Wind Walker (27 page)

“Ain’t you glad to see me, Scratch?” Shadrach Sweete roared.

Bass felt troubled as he peered southwest across the valley of Black’s Fork. “It ain’t that I’m not happy to have you back,” he explained with a little irritation, watching the big man rein up beside him and slide out of the saddle. “I spotted the dust from your travois and them animals—figgered it was my daughter comin’.”

“Magpie?” Sweete snorted as he approached, leading his horse. “That li’l gal can’t raise much dust by her own self.”

They clasped forearms and shook, pounding one another on the shoulder there on the flat some forty yards outside the main gate at Fort Bridger. “Ain’t Magpie I was meaning. I got another daughter.”

Sweete inched back. “I never knowed.”

He grinned with pride. “Name’s Amanda. She come in yestiddy with the last train down from the ferry.”

“How’d she know her pa was here?”

Titus shook his head. “Didn’t. Bound away for Oregon with her husband. Got four li’l ones of her own too.”

“Then she ain’t a young’un herself,” Shad commented as they started moseying toward the post walls. “When’s last time you see’d her?”

“Late winter of thirty-four.”

Sweete looked over at Bass with a moment of study, then asked, “You still recognize her after all that time?”

“She come found me,” he declared. “Was in the store yonder when she heard Bridger give my name to some fella from the train what needed a li’l smithy work. Come over to see for herself if I was the one.”

Sweete laid his big hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “You really her pa?”

“I am, Shad.” It was then they stopped short of the gate and Titus turned to stare at the distance, his one good eye moving across the distant trees. “Thought she’d be back with ’em by now.”

“Who?”

“Amanda an’ her family. They was coming to dinner.”

Sweete cleared his throat thoughtfully, then said with a sympathetic tone, “Maybe her husband ain’t the sort to wanna sit down for no dinner with Amanda’s pa.”

He studied Shad a moment, a new worry intruding on his plans for a happy evening. “Why you say that: He won’t wanna eat with me?”

“I dunno. Here this fella’s been married to your daughter all these years—who knows if she ever told him her pa was still livin’, or where you was in the first place, even when they started out for Oregon. Maybe your Amanda just let it out of the bag on him today real sudden, an’ it took him by surprise. Some folks are a mite touchy like that, you see?”

Titus shrugged a shoulder, not wanting to believe it. He wagged his head, saying, “Not likely. What she told me, the fella seems like a good enough sort.”

Shad peered at his friend’s face. “Sounds like you don’t got a thing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry ’bout,” Bass repeated, unconvinced. “Just wanna know why they ain’t showed up.”

“What say we head on over to the camp, have ourselves a look? You an’ me.”

“I’ll get a horse while you tell Shell Woman why you won’t be helping her set up the lodge,” Titus said in a gush as
he started to turn aside. “Tell her she can fetch Waits-by-the-Water to give her a hand! Them two need a time to talk after all the weeks Shell Woman’s been away at the ferry.”

“I’ll wait right here for you!” Sweete hollered back.

Bass suddenly dug in his heels and skidded to a halt. “By the by, tell Shell Woman you an’ the young’uns are invited to a special feed tonight in the fort!”

Shad swiped at the sweat trapped at the back of his neck beneath the long, matted mane of hair. “What’s so special ’bout tonight?”

“My family’s sittin’ down to dinner with my daughter an’ my four grandkids,” he roared back at Sweete as he bolted away again, beaming anew. “That’s what makes this evenin’ shine for this here child!”

The two of them and that pair of rascal dogs were no more than a half mile from the emigrants’ camp when they realized something out of the ordinary was afoot among these Oregon-bound travelers. Usually these camps were a bustling beehive of activity at this time of the day: young men and boys watering the hundreds and hundreds of animals, women and girls bent over fires as they prepared the evening meal, others of all ages moving about, going here and there on one mission or another now that the train was not rolling and they had these precious hours before darkness fell. Repairs to wagons, wheels, guns, or equipment. Medication administered and healing words spoken to those become sick or injured along the last few days of their journey. Older children assigned to watch over the youngest, noisiest, and quickest of foot in camp.

But even those few youngsters Titus spotted on the fringes of the gathered crowd seemed oddly quiet at this time of day; at long last they were allowed to run and play and burn off all that energy they had bottled up through the interminable hours of sitting still in those jostling wagons.

“Somethin’ ain’t … right ’bout this,” he said to Shadrach.

“Looks to be a meeting to me,” Sweete said, pointing out the large gathering near the bank of Black’s Fork.

Most of the emigrants stood, some seated in the grass
beneath the shade of a thick copse of overhanging cottonwoods. Men, women, and their children too.

As their horses carried them closer, Titus picked out one voice after another, some raised louder than others to drive home a point. Although he could not make out most of what was being bandied about, he could nonetheless tell from the tone that he had not come upon a lighthearted occasion. Drawing up to the outskirts of the crowd, the two old trappers momentarily caught the attention of the first emigrants to turn, then nudge their neighbors to have themselves a look. In heartbeats most of the hundred-plus people had given the horsemen a quick look of disapproving appraisal before they turned their attention back to what was clearly some grave business at hand.

As Bass peered quickly over the crowd he spotted Amanda peeling herself away from a nest of women and children standing behind an inner cordon of their menfolk. But it wasn’t until she had reached the outer fringe of the crowd that he saw she wasn’t alone. Her hand gripped that of a young boy, a barefoot child, who shuffled along through the dusty grass to keep pace with his mother’s long strides. She turned and leaned down slightly to say something to the child as they circled around the gathering. In response the boy brought his tiny hand to his brow and peered into the distance at the two buckskin-clad horsemen. He still had his hand shading his eyes as Titus kicked out of the saddle and landed on the ground, only a moment before Amanda stopped before him.

“This is my daughter Amanda,” Scratch announced as she held out her empty arm for her father. “Amanda, this here’s my good friend, Shadrach Sweete. Him an’ me, we’ve been through a lot together over the years—”

“Oh, Pa!” she interrupted him, pain in her voice. “Our train’s breaking up!”

He took her shoulder in one strong hand and quickly glanced at the heated argument taking place nearby at the center of the crowd. “That why you was late comin’ for supper?”

Amanda’s eyes pleaded. “I’m sorry, for we got all caught up in this trouble—trying to sort out what we’re gonna do.”

“How’s your train falling apart?” Sweete repeated.

“We got to Laramie with our company captain,” she began to explain. “We elected him at Westport, mostly because he had a little experience on the plains. Last year he’d come out to Fort Laramie on his own to ride part of the trail for himself. Mostly, he got himself elected because he had more money than the rest of us … and that meant he had more wagons and guns for our protection, and some hired men along too. But, they weren’t family men like the rest of us. Just single fellas, going out to start over in Oregon on the captain’s pay.”

The fear he read in her eyes made Titus bristle. “Now the rest of you got trouble with some of ’em?”

“Yes … well, no,” she responded with a frustrated shake of her head. “The captain, his name is Hargrove—back at Laramie he ran onto a pilot who says he knows the country from here on out. Says he’s been out to Oregon a half dozen times. Was a mountain trapper too, he claims.”

“What’s his name?” Sweete demanded suspiciously.

“I can’t rightly remember,” she answered, her face gray with concern. “Only that Hargrove said he was our Moses,” she admitted.

“He here?” Titus asked.

She nodded.

“Point ’im out to me.”

Amanda turned with the child still clutching her hand and stepped away to the right where the three of them would have a better view of the central actors in this dramatic dispute taking place beside Black’s Fork.

“There he is,” Amanda announced, bitterness in her voice pointing quickly. “That’s him. Got a full beard like yours, and he’s wearing those skin clothes—like yours, Pa.”

Peering through the anxious crowd shifting from one foot to the other, Titus trained his good eye on the figure who was turned slightly away from him for the moment. Then the tall
man addressing the group took a step forward, and Scratch easily made out the pilot.

“Harris,” Sweete whispered it like a curse.

“That nigger gets drunk at the drop of a hat—an’ when he does, he ain’t leading no one nowhere,” Bass grumbled in agreement of Shad’s sentiment.

“No, he hasn’t made any trouble with his drinking,” Amanda argued. “Problem is, the pilot’s going off with Hargrove and his wagons.”

“Off where?”

“Taking them to California,” she said with exasperation and a shake of her head.

Scratch turned from glaring at Harris to look down at his daughter. “Thought you said your train was bound for Oregon?”

Amanda pursed her lips, then said, “Back at Westport we was formed as a company for Oregon Territory. That’s where most of us still want to go. But late this afternoon Hargrove sent around his men, calling a council meeting.”

“Hargrove?” Shad echoed.

She explained, “When we got here a little while ago, he started off telling us he and his hired men would stay on with us till we reached Fort Hall. That’s where Hargrove said he was turning off for California.”

“An’ your captain is taking your new pilot with him to Californy,” Bass completed the dilemma.

“That’s right,” she answered, reaching out to gently squeeze his hand. “After that we won’t have us our company captain and all his guns along. And we won’t have our pilot to get us from Fort Hall to the Willamette.”

Without turning to look at his tall friend, Scratch glared at the tall, well-dressed speaker named Hargrove and said quietly, “Let’s go have us a listen, Shadrach.”

Leading their horses, the pair inched forward on foot to the outer edges of the crowd. It was there that Titus whispered, “I didn’t see him my own self earlier this summer, but them Marmons Gabe an’ me run into on the Sandy said they
come across Harris at Pacific Springs in the pass. Coming from Oregon hisself, he told ’em. When Brigham Young said he had no need to hire him to lead his bunch into the valley of the Salt Lake, Harris said he’d push on to Fort John—where he claimed there’d be plenty of trains what’d hire him to pilot them through.”

“No-good bastard found him some work, he did,” Sweete responded in a whisper so sharp that it made a few of the nearby emigrants turn their heads and flick a disquieting look at the pair in buckskins.

Bass leaned over and whispered to Amanda, “That’s your Moses, all right. His name’s Moses Harris. Sometimes, that nigger goes by the name o’ Black Harris. His cheeks burned so dark the skin shines like burnt powder. How he come by that name.”

With an involuntary shudder, she declared, “I’d just as soon he go off a different way, Pa. Never did like the way he looked at me or any other woman with the train. Them eyes of his all over me—makes my skin tremble like I was cold and had spiders crawling on me at the same time.”

“From what I recollect, that’un’s a coward … less’n he’s got a bellyful of John Barleycorn,” Shad observed.

“Shshshsh!” One of the emigrants turned and pressed a finger to her lips at the two old mountain men.

“—which means all of you are free to follow me to my new home in California,” boomed the tall man who towered over the stockier Harris, “or, you can make your own way to Oregon without our help.”

“I recall this company elected you our captain,” protested a tall, wide-shouldered man as he stepped from the edge of the crowd, tugging at one of his frayed suspenders that threatened to slip off his shoulder. He was clearly growing agitated. “Back at Westport, before we ever headed out, we elected you, Hargrove—because you said you was gonna lead us to Oregon.”

“A man has a right to change his mind,” Phineas Hargrove argued now with a winning smile. “Between leaving Westport
behind and the Green River crossing, I’ve come to believe California is where my fortunes lie.”

Another, heavier man lunged from the inner edge of the gathering to growl, “But we was formed around you to take us to Oregon. That’s where we all wanna go! We’re a Oregon company!”

Hargrove turned to the shorter man with that look of disdain written upon his face. “And you’re all free to follow your dreams from Fort Hall,” he reminded them. “But any of you who want to see what California has to offer, I repeat that Mr. Harris here has agreed to lead us south and west from Fort Hall, to the Humboldt and on to northern California.”