think to go after him again. He heard cries like little echoes around him and in the wheel of sight saw the men ringed about and the Indian watching, his hands rope-held behind him, and, farther out, the women pushing up and Becky at the front of them.

Blow and blow and lick on lick, and the brain stunned and the eye dimmed and his fists forever off the mark, and in his mouth the salty leak of blood. He was strong and he was right and he was beaten. But bore in! Bore in and swing and meet the swings and stand as long as could be! Stand for Becky! Stand for Brownie! Stand for what he knew was right!

He was standing yet. He could stand some more. It came to him as Tadlock's fists battered at mouth and jaw that he could stand a long time. He could stand forever. There wasn't power enough in Tadlock's arms to lay him out, or wind enough in his belly. Here was Tadlock backing off, mouth working like a landed fish's, blood in his unbruised face and sweat on it, and in his eyes the peaked owning-up of doubt.

The wild fist found its mark, and Tadlock spun half around and tried to get an elbow up before the next lick hit. He lunged for footing and set himself and got his two blows in and staggered at the answer to them. With all his power Evans swung at the boned line of his jaw.

Tadlock didn't falter and then melt. He slammed backwards all at once, head and shoulders and b.u.t.t and heels, and moved a little and lay quiet with blank, half-opened eyes.

Evans pulled in a breath and looked around the circle, at Brewer and Holdridge and Daugherty and the rest, and then he walked to the Indian and untied him.

He didn't see the Indian slide into the brush, for Rebecca tugged at his arm as the rope came loose.

"Come on, Lije."

"What?"

"Your face is a sight."

"That don't matter."

"I'll doctor it. Come on."

He stood uncertain while the world steadied around him, the trees getting fixed again by the river, and the people singling themselves out, and Rebecca's face not just a blur but a face with eyes that held pride and pleading both. He saw Mrs. Tadlock was bending over her man, and Weatherby bending with her, and the men watching out of questioning and guarded faces. Nellie grazed beyond them, grown used to the elk across her back.

Rage died in him, and the pride of rage that had made him glare his dare at the men, and he said, "We best see to Tadlock first. I didn't aim to hurt him bad."

Afterwards he felt cast down but somehow wholer than he had been. It wasn't fun to beat a strong man down. It left a wound upon the winner deeper than blackened eyes and broken lips. But still he had had to take his choice, and he had taken it and stood by it, and the taking and the standing made him a wholer man.

When d.i.c.k came into camp, he said, with the quiet grin in his gray eyes, "I hear you done the needful, Lije." But Evans didn't have to have d.i.c.k's words to feel solid in the right.

Chapter Twenty-Two.

WHILE THE CHILDREN shouted around her, Mercy McBee dipped up a cup of bubbling water and stirred a spoon of sugar in it and handed it to Tom Byrd. His young, soft lips sucking at the rim of the cup reminded her of a catfish's mouth.

"I'm next," Dolly Brewer was yelling above the rest. "I'm next, ain't I, Mercy?"

"You aren't. I am. I am."

"I said fourth."

"Didn't, either."

"Did so."

"Hurry up, Tom."

They were all crying at her and at one another, crying and pushing and shoving up, the Byrds' children and the Brewers' and the Daughertys' and Harry Gorham and her own brothers and sisters, each of them wanting next on the soda water that boiled out of a low, white mound. Stirred with the sugar that Mrs. Tadlock and Mrs. Mack had given, it made a sweet and fizzy drink.

"Land's sake!" Mercy said. "Just wait now. You'll all get some." She cupped it up without letting herself think about the taste of it, for the thought troubled her stomach as the smell of frying bacon did or of onion-seasoned stews. "I'm goin' from the littlest to the biggest. That's fair."

They quieted for a minute, and she heard again the regular sh-h-h of another spring, closer to the river, that surged in its closing of rock, making a sound like one of the steamboats she had seen on the Ohio. All night she had listened to it, the puff of it like a hard-blown breath above the murmur of the river and the voice of the wind in the trees. "Sh-h-h," it said and breathed in. "Sh-h-h," as if it knew.

"Here, Dolly."

The train was camped out a piece from the river and the spring she dipped the water from. She could see the women stirring around it, poking fires and readying Dutch ovens for the bread dough they had mixed, using water from the springs in place of yeast or saleratus. This country was all springs. It was all a kind of giving birth, the water pushing up and out of the sodaed lips that held it.

"All right, Billy."

"And then I'm next."

"I'm after you."

The men were hunting, or fishing upriver, or watching the stock across the Bear, where the graze was better. Only Brownie Evans was in sight, wandering among the tents and wagons as if lost for company.

"Now me. Now me, Mercy!"

She was glad for the children, glad for their shouts and shovings. They kept the mind filled and the hand busy. She said, "I'm all right," when Mrs. Brewer came from camp, waddling with the child she carried underneath her ap.r.o.n.

"Nah," Mrs. Brewer answered. "Too much time you couldn't giff. Not good, it is not. De mudders take de young vones now."

"Wait till the sugar's used up."

Mrs. Brewer stood solid and silent, a mild cow of a woman with the little calf lumped in her, not wanting to sit, Mercy guessed, because of the work of getting up. She marched the children back to camp when the last grain of sugar was gone.

Mercy watched them traipse away and listened to the young voices complain. She sat dangling the cup from a finger, thinking as the voices faded that the earth might be coming to an end, and this here, this now, was the last of it, the river flowing into nothing, the sun going forever home, the high hills darkening, the spouting water saying its last, "Sh-h-h. Sh-h-h." The sh-h-h that others would be saying if the world went on. Sh-h-hl Mercy McBee! Do tell! It could be the end and she wouldn't care. The end was rest and peace in the mind and nothing mattering any more.

She bowed her head with the sick weight of thought in it, telling herself maybe it wasn't so. It didn't have to be so. It could be it wasn't. A body couldn't tell for sure so soon. Later she would look back and think how foolish was her misery, and she would laugh then because her fear was a child's fear and there was no cause for it. She tried to put herself forward in that time, tried to gaze back on herself, sitting here with shame and sadness, and it was as if she was two persons, the cheerful one ahead and the fearful one by the spring. Why, she had studied herself a dozen times, when the brush offered a place or the tent was empty. She had looked and she had felt, and there wasn't anything wrong. She was flat and slim as ever. There couldn't be anything wrong. For a minute she felt the spurt of comfort and of courage. Things would turn out right. No need to cross a bridge before you got to it. Plenty of bridges never came to be except in the mind that built them. Then her stomach turned with sickness.

The cup trembled from her finger, and she set it down and locked her hands in her lap, trying to catch hold of fear, trying to bring it in from hands and legs and head and lay it deep inside the chest. Ma would throw up her hands and take on terrible, crying, "I tolt you to stay clear of men, didn't I? But, no, you knowed better, and this is what comes of it and serves you right. 'Fore G.o.d, I don't know what got into you." What Pa would do or say she didn't know, but it would be like him to go to Mr. Mack and brave around and settle happy for a horse or ox, as if that was the price of her.

While she pulled fear in, she understood it was Aunt Bess who'd made her look on Pa for what he was -a windy man and no-account, "slack-twisted" in Aunt Bess's words, though she never out and gave that name to him. Aunt Bess had kept her when things went extra hard, which generally they did, and by voice and manner had made her eyes to see, so that, when she went back home, she saw the dirt and ugliness of it and Ma dragged out and shriller as the days went by.

If she could talk to Mr. Mack! If she could put her head on his chest and cry to him how it wasl But he hadn't made a way to see her again, not but just one time after Laramie, which seemed so long ago it was something on the edge of dreams and she wouldn't think that it was real except that her stomach churned and her time was past. But still he was with her. Still she took him to bed at night and got up with him in the morning and traveled with him by day, her hands pushing back the black lock of his hair and smoothing the trouble from his face. And it wasn't body-hunger for him and never had been much, but just the wanting to find strength and kindness in him and to give them back. She watched for him in camp and along the trail, watched for the frowned face and the quick way of him, acting as if she wasn't watching. Sometimes when their eyes met, he would smile or say h.e.l.lo, and she wondered, seeing him so common, did he remember? Did he hold the secret and was it dear? Did he cry for her inside?

Her stomach queased again, bringing her to now, bringing her to this, and a prayer spoke in her. 0 G.o.d, let it not be so. I pray, help me, G.o.d, and forgive my trespa.s.ses and make it so I can talk to Mr. Mack. Please, G.o.d, make it not so, I pray Thee.

A voice spoke, Brownie's voice, saying, "How-de-do, Mercy. Why, you're cryin'."

She brushed at her eyes and went to get up and was suddenly so dizzy she had to let herself sink back. "It's this fizz water brings tears to my eyes. It's this fizz water I been drinkin'."

"Oh!" he said. She saw just the blurred feet of him, shuffling as if not knowing what to do. "Mind if I set?"

"I was fixin' to go."

"I wisht you wouldn't."

"You could set, though."

He sprawled on the ground. "I want someone to talk to."

"There's others besides me," she said. She had laid fear back. She had brought it in and laid it back, and it was just a heaviness in her, weighing on the heart.

"Better to talk to you than, some I could name," he said. "Nice place, ain't it? Been to Beer Springs?"

"No."

"Pa says it tastes like old beer, with the life gone out of it."

"I wouldn't know."

"I tried it oncet. Made my stummick turn."

When she didn't speak, he asked, "Whyn't you and me take a walk down that way?"

"There's work to do."

"It'll get itself done."

With fear closed in, her eyes had dried, and she let them lift and see his face. It was an honest face, with sandy hair and freckles like stains underneath his tan and a gaze that wouldn't see inside her.

"Wisht you'd walk."

"And just let work go?" She tried to make her tone light. "That'ud be a putty thing."

"You're the purty thing." The words came out of him like a blurt out of one of the springs, as if they had been building up and wouldn't be held and so spilled out of his mouth in spite of him. The blood rising in his face drowned tan and freckles both.

Before she thought, she said, "Purty is as purty does."

"Purty does all right, I bet."

"You don't know nothin' about me, Brownie."

"Reckon I do. You willin' to walk?"

His eyes, she thought, were a little like those of the old dog, Rock, that had trotted up and sat by him and watched her with a round, slow-winking stare. Before the open begging in them she said, "Can't stay long."

He didn't give her a hand up, as Mr. Mack would have, but stood awkward and unsure while she got to her feet, but of a sudden she felt close to him and somehow in his debt, for here, in her aloneness, was a one that prized her. Would he prize her no matter what, she asked herself while she waited for the dizziness to die in her. Would he if he knew?

They walked downriver, beyond the camp, beyond the steamboat's breathing sh-h-h, and came to Beer Springs, and he tried the taste of it, and they sat down afterwards behind a white cone where water had stopped flowing. The crust that the springs had made showed whiter against a sun that was sinking toward the hills.

"You ever think what you'll do after vou get to Oregon?" he asked.

"Just keep on helpin' Ma."

"I mean after that."

"Not so much."

"I think a heap of things. I aim to work hard and get along and own a nice farm and have time to hunt and fish."

He leaned back and put the heels of his hands at his sides to brace himself. "A heap of things. Like about you, f'rinstance."

"I ain't much to think about, Brownie," She was sorry afterwards for what she'd said, for the words were teasing words though honest-spoken.

He answered, "You are so. If I could just tell you She wouldn't lead him on. She wouldn't help his tongue to tell. She didn't want him, and, even if she did, she had no right. She had no right -and fear marched in her again. She had held it in, underneath thought, and it had risen, heavy and terrible, and she wanted to run wild into the hiding wildness or to cry out and fall weeping and give herself to earth.

"I'm nigh eighteen, Mercy."

"I best go."

"Pa got hisself married younger'n me."

She kept silent, drawing fear in, putting it quiet in its secret place.

"I reckon you know what I'm set to say."

Now that the thing was out, he turned to her, and face and eyes and all of him were honest and humble with his wanting. "If'n I could just feel you felt the same as I do, there wouldn't nothin' hamper me, in Oregon or wherever."

She ought to say no to him, no, Brownie, don't talk that way, but the face was too much for her, and tears washed in her eyes. "I ain't ready to think about it, Brownie. I can't think about it. I do' know as I feel the same, but I thank you all the same."

She couldn't keep from crying. The crying started deep in her and wrenched up and broke out, and she put her hands to her face and felt his arm go across her shoulder.

"Why, it's naught to take on over, Mercy. Don't have to cry on account of I want to marry you." The hand lay gentle on her back. He held quiet, as if he knew she had to cry though the why of it was lost to him.

She wiped her eyes later, leaning over so as to use the hem of her dress. "I didn't mean to act the fool."

"You couldn't act the fool to me, Mercy." His hand came under her chin and lifted her head and turned it to him. There was concern in his face, and questions and kindness, and of a sudden he bent and kissed her cheek, kissed the kiss not of hunger but of care and good-wishing. "You allus look so sad," he said, dropping his hand and drawing his arm from across her back. "Wisht I could make it so you didn't. I'd do anything."

"You're good, Brownie," she said. "Whatever happens, I know you're good."

She got up because she couldn't talk without more tears, and they went back, saying little, and neared camp, and he said, "I hope this ain't the last time I'll get to walk with you?"