The Way West (14 page)

   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 pass 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 Dick 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 God, 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 God, 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 hell; 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.
 

 
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 scraps, 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 grass 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 Buttes and the Sweetwater and the Southern Pass 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 pass, 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 Pawnees 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 dickered 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?"
   "Dick 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 grass 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 all   its brightness, and the wind sad-rough, and she hated the grind of sand between shoe and foot.
   "There's Dick."
   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 coarsened by the wind until it was more man's face than woman's. For all that God 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."
   Lije nodded.
   "You'd best be callin' on the bourgeois, too, Lije."
   "Sure. Who is he?"
   "Culbertson, Alexander Culbertson, used to be. Somewhere I heerd that Jim Bordeau was now."
   "All right."
   "How you, Mrs. Evans? Rock ain't dead yet, I see."
   "He just this minute come up. I'm tolerable."
   "That's slick. I'll be gettin' along, Lije."
   The lead wagons were sinking from sight down a slope that Rebecca figured led to the Laramie. It was as if the wheels were sinking into the earth pair by pair, and then the beds and then the swaying tops.
   Lije whoaed his oxen when he came to the top of the hill. Rebecca walked up to him and saw the train winding down and, below it, Fort Laramie, white as fresh wash, with trees waving and shade dark on the grass and the river fringed with woods. Ntore to herself than to Lije she said, "I never thought to be so glad just to see a building."
   "It's Fort Laramie. Sure."
   "Not because it's a fort. Just because it's a building."
   "It's Fort Laramie all the same."
   "You reckon they've got chairs there, Lije? Real chairs."
   There was a light in his eyes. He said, "Sure," and cut a little caper with his feet and sang out: