The Passionate and the Proud (16 page)

Again she had let herself fall beneath his spell. She had almost surrendered. No
—face it, Emmalee
—she
had
surrendered. There just hadn’t been time for him to claim the booty that belonged to the victor. She’d lost her mind, and because of it she’d almost lost her body too.

It was something that wouldn’t happen again.

“This
has
been a lesson to me,” she assured Horace Torquist, who believed she had almost been raped.

“I’m glad, Emmalee. The world is a harsh place. People are cruel. I myself was fooled by Landar for a time. We must watch out for men like him. Nobody is blaming you. A girl who can attract a fine man like Randy Clay is the kind of girl I want standing beside me in Olympia.”

“Thank you, Mr. Torquist,” said Emmalee hollowly.

“But you
were
with Landar, you know,” he chided. “It wouldn’t have happened at all if you hadn’t been with him.”

Oh, true. Hindsight is wisdom incarnate.

But hindsight could not blot out the knowledge that she had been absolutely in Garn’s power and that she had
wanted
to be.

He had been thrown out of camp not solely as a result of his own recklessness but because of their commingled passion, utterly beyond thought and raging with desire.

In the final analysis, however, after admitting the depths of her own complicity, Emmalee could not forgive Garn for what he’d done to Randy. It had been manic and unnecessary. Even his charm, even the unerasable memories of the ecstasy he’d given, could not excuse gratuitous brutality.

“I’m glad he’s gone,” she said aloud.

“Hey! Who’s that?” called Ebenezer Creel. “Oh, it’s you, Emmalee. How you doin’?”

“Not terribly well. I’m afraid.”

“Hey, what’s the matter now?”

“There was a fight.”

“I hope you kicked the dickens out of her…or him.”

“No, the fight was between Randy and Garn.”

“Garn was in a fight?” asked Ebenezer, concerned. “Garn knows how to kill guys. Is the other feller all right?”

“It was Randy Clay. His arm is broken.”

“Hmmm. Got off easy. What was they fightin’ about?”

Emmalee fumbled for an answer.

“You, huh?” Ebenezer guessed. “Well, I don’t know Clay all that much, but I can tell you that ol’ Garn, he loves the ground you walk on. I told him, just like I told you once, that you ain’t his type, you’re too sweet, but he said you’re the one he wants.”

“He says a lot of things.”

“I know that too. Most men do, when it comes to women. But he loved that silver hatband, and that’s what it cost him to keep you outta Fire-On-The-Moon’s clutches.”

Emmalee started in surprise. She’d known that the chief had asked to have her and that Garn had demanded the white stallion in return. She’d believed that the bargaining had ended in a stalemate. Now she remembered the chief pointing at Garn and counting his fingers. Counting the pieces of silver?

“Yep,” said Ebenezer, “Garn had to hand over that hatband, all on accounta you. But he didn’t mind.”

He never even
told
me,
Emmalee fretted, thinking of Garn as she spread out her bedroll and prepared for sleep. Having so recently assigned him to perdition, she was now forced to reconsider the man.

But I didn’t know
! she told herself.

The whole thing was a disaster and, anyway, he was gone.

She noticed that the one-hundred-dollar bill Creel had given her was missing when she undressed. Frantically, her mind flashed back over the day’s events. She remembered tucking the bill into the bodice of her calico dress that morning.

Just before supper, she’d washed and put on a shirtwaist and skirt. She recalled holding the bill and wondering what to do with it. Put it in her bedroll? Keep it with her? The Bent sisters were always interested in what she was doing, so, operating on the theory that practicing busybodies are potential felons, Emmalee had…

…put the bill back into her bodice.

Which Garn Landar had loosened behind the boulders on the hill.

Next morning, she went up the hill to search, taking care that no one would see her and think her depraved for returning to the scene of what they believed to have been heinous ravishment so narrowly averted.

No one saw her.

She didn’t find the money either.

Emmalee saw Olympia for the first time while riding behind Randy on his dapple-gray. The Torquist train had been struggling down the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains for a week. Cresting the last range of foothills on a golden late-September mom, shimmering clouds of mist parted suddenly, prophetically, and there for all eyes to see lay the promised land of dreams and destiny.

There were others on the train who may have seen their destination before Emmalee, but she was the first to cry out.

“That’s it! That’s it! There it is!” she shouted in jubilation, dabbing at tears with the back of her hand. She could not have been any less exultant than Columbus when he heard the watch call “Land!” and saw from the prow of the
Santa Maria
the fresh green shore of a new world.

I’ve made it
! she said to herself.
I’ve come all this way
!

“We’ve made it, Em!” said Randy with quiet joy. He turned in the saddle, a bit awkwardly because he still wore a splint and sling on his arm, and kissed her gently on the cheek.

“Yes,
we
have,” Emmalee affirmed. She put her arms around his waist, pressed her cheek against his broad back, sharing his happiness. Since the fight behind the boulders and Garn’s subsequent departure from the train, Randy had been more and more forthright in his courtship of Emmalee. She did nothing to discourage him either, thinking that she had finally learned the difference between a man with promise and a man without. He had, as yet, made no direct proposal, but it had become common for the people on the wagon train to see them together.

As the wagon train drew nearer and nearer to the frontier village of Arcady, a small cluster of rude buildings in the middle of the Olympian plain, Emmalee and Randy surveyed their new home with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.

The setting itself elicited a quiver of elation from even the most skeptical, matter-of-fact heart in Torquist’s party—which probably belonged to Myrtle Higgins—and caused in Emmalee a sensation similar to that of a big mug of beer drunk quickly on a hot day. Behind her, to the east, were the purple mountains through which she’d just passed, and to the north rose the rugged Sacajawea range, named for the Indian woman who’d guided the explorers Lewis and Clark through this region and onward to the Pacific. Down from the Sacajawea flowed the twin tributaries of the Big Two-Hearted River, named for the dual nature of its boon and bane: On the one hand, it watered the vast Olympian plain, making the land rich and productive; on the other, melting snow and sudden mountain storms sometimes swelled the Big Two-Hearted, flooding the plain. The lush promise of the land, however, far outweighed the possibility of intermittent floods. The settlers were undeterred by the prospect of disaster in the face of all this natural beauty and promise of well-being. If they could claim land, if they could hold onto it, no tempermental river was going to rob them. Never!

Emmalee felt a flicker of apprehension, though, when she perceived the formation of Olympian topography, the manner in which God and nature had arranged the land. Bordering the foothills of the Sacajawea Range and sweeping down into the valley to the village of Arcady were low, rolling hills and little groves. The hills were covered with jade-green grass, the soil beneath the grass almost blue with glistening vitality, so fine and fertile that not even Iowa’s best could compare to it. These hills, bisected by the river, would be perfect for Torquist’s farmers. South of Arcady, on both sides of the Big Two-Hearted, the tributaries of which joined to become one deep blue channel on the plain, were fields of tall grass waving in the wind, perfect for ranching. Even now Emmalee could see Pennington’s ranchers and their wagons spread out on both sides of the river, set to race out and claim that land when the rush commenced.

True, the farmers might have desired those broad, flat fields, which would be easier to plow and till, beneath whose primeval sod lay fine and fertile earth. But they could claim the groves, the hills, and still be content. No, the problem for the community that Olympia hoped to become lay with the river, which Emmalee understood at once. The ranchers, who meant to claim the prairies south of Arcady, would rely on the river to water their herds of cattle. The farmers upstream would need the water to irrigate their crops, should rainfall be scarce.

Burt Pennington had thought of that too. As Torquist’s train came down out of the mountains and crawled its last slow miles toward Arcady, Emmalee saw here and there, behind bushes, partially concealed beneath groves of trees, the outlines of Conestogas in the hills along the river, north of the village. Pennington had men in position to claim the grazing lands he wanted
and
the riverbanks in the areas to which the farmers would be drawn, in order to exert control of water rights in all of Olympia.

“It’s not fair!” she said aloud.

“What?” asked Randy, who’d been drinking in the awesome landscape.

She explained, and he understood at once.

“Pennington can’t be that callous!” he exclaimed, in a pained voice. “We all have to live here.”

He touched his spurs to the flanks of the dapple-gray. The big horse trotted toward the head of the train.

“Where are we going?” Emmalee asked.

“To see Mr. Torquist.”

They found the wagonmaster driving his horses from the seat of his Conestoga, conferring earnestly with scouts Ryder and Cassidy. Torquist had also noted and interpreted Burt Pennington’s strategy. There was a certain gimleteyed concentration to his visage that Emmalee had not seen before in precisely this way and that seemed as atypical and foreboding as his burst of optimism in Denver. Torquist was no longer—not exactly—the man of pure ideals she had met in St. Joe, but what he was now and where he was tending Emmalee did not know.

“This is outrageous!” he was telling the scouts. “This is absolutely beyond the pale! As the Lord is my witness, I’m going to do something about it.”

“What?” asked Cassidy. “It’s a land rush. First come, first served. All’s you can do is try and get in position and claim the land you want and hope for the best.”

“You fellows want to stick around and give us a hand, case there’s trouble?” Torquist asked.

“Nope. Me an’ Hap is scouts and guides. We get nervous thinkin’ about bein’ in one place any too long.”

“I could make it worth your while,” Torquist pressed.

“No, sir.”

Then the wagonmaster caught sight of Randy and Emmalee on the horse.

“What is it, Clay?”

“I guess you already know. The wagons up along the river.”

“Intolerable. I’ll speak to the claims agent about it as soon as we get to Arcady. We’ll all have to register our intent to claim land anyway. Rush starts day after tomorrow. We don’t have much time to get situated. What are you two planning on doing?” he added, with an air that might have seemed avuncular or even paternal had Emmalee not realized that Torquist was reminding her of the two years servitude to him.

“We’ve been talking it over,” Randy told him forthrightly. “We’ll let you know what we decide.”

There were many decisions to make but finally they were in Olympia, with the wagons forming their three great circles one last time. Emmalee slid down from the dapple-gray and looked around. Compared to Cairo and St. Joe, Arcady was a toy town. Yet it was a town, with a couple of rickety clapboard houses, a stable, a tiny church, and a sprawling general store that seemed to house a lot of different activities. Telegraph wires, running down from the mountains, threaded through a hole bored into the wail of the store. A big sign,
LOANS
, hung from a sign beside the door, and a massive, hand-lettered notice was tacked to the side of the building.

U. S. LAND CLAIMS AGENT
INQUIRE WITHIN
ALL PROSPECTIVE CLAIMANTS MUST
BE PROPERLY REGISTERED OR RISK
DISQUALIFICATION

This was it. She was there now. Her future had arrived and things had to be decided. Today, registration, without which she could not claim land at all. Then the land rush itself.
This land. My home.

Torquist’s people came to a halt outside little Arcady on the Big Two-Hearted River, awestruck by the colors of this promised land. Its hues were new as a new world, new as time, still fresh and luminous from the palette of God. The sweeping sky, a glittering, dancing blue, reflected the darker blue of the river, spotted with foamy white rapids that poured over boulders, the rocks pearly white on one side, thick with forest-green moss on the other. Grass grew rampant, brilliant green along the river, turning to darker green and gold in the rolling hills. A soft, late-September wind came in over the plains from the Pacific. The air was hushed, but expectant. The end of one journey, the beginning of another.

“Randy, maybe we should talk now,” Emmalee said, looking up at him on the horse. “You’re right. It’s time for some choices.”

Very soberly, conscious of the importance of this moment, Randy dismounted. “Let’s walk down to the river,” he suggested.

A crowd of Pennington people had come out of the store to watch the arrival of the Torquist train. They stood in the dust shouting halfhearted welcomes to their rivals. Skirting them, Randy and Emmalee walked quickly through the village toward the gurgling river and sat down on its grassy bank. It was about twenty yards wide and deeply channeled, a river that knew floods and fast water, although now it was no more than three or four feet deep.

They spoke at the same time. “I’ve been thinking…” Emmalee began. “I’ve been meaning to ask…” said Randy.

They laughed. Randy reached out and touched her hand. “Let me say this?” he asked. “I’ve been wanting to for a long time.”

Emmalee nodded.

“I’ve learned quite a few things on the way west, Em. And I think you have too. When I almost ran you down beside that wagon back in St. Joe, we were just kids, more or less. But we’ve had to face things, and we’re more than just a few months older now. We’ve grown. And I think we’ve grown together. You’ve learned—I think—not to be duped by…well, you know what I mean. And I’ve learned that I’ll never have what I want unless I get right up on my hind legs and ask for it.”

Emmalee waited.

Randy paused, holding her gaze. “I want us to get engaged, Em. That’s what I’m asking for. It’s because I’m in love with you.”

His eyes, usually so sparkling and bright, were darkened with intensity. His strong, handsome face seemed drawn and even pale in spite of trail sunburn. He leaned toward her.

“I’ve been thinking things over too,” she said.

His words and his presence, the very strength and goodness of him, combined with the euphoria of journey’s end to produce in Emmalee not only a feeling of tenderness toward Randy—a tenderness more acute than ever before—but also a vivid sense of promise. It was as if a time had come to draw a line, to make one’s mark, to stake a claim upon the territory of her soul.

“I want to make a life for us,” Randy was saying. “A life together. You and me. Because I love you, Em.”

“Randy, I’m—”

“Don’t answer yet if you’re not sure.”

“It’s not that, I’m—”

“I have it all planned,” he went on. “I know I don’t have much to offer right now,” he said, ducking his head, “but time will take care of that. I’ll work hard. We’ll both work hard. I intend to get the best farming land there is and have the best darn farm around. You’ll claim land right next to mine—we’ll see to that—and right after the first harvest we’ll get married.”

“After the first harvest?” asked Emmalee.

That wouldn’t be until next fall, a year away.

“Em! Does this mean…? Dos this mean you’re saying yes?”

Emmalee paused a moment, trying to sort out emotions, impressions, ambitions. Myrtle had been right, back there on the Kansas prairie, when she’d said it wasn’t good for a person to be alone. She’d also been right about finding a good man, if you were lucky enough. Emmalee had grown up sufficiently to judge the truth of Myrtle’s advice, and she’d been lucky enough to find Randy, or be found by him. Emmalee had no fear that, by getting engaged to Randy, she was surrendering her independence. I can have land, home and love too, she realized. Randy is not like some other men who would demand to own you, body and soul.

And there was a year to get used to the idea.

I’m doing the right thing and the good thing, Emmalee decided.

“Em?” Randy was asking, his voice at the ragged end of hopefulness.

“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I will be your betrothed. I’ll marry you whenever you say it’s time.”

“Oh, Em!” he cried with sudden, wild delight, scarcely able to believe what he perceived to be such extraordinary fortune. It was as if the skies had parted and suddenly vouchsafed him a miracle. “Oh, Em, I promise I’ll make you so happy,” he said, taking her into his arms as best he could with the splint.

Then he kissed her and Emmalee responded, lost for long minutes in the commingled excitement of their mutual promise and future. She felt the hunger of his need, sensed also his restraint, and thought that she was glad of it. He was treating her as a lady ought to be treated; she felt safe with him, and wanted.

Their betrothal kiss was long and very sweet, tasting just faintly of salt. Although they were both too distracted then by happiness and future resolves to think consciously about it, the salt was a reminder that men and women alike are made of perishable flesh, which must struggle to survive, and whose great dreams are as permanent as the dust on a butterfly’s wings.

Horace Torquist stood on his wagon seat and called “
Whoooaaa
!” one last time. The proud but ravaged train lurched to a halt. Horses sagged in their traces. Oxen showing ridges of bony rib all but fell beneath their yokes, and the pilgrims climbed down from wagons, from the backs of weary beasts, and faltered toward the general store. Randy and Emmalee, holding hands, walked up from the river and joined the others just as a thinnish man with a shrewd face and a fine black suit came out of the store. He wore a flat, low-crowned black hat. Some kind of pin or badge was attached to his lapel. He surveyed the gathering pilgrims with a look that managed to be bored yet cannily appraising at the same time.