The Way West Part 8

"Does Summers know everything?"

"Why," the boy said, "I s'pose not, but he knows a store of things."

Mack liked Summers and he liked Brownie, but still he was prompted to say, "You'd think from the talk that no one had any sense but Summers."

Brownie didn't answer. With a boy's deference to his elders he kept quiet, but Mack knew he was resentful, as he wanted him to be.

A star streamed down the western sky, and, as if glad for its excuse, Brownie asked, "You reckon that star hit in Oregon, Mr. Mack?"

Before Mack could answer, a rifle cracked at the far side of the herd. The sound of it died into a sharp, thinking silence.

Brownie jerked his rifle up. "Injuns! Injuns!"

"Listen!"

What Mack heard was the camp shouting, shouting out across the darkness. He heard the clank of ox chains and the sound of running.

Off beyond the dark blob of the cattle another rifle spurted fire and boomed above the shouting. The cattle were climbing to their feet. Mack could see the close ones struggling up. They stood dark in the night, the breath loud in their nostrils. Farther on, the edges of the blob began to flux.

Lije Evans' voice was bellowing, "Brownie? Where you, Brownie?"

"Here. Here, Pa."

Evans came pounding up, and behind him a straggle of men.

A rifle cracked again.

Mack heard the gun, and then the sound of hoofs. The dark patch was flowing into a string, and the head of the string was running, drawing the rest after it.

Someone yelled, "G.o.ddam! There they go."

"Horses! Get horses!"

"No. Can't head 'em." Mack knew Summers' voice.

"Get horses, I told you."

The head of the string was lost to the eye. "No! Wait!"

Summers stood before Mack. "Injuns? You see Injuns?"

Mack said, "No."

"Critters was uneasy," Brownie put in.

Mack couldn't see the cattle now. The sound of their hoofs was a far drumming. Above it he heard the sudden voices of the other sentinels.

Summers asked them, "Injuns?"

" 'Y G.o.d, yes," McBee answered.

"Sure?"

"No," Patch said.

"I seen one. One, or a wolf," Holdridge added. Tadlock shouldered ahead. "Get horses, d.a.m.n it."

"Hold up!"

"What's wrong with you, Summers? You want to hold a meeting?"

Summers didn't answer, but Lije Evans spoke out, "Leave it to d.i.c.k."

"Summers isn't captain. Get your horses!"

Summers spoke then, spoke with something in his voice that Mack liked but still resisted. "Don't forgit yourself, hoss."

"I'm not forgetting those cattle."

Patch's tone was mild. "Most of them are yours."

"G.o.ddam it! What's that got to do with it? You want to lose yours?"

The men had crowded into a close bunch. A half dozen of them were trying to talk. Summers' words rose above the rest. "Rules say it's up to me to call a war party."

Tadlock faced up to him. "Call it then!"

Mack spoke without thinking, spoke, he knew later, out of temper and hunger for a fight. "Rules be d.a.m.ned, I say, if they don't work."

Summers stepped up to him. "Mack," he said quietly, so quietly that everybody listened, "these here could be p.a.w.nees, and, besides, I don't aim to send green men out at night, even against Kaws." He paused as if to let his words sink in. "You'll get more cattle back, come daylight, than you can now."

Summers faced around to address the others. "I'll be the war party. You all watch the wagons." He didn't say any more. He faded out like a shadow. One minute Mack saw him, ghost-like in his buckskins, and then he caught the glimmer of him moving off, and then he was lost, lost in darkness, lost in the sudden pressing emptiness, lost on the brooding land.

After a minute the talk picked up, but Mack didn't wait to hear it. He would be a war party himself, a one-man, green-man war party, riding with his anger, riding like a fool to dull the edge of it, and maybe meeting Indians and fighting them and so spending himself in another way than with a woman. A man got so he found his pleasure in being crazy and perverse -but he never could explain to Amanda how it was. If he could, it wouldn't make any difference, not with Amanda.

Some of the women ran out to meet him, a squall of alarm, of questions, of entreaties. They pulled at his sleeves and ran around to face him again after he had pa.s.sed them. "Everything's all right. I said everything's all right." Others waited at the corral, wanting to know, too, and he said, "It's all right," and went on, hardly looking at them, hating them, all of them, because they were women. Mrs. Turley was crying, "I knowed we shouldn't've come. I knowed it." He stepped over a wagon tongue and got away.

The fires outside the corral had been replenished, and the flames licked in the big eyes of the horses, which were standing high-headed, uneasy with the general uneasiness. He caught his saddle horse and led it over and tied it to the wheel of his wagon and threw a saddle on it. Then he loosened the ox chains between his two wagons and pulled the tongue aside and led the horse out, putting the tongue and chains back afterwards.

When he turned around, he saw Amanda. "What are you going to do, Curt?"

"Hunt Indians."

Her face looked pale and drawn in the firelight, and shadowed with sorrow. "Alone?"

When he didn't answer, she said, "You don't know Indians, Curt."

He put his foot in the stirrup. "Know one when I see one."

"I wouldn't go."

"Wouldn't, eh?"

"Please!"

Please. Please h.e.l.l! For her please she would get what he got for his.

He turned his horse and heard her "Please be careful," and realized that it was partly, maybe mainly, to distress her that he went out on this crazy business. He didn't care about that, either. And he couldn't help it. The horse stumbled as he kicked him into the darkness.

Unguided, the horse rounded the corral and made for the river and lowered his head and drank and raised it, savoring the water, and let the breath rattle in his nostrils.

It was darker here in the growth. Mack felt the trees shouldering him. Even the river ran dark, dark to the black band of the far sh.o.r.e. A bright star shone on its moving bosom. Looking up, he saw the same star in the sky. The words of Scripture went through his head: "When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy." He could remember reading them as a child and being moved by them, back in the church that had left its scars on him.

He reined his horse out from the water and walked him clear of the trees and struck west, riding hard in the direction he remembered the cattle had taken.

Nothing happened. The Great Dipper wheeled in the sky and a star dropped and wolves howled and the horse stumbled and got his head jerked back for it,, and nothing happened, except that the horse began to wheeze. Let him wheeze! Let him labor! Let him run his heart out and his lungs! Getup! Amanda would have protested; she believed in kindness to dumb animals. Getup!

He was far out when, faint as something imagined, he heard rifle fire downstream, from the direction of camp. He pulled his horse up, alarm leaping in him, thinking, before he had time to regulate his thoughts, of Indians and the camp and Amanda without him to protect her; and then it occurred to him that it must be four o'clock and the sentinels would be firing to rouse the camp for the day's journey. He kicked his horse into a lope.

Nothing happened. He rode on another mile and turned and began crisscrossing back toward camp, and a flush came into the sky, and light, and he saw he was on a low bald ridge above the river. The camp was lost somewhere down the stream. He started for it.

He was close enough to hear the echo of voices, sounding thin in the chill of morning, when he saw the Indian in the tree. At first he took him for a big c.o.o.n, or maybe a bear, and then, coming closer, he made out the shaved head with its comb of hair and the blanket gathered around the shoulders. From his vantage point above the lower growth the Indian was watching the camp. He was holding to his perch and watching.

Mack stopped his horse. The Indian had no gun and no bow that Mack could see. He would.have a bow though, if not a musket, hidden by his body or the folds of his blanket.

Mack dismounted and tied his horse and walked ahead, stepping soft. He began to feel the blood beating in him, and the breath light and quick in his throat.

At this range he couldn't miss. He had only to raise his rifle and line up the sights and squeeze the trigger. He couldn't miss, not if he chose to shoot.

He looked around for other Indians and saw none, and listened and heard, far off from pulse and breath, the voices of women cooking breakfast and the deeper tones of men catching tip their teams.

Even with the blood thumping in him and his lungs working, he couldn't miss, not if he fired. There was the barrel lifting and the sights lining up and the finger waiting on the trigger.

The Indian turned, his sharp face composed but watchful, and his eyes ran over the back country. Mack saw them nearing, saw them widen and fix in the shocked instant of finding him. They cried out. The eyes, the wordless mouth, the whole face cried, "Please! Please!"

The Indian dropped as the rifle cracked. He didn't shout or thug out. He hung for a bare instant, the please fading from his face, and then he dropped.

Mack ran up. The Indian was dead all right, dead as a d.a.m.n doornail. He lay crumpled in the bushes with his old blanket and his proud wisp of hair, face turned up, mouth loose -a runty, thin man with scars on him and the marks of hunger, a Kaw who had asked please and got his answer, and now wouldn't have to ask any more or go without, either.

Mack stood for a long minute, hearing the camp hushed and then noisy with the alarm his shot had raised. A louse worked in the tuft of hair, and a small breeze fanned it. Watching, Mack felt fatigue dragging at him, felt loneliness and regret creeping on him and bearing him down. Now, unaccountably, he wanted to talk to Amanda.

Drive, plod, push, tug, turn the wheels. Eat dust, d.a.m.n you! Eat mud. Swim in sweat and freeze at night. Work the sun up. Work it down. Wear the body limp. Keep moving.

Chapter Eight.

THE KAW lay behind them, the Wakarusa and the Kaw and the Little and Big Vermilions and the Big Blue, each standing out in memory as the train wormed up and down the hills and sidewise through the trees, each costing something -time and sweat and breath, a broken tongue or piece of harness, and maybe a wetting if the wagon boxes weren't tight.

Once pa.s.sed, they stood lonely and somehow dear in the mind. They were landmarks where there were no others, and so they were remembered, and the thought of them brought up remembered things, for often they camped at crossings and, for that little while, had a home again. Thinking back, while the raw breeze streamed at her, Rebecca Evans heard the children's cries again and smelled camp smoke and coffee and saw the wagons standing white in the late sun.

It was only then, after the wagons had been drawn up and the teams unyoked and the ox chains fastened wagon to wagon, that she had a real chance to talk to Lije or Brownie. They would let down then for a little and speak about their new home or maybe about their old one, and Lije would wonder how things were going back in Missouri.

She would wonder, too, though not so much about crops and critters, but about the well and its water sweeter than river water, and had the new people fixed the door and did their young ones call from the trees that Brownie used to climb. Or she would think about her sister, living at New Madrid, her little sister whom her mind couldn't picture grown up but still small and fetching as in the old years. She always wore the new dress, of boughten goods, that Ma dressed her in on her sixth birthday, and had her pigtails tied with the red ribbon Rebecca had given her.

The camping places of last night and the night before somehow went with home. The wagon train hadn't much more than pulled out than the spot they'd stayed at joined with the old thoughts, something known that wouldn't be known again, so that a body felt lost and a little homesick, wanting the time back again, the friendly fire, the still evening, the sound of the water, the easy talk. Nothing ahead of them was known; none of it was warmed by memories.

Rebecca said "Haw" to the oxen and pulled her old coat closer about her neck. She was walking at the side of the wagon, being so tired and sore she didn't want to ride. If a person had flesh on her, she got st.i.tches and aches from the jolting, and spots on the flesh sore to the touch.

Ahead of her Lije turned and smiled and turned back again to his team, tucking his chin into the breeze that made a mourning sound along the canvas of the wagons. Rock moved along behind him. That was the way with that dog. Most of the time he followed Lije or Brownie as if on a lead rope.

Rebecca tried to push the backward thoughts from her mind. Her man and her boy were happy, and that was enough. A happy family was all a person could ask for. It wasn't in the right nature of things for her to allow herself the miseries when she had that much.

Everything was going as well as a body could hope. They were making fair time, even d.i.c.k Summers said, and they hadn't had any trouble to speak of. Just the stampede was all, and the Indian Mack had shot for some reason and, later on, the Kaws that came to call about the shooting and had got shooed off by Tadlock. The men had found the cattle, all but one. d.i.c.k didn't lay the stampede to Indians, except that maybe the critters were spooky from the smell of them there along the Kaw. A green animal, he said, always scared at Indian scent.

Rebecca drove the second wagon mostly, though Brownie spelled her sometimes, and sometimes where the way was open the oxen could be trusted to follow along, trailed by Summers' pack horses tied behind. Riding or walking, she kept her eye out for Lije and Brownie, and for d.i.c.k Summers, too, though he was mostly out of sight, scouting for Indians or deciding the way or hunting. He kept the pot full. At first, close to the settlemerits, he had come in with ducks and snipe and pigeons, hut now he hunted bigger game. Last night he brought back two turkeys and a strange thing that he called a wild goat but others said was an antelope. He kept the pots full, their pot and Brother Weatherby's, too. She reckoned it was a long time since Brother Weatherby had fed so well. There was power in the sermon he preached against traveling on the Sabbath Day -but they traveled just the same.

d.i.c.k was a good man, and her Lije was, too, as people were coming to know. Lije was strong in his body and good in his nlind, but it was his spirit that was best of all, being calm and kind and not set up.

She would see him, ahead with the heavy wagon and its double yoke, and him likely walking and popping his whip now and then. Or the train would have to stop, and he would go to the head of it and help others across a wash or up a bank, his clothes muddy or dusty afterwards and damp with sweat. He didn't talk too much, and never loud and bossy like Tadlock, but he did his share and more of the work.

Most of the time Brownie was back with the cows. She saw him sometimes when the train was climbing a rise and waved at him, and he would give just a little wave back, being a boy yet and bashful about showing his feelings. For all that he was only a boy, he was doing a man's work. He didn't need to be back with the stock so much, not with just the fifteen head that Lije was bringing along; but he had hired out to Mack, who had forty or more, so's to earn something. Rebecca thought that Mack couldn't have got a faithfuller man.

Rebecca punched the near ox with the stick she carried. She wanted to keep close to Lije. Sometimes she let the team lag a little, but, with the wind blowing sad and her body sore and her mind low in spite of her, she wanted to keep up today. Here along the Little Blue they would have had dust in their faces except that it had showered the night before. Wagons at the end had to bear a sight of dust, and so it was they traded places day by day, the back ones moving up and the fore ones coming back.

She made herself look around and take note of the land. They had been through changing country, the woods and hills first and then prairies such as she imagined must lie on the near side of the Rocky Mountains; then woods again and limestone and big hills along the Big Vermilion. Here the country seemed to be reopening. The eye could travel farther, and the trees were more separated into groves. You couldn't tell for sure, though; tomorrow things might close in again.

The wind that blew was not like the winds of home. It was steadier and more devilish, streaming out of the west as if there was no end to it. It bent the trees or whistled over a bald hill and ran down the hollows as if just to push at the train. People said, though, that it wasn't anything; wait until farther on. But it was enough. It was more than enough.

She was glad when the train had to stop. She took a breath and rubbed her sore behind with one hand, not caring much who saw her, and then walked up to Lije before he took it into his head to go see what was the matter. He said, "Watch the critters, will you, Becky?"

"Wait, Lije! You don't have to do all the work. Can't we talk a minute?"

He started to object, she knew, and then he looked at her and said, "Why, sure thing. What's wrong?"

"I just wanted to talk, is all."

"About what?"

"Just talk."

"You ain't like yourself, Becky. Wore out, I bet."

"I'm all right."