Janet Quin-Harkin (12 page)

Then, on the eighth day of prairie, when they were not far from Fort Kearny, their first point of reference on an almost blank map, they came upon a group of about twenty ragged men, a couple of ox wagons, and a few tired mules heading back to Independence.

“If you’ve got sickness, keep well away,” Sheldon Rival shouted as they jostled for space on the narrow track.

“Sickness will be the least of your worries,” one of the men called back. “When your head and your shoulders are separated, you’ll not have to worry about cholera or anything else.”

“What are you talking about?” Jimmy demanded, riding up to meet them.

“Haven’t you heard? The Pawnee are on the rise. They’ve slaughtered a great group of seventy emigrants and they say they’re thirsting for more blood.”

“Who says?” Jimmy asked, unmoved.

“Out past Fort Kearny. It’s common knowledge out there. We decided to come back rather than risk it. We’re not going to be cut up by savages.”

“A bunch of cowards,” Rival sneered. “Let them go home. All the more gold for the rest of us.”

“You’ll decide who is a coward when you feel your scalp being peeled off,” the man said.

“I’d like to see the savage that dares to attack me,” Sheldon Rival said. “Do you know how much ammunition I carry? How many guards I’ve employed? Let the Pawnee prey on weaklings if they want to. We’re pressing on.”

The man shrugged his shoulders expressively, then cracked his whip for the oxen to move on. Libby looked longingly after them. They had represented a way back to sanity and she had not taken it. Now, it seemed, she had Indians to worry about, as well as all the other disasters waiting to happen. Jimmy was still talking to Rival and it appeared from their faces that neither was concerned.

“Do you think there’s any truth in what they say?” Rival asked.

Jimmy pushed his hat back on his head. “These rumors go up and down the trail all the time,” he said. “I don’t think there’s been a large-scale Indian attack since so many people took to the trail. They might have picked off a lone wagon, but there’s safety in numbers, isn’t there?”

Libby walked on, hoping their confidence wasn’t misplaced. She wondered how many braves there were in the Pawnee nation and what would happen if they went on an organized warpath. Now as she walked, she kept her eyes open for dust clouds rising in the distance. She did notice, however, that Sheldon Rival posted guards that night for the first time.

Until that point the prairie had been singularly empty of wildlife. With so many travellers, any misguided grouse or pigeon that came near the trail wound up instantly in a cooking pot. Every day the men had been on the lookout for buffalo, full of exaggerated tales of moving carpets of animals where any shot would be guaranteed to bring down a beast. They were beginning to resent the monotony and ready for any form of excitement when there was a cry in the distance of “Buffalo! Hundreds of ‘em!”

Without waiting they grabbed at rifles, mounted every horse and mule, and were off into the grass, leaving Libby and the children coughing in the cloud of dust they made. It was only as they disappeared that Libby realized that the men who had gone were the guards and the wagon train was now completely unprotected. She looked around nervously, then told herself that it was broad daylight and that there must be enough men left behind who could get to rifles.

Eden and Bliss were playing at tea parties with leaves and pebbles in the shade of the wagon, so she took the opportunity to collect her buffalo chips for the evening meal. She stayed close to the trail, her ears straining for any sounds of a buffalo hunt. She could hear very distant cries but they seemed to be receding. She bent to fill her sack and when she straightened up, she found herself looking into the faces of three Indians.

All of the stories she had ever heard, whispered around the drawing rooms of Boston or printed in the cheaper newspapers, came rushing back to her. Indians carried off white women and took them as wives. Would that be preferable to being killed instantly? Would it be preferable to being scalped and dying slowly? She tried to remain outwardly very calm and not run. The three braves, for their part, did not appear about to make any hostile move, but they had appeared from the grass so miraculously and silently that she could not predict what they were about to do next. She nodded to them and hoped that they would pass her by. But instead they came toward her, talking to each other in deep, guttural voices and, to her horror, one of them reached out to touch her head, saying something as he did so. Libby’s heart was beating so furiously that she was sure it must be sounding out across the plains like a drum. She wondered what would happen if she screamed. Would any help come or would it make the Indians panic and kill her quickly, or, worse still, carry her off?

Then she was aware of someone at her side. Gabe Foster came up and Libby was glad to see that a brace of pistols was shining at his belt. Instead of grabbing her and running or gunning down the Indians, he walked over to them and began conversing with many gestures. One of the Indians again pointed to Libby’s head. Gabe nodded. Libby felt as if she was about to explode with tension.

“Would you get me out of here?” she snapped to Gabe.

“In a minute, what’s the rush?” Gabe answered. “I’ve never met real live Pawnee before.”

“So you’re going to wait around and watch me get scalped?” she demanded.

“What gave you that idea?” he asked.

“They keep pointing to my head.”

“That’s because they like the tortoise shell comb you’re wearing. They’ve come to trade.”

“Oh,” Libby said, feeling rather foolish.

One of the Indians grunted again, pointing at Libby. Gabe listened, then laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Libby demanded.

“He asked if you were my squaw and says that you make much noise.”

“Most amusing,” Libby said. “So how come you speak their language if you’ve never met a Pawnee before?” she asked, hating to be shown up to Gabe in a bad light once more.

“Oh it’s simple, if you’ve got the gift,” Gabe said, turning back to her with a superior expression on his face. “When they say ‘we make trade,’ I guess that they’ve come here to trade.”

“I’m going back to camp, please excuse me to your friends,” Libby said icily.

“Wait, don’t you want to see what they’ve got to trade?” Gabe asked.

Libby pulled the comb from her hair, causing it to cascade over her shoulders. “Here,” she said, tossing the comb to him. “You trade if you want to. I’m getting back to camp.”

Shortly afterward, Gabe returned with two beautiful wolf pelts. “Here,” he said, flinging them down onto the ground. “They’ll help keep you warm when we pass through the mountains.”

“You got those for one comb?”

“I got three,” Gabe said with a grin. “I kept one for myself as commission.” He started to leave. “You’ll be pleased to hear that the chief of those braves now has your comb stuck in his oily locks,” he said. “I thought it suited you better.”

He laughed as Libby gave him a cold stare.

She headed for her own wagon. “Look what Mama’s got, girls,” she called. Eden crawled out from under the wagon.

“Where’s sissy?” Libby asked. “Did she get too hot?”

“She went to you, Mama,” Eden said. “She wanted to help you.”

“But I didn’t see her.” Libby had visions of Indians, slipping away with Bliss under one arm. “Bliss!” she yelled. “Baby! Where are you?”

She stared helplessly at the sea of grass, realizing for the first time that it was taller than a small child. Bliss could walk in and be lost, a few feet from the path. In panic she ran up and down, then sprinted after Gabe. “Gabe, you’ve got to help me,” she begged, grabbing at his arm. “Bliss has gone. Do you think those Indians could have taken her?”

Gabe ran for his horse. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said. “You search close to the track and keep on calling. Maybe she’s just lost her sense of direction.”

He spurred his horse into a lope, moving through the grass as if he were wading. Libby tried to make herself search in an orderly fashion, walking through the grass calling, “Bliss? Where are you?” every few steps. She could feel her dress sticking to her back as she ran on. Then she heard Gabe’s shout. He came riding toward her with a little white bundle sitting in front of him.

“Look, Mama, I found pretty flowers,” Bliss said, holding out a crushed sunflower in her little hand.

“You’re a bad girl to go away from sissy,” Libby said, taking her from the saddle and holding her close.

“Don’t, you’re squashing my flower,” Bliss said, wriggling to get free.

“You must promise Mama you’ll never leave the wagon again without me,” Libby said. “Mama was very, very worried.”

“Sorry, Mama, I promise. Now can I go show sissy my flower?” Bliss asked.

Libby put her hand on Gabe’s boot. “Thank you so much,” she said. “It seems that I’m forever to be in your debt.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gabe answered. “You forgot yourself enough to call me by my first name. I can see we’re progressing in the right direction.”

“You are so infuriating!” Libby snapped, leaving Gabe laughing.

She had hardly calmed down after her double frights when she felt the earth beneath her feet vibrating. A cloud of dust was heading toward the wagons. Her first reaction was that the Indians had gone back to tell their people that the wagon train was unprotected and had come to attack. She yelled to Eden and Bliss to climb up into the wagon, then rushed to grab a rifle that was under the nearest seat and stood at the ready. But instead of Indians, the dust cloud revealed a brown, moving mass and a herd of buffalo thundered toward the wagons, heads down and packed close in flight. The size and power of the huge beasts was so overwhelming that Libby forgot to be terrified. They came closer and closer to the wagons, then, when it seemed they must crash through the line, they swerved at the last minute. A shot rang out, and Libby noticed that there were men riding alongside. Beside the large beasts they looked puny, like hounds around a stag. More shots rang and one huge bull swerved away from the herd, cutting through between the wagons with the men after him, whooping crazily like Indians. They came up on either side, shooting as the bull swerved and faltered. Finally, he dropped to the ground while the men rode around in circles, screaming wildly and firing in the air.

Libby was both excited and sickened by what she had seen. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for the bull who had been so majestic and had been taken so unfairly in a hail of bullets. At least when Indians hunted with arrows it was a fairer contest, she thought. The men, however, were delighted, slapping each other on the back, each claiming their bullet had felled the buffalo and their bravery had stopped the herd from breaking away and being lost. In the midst of the chaos Sheldon Rival strolled up.

“You know how to cut up a buffalo?” he asked Libby.

“I’ll do it if you show me the way,” she countered.

“Just make sure I get the best steak for my dinner,” he said, moving past her to kick at the carcass with one polished boot.

In her diary that night Libby wrote:
June 21.1 longed for excitement and change. Today my request was granted a little too well. Now I will be content with many days of boredom ahead
.

A
T LAST THE
prairie came to an end. Ahead was a dryer landscape, dotted with strange rock formations rising sheer from the ground like exaggerated sand castles made by children. Dust now replaced mud on the trail. It rose from the plodding hooves and hung as an ever-present cloud in the air, coating faces and clothing and making the men constantly clear their throats and spit.

Bliss thought this was great fun and practiced until Libby caught her. “Don’t do that, it’s not nice,” she said.

“Everyone else does it,” Bliss said, “and the dust keeps getting in my mouth and making it taste nasty.”

“Then hold your kerchief across your mouth,” Libby said. “Ladies don’t spit.”

“I’m not a lady. I’m going to be a cowboy,” Bliss said.

“She’s right, Mama,” the normally timid Eden chimed in. “There are no ladies here. It doesn’t matter what we do.”

“I am a lady,” Libby said, frowning at her daughter. “I will always be a lady and so will you. We were born to be ladies and we will remain ladies, whatever unfortunate surroundings we find ourselves in. Please don’t forget it.”

“No, Mama,” Eden said, giving Bliss a grin. “Come on, sissy, let’s go see if Mr. Foster will give us a ride.”

Libby shook her head as they ran off. Sitting alone on the backboard of the wagon, she took out her diary, reading it through as if it were someone else’s life, someone who had lived very long ago and far away from here. Then she wrote, in jerky scrawl as the wheels lurched and bumped:
July 2, 1849. The hardest thing is being entirely alone. There is nobody here I can talk to, nobody whose advice I can trust. I think I’d even be grateful right now for one of father’s lectures
.

A picture of the drawing room at home swam painfully into her mind; Father sitting there with his pipe, his gold watch chain stretched across his broad stomach. “Pay attention to this, young lady,” he’d say, wagging the pipe in her direction so that her mother had to look up from her sewing to comment, “Watch the ash, Henry.”

Such a small life we led then
, she wrote in the diary.
Our definition of a crisis was if the ribbon on a bonnet broke when you wanted to wear it, or if there were no lobsters available when you had planned lobster for dinner. And they wanted to make me as small as that
—
to have me married and domesticated and content with so little
. A sense of excitement shot through her because she realized that she had come so far on her own, without any help or advice and was her own mistress in a giant world of infinite danger and infinite possibilities. She closed the diary and put it away.

The danger, unfortunately, was all too real and all too frequent. Every day they passed other parties that had stopped beside the road to mend broken axles, to replace dead animals, or to wait for someone in the group to recover or die. Once they passed the only party they had met so far that contained a woman. They were camped under a canvas awning and the woman looked tired and old, although Libby suspected she was not much older than herself. She was crouched by a makeshift bed on which a small child lay deathly still.