Jim and Rich followed. They lost themselves in the night and the winding ways. Jim walked alone, though the others were close enough to touch. Their voices reached him like voices heard in still air across a valley. The rage had left him. He felt heavy and sick, and he felt unclean. Not dirty, but unclean, as the Bible used the word. His skin crawled and quivered at the remembered rasp of hemp.
He had thought he knew what hate was. He had prided himself on being a pretty good hater. Now he knew that before tonight he had hated like a child.
“You said you had an extra horse, Rich,” he said. “I’d like to use him now.”
“Might’s well ride together,” said the big man. “If you’ve got no objections.”
“No objections,” Jim said, “but I’m going now.” He shivered with his need to get away out of this place. “Rich, I owe you for tonight.”
“Oh, hell,” Rich said, “I owe you, you owe me—I’m sick of this owing business. Let’s just get ourselves clear of this stinking trap. Stable’s that way.”
Jim let himself be guided.
“Jim,” said Rich, “this here’s Pegleg Smith. He’s been holding out with Walkara’s bunch of Utes—Jim, you listening?”
“Mention horses,” Pegleg said. “That ought to make a Crow prick up his ears.”
“Horses, Jim. Not fifties, not hundreds. Thousands. You want to go back to trapping, or do you want to get rich on horses?”
But Jim had gone back into his private darkness. “White man’s country,” he said. “I hope to God they stay in it. I hope to God they let the rest of the land alone. Only good thing about white man’s country is leaving it behind you.”
Rich was suddenly in a shaking temper. “Will you quit running down the white man! I’m white, ain’t I? I had my neck stuck out right alongside of yours, didn’t I? Pegleg too, didn’t he?”
Jim stared at him, startled.
“It ain’t all who’s black and who’s white,” Rich snarled. “It’s towns, and the way people have got to live in ’em. If you was white as the driven snow you couldn’t live that way, no more’n I can.”
Pegleg stood massively aside, waiting for them to settle things between them. Rich stamped his feet up and down in the mud.
“Fact is,” he said, “if you wasn’t too thickskulled to see it—fact is, Jim, that you and me, and Fitz, and Pegleg here—all of us—we ain’t like anybody else at all, white, black, or red. We didn’t have a place to fit us, so we went and made one. And if you—”
He stopped, run out of breath or words, or both. He looked around at the huddled buildings and spat.
“If you wasn’t standing there blabbering like a goddamned idiot,” he said, “we could be on our way back to it.”
Jim’s body relaxed. He began to smile. “I’m ready,” he said.
They walked on toward the stable. Jim turned to Pegleg. “Was somebody talking about horses?”
“Um,” said Pegleg. “Thought maybe you’d like to see how the Utes do it.”
“Where?” asked Jim.
As casually as though it was right next door, Pegleg answered, “California.”
LEAF FALLING
EIGHTEEN
Dappled sunlight fell through the vine leaves. It touched Amelita’s high Indian cheekbones and made bright moving patches on her glossy hair. “Are all Yankees so full of the wandering sickness?” she asked. “Don’t you ever want to stop?”
“When we get old,” Jim told her, in his just-adequate Spanish. “Don’t you want to come with me and see what’s on the other side of the mountains?”
“I do not!” she said, and laughed. “And I feel sorry for the woman who is ever foolish enough to say yes.” She looked at him, up and down, from a little distance. “But not too sorry.” She kissed him. “Good-bye, Yankee.” She walked away from him, out into the clear sunlight and across the courtyard.
Jim watched appreciatively the free and graceful swing of her bare brown legs. Her skirt was short enough to show them halfway to the knee. The skirt itself was a poppy red, making a pretty splash of color against the baked hardpan of the ground and ’dobe walls with the whitewash crumbling off them. He watched her until she passed through a low doorway and was gone. Then he went down to the corrals, where Rich was waiting for him.
“Someday,” he said, “I’m going to marry one of these girls and settle down.”
“I’d thought of it myself,” Rich said, “but I ain’t sure how one of ’em would get along sharing the lodge with Grass.”
Jim grinned and shook his head. “They’re strong like the Indian women, and they’ve got the dignity, but they seem to be kind of lacking in patience. I’d hate to try lodgepoling one of ’em.” He had never lodgepoled Cherry, but theirs had been an unusually good relationship.
“I would reckon,” said Rich, “if you was to try it on Amelita, she’d have your gizzard out and thrown to the cat before you knew what happened.”
He looked to see if the wranglers were ready to turn out their little cavallada of twenty-eight horses. Jim swung into the saddle of the claybank stallion he was riding, and all the vaqueros around the lower corral shouted and laughed at him. Jim rode Indian-style, or mountain-style, which was the same thing, with short stirrups. These Californios liked to ride standing on their toes with their legs at full stretch. They thought Jim was very amusing, even though he had shown them he could do one or two things they couldn’t.
It worked both ways. “Come on,” they shouted, waving coins in the air. “Once more, Yankee! Try once more.”
“I’ll be along in a minute, Rich,” Jim said, and went over to the vaqueros. He made the stallion prance, and that made the half-broken colts in the corral shy stiff-legged and snorting from the fence. Some of the vaqueros were pure Indio, scattered out from the missions that had no further use for them after the Secularization. They were all superb horsemen. They were good-natured, proud, high-tempered, and tough as their own reatas.
One of them placed a coin with great care under each of Jim’s knees, where they pressed against the saddle housing.
Jim asked, “Does anybody wish to bet that I don’t lose them both?”
They said he was insulting their mothers by implying that they had given birth to idiots. He had been here ten days and they knew him. Jim laughed and kicked the stallion into a gallop. The course was improvised. Over the tongues of three wagons parked beside a wall, thread a row of tall sycamores like a needle going through cloth, turn three times tightly around the well, and then back to the start at a dead run and bring the horse up rearing. Jim had lost both coins.
They were happy. They told him to go with God, and he thanked them and wished them well, and rode off after Rich. On the way he saw the hacendado Menendez coming from his house, a lean, straight-backed man walking like a king with a coiled whip in his hand and his huge spurs ringing. They exchanged courteous salutes at a distance. Jim reined up beside Rich at the head of the cavallada.
“I think these people are going to fight,” he said.
Rich looked back at the sprawling, whitewashed buildings of the rancho as though he were thankful to see the last of them. “If they’d ever suspicioned for a minute what we were up to we’d have found out what they could do. I felt my hair turning white day by day.”
Ostensibly they had been trading for horses, and if the Californios fought as hard as they bargained Jim thought that nobody could stand against them. He and Rich had been in California a month with their ’breed wranglers, traveling from the Santa Ana River up to San Luis Obispo and down again, and twenty-eight head was the best they had been able to do. They had lost money on the goods they brought in over the Spanish Trail from Santa Fe.
They expected to get it back.
The valley was wide under the peaceful sky. Low mountains closed it in on the west, and sometimes the wind that blew through the passes brought with it the smell of the sea. To the east the land lifted into rough hills cut with deep arroyos, and then into the foothills of a highe
r range with bare peaks of gray and sandy pink. Winter never troubled these inland valleys where the grapes and the olives grew. It was November and still warm. The sun had burned the grass to a rich dark gold, clumped with blackish-green live oaks. Beautiful country, Jim thought. A good place for a man to come to when he felt himself getting old. Right now, though, his eyes were less concerned with beauty than with horses.
Alta California was one vast range where the cattle and horses were so thick that in drought years thousands of them had to be slaughtered to save the grass. And from the Santa Ana River to San Luis Obispo and back, Jim and Rich knew exactly where the best horse herds were pastured, which ones were held in the open and which ones were corralled at night.
“I might,” said Rich slowly, “feel a mite more guilty if these self-same Californios had been a mite more friendly when I was here before. As it stands, I got to admit that all I can think of is it serves ’em right.”
The traders and the mountain men had a long, old score against the Spanish settlements. Jim had no personal grudge himself but he had heard enough stories from others, including even the almighty Bents. Individual Mexicans and Californians might be your faithful friends. They might love you, marry you, die for you. But the men who made the rules and signed the papers were a different matter. Bribery and extortion were a way of life. One time you might be given permission to trade or trap, the next time you got thrown into jail and all your possessions were confiscated. Sometimes you got shot. Imperial Spain had always claimed everything right up to the Arkansas and she tried her best to keep a stranglehold on it. Finally she strangled her own colonists into a revolution but it hadn’t changed things too much for foreigners. A Yankee was still taking a risk, particularly since the Texians had tried the revolutionary shoe on the other foot and won their independence from Mexico, and the Mexicans didn’t like it at all. California, being more remote, was less involved in these matters, but Jim knew what Rich meant. He would breathe easier when he saw Cajon Pass ahead of him.
He said cheerfully, “They’ve got so many horses here they throw ’em away when they get dirty. It won’t hurt ’em to lose a few.” He was feeling a pleasurable excitement that he had not felt since the last time his scouts came back and reported that they had found the enemy, and he began to plan the raid.
Rich said, “I hope Walkara don’t mess things up again.”
“He won’t. He’s smart, he won’t make the same mistake twice.” Jim laughed. “Besides, he got Pegleg so mad at him he wouldn’t speak for three years, and he loves Pegleg better than he does his brothers. He won’t do that again.”
Once before, in the same guise of peaceful traders, they had come down the Spanish Trail to California—Jim and Rich and Pegleg, Walkara the Ute chief and two of his brothers, Arrapeen and Sanpitch. The third one, Tobiah, stayed with Walkara’s braves in the outer canyons where they could wait unseen. Pegleg was thinking large thoughts. Jim had discovered that Walkara did not at all feel that he had had a poor day when he ran off four hundred head, or even one hundred. But Pegleg was thinking in thousands, and not just any horses, but the best. This was going to be a real expedition, carefully planned. Everything went well until the Hawk of the Mountains got impatient with the slowness of the white man’s methods and whistled his Utes down out of the hills for a raid of his own.
He got a little over two hundred head. A hard-riding group of Californios got some of those back. The expedition went up in a cloud of dust, and Pegleg, Jim, and Rich went flying out through the Tehachapis to save their necks. When they got back to Walkara’s windy roost on the Spanish Fork, Pegleg packed up his squaws and moved out. Walkara was brokenhearted. But it was three years before he saw Pegleg again.
Jim and Rich trailed with Pegleg for lack of anything more pressing to do. They wintered at Santa Fe and then worked the southwestern country which was Pegleg’s old stamping ground. They didn’t do well. They moved north again, into the valley of the Green and on, ranging the familiar mountains and trapping the familiar streams, but it was not the same. Beaver was scarce. The mountain passes and the camping places in the “holes” were full of strangers, and many of the old acquaintances were gone, killed and scalped, frozen, starved, drowned, gone under.
Even the old enemies were gone. Smallpox had swept the lodges of the Blackfeet. Many of the young men lay dead, with no one to bury them, and the war parties no longer harried far and wide as they had used to. And farther down the Big River, the Arikara towns were also desolate.
Jim felt a strong yearning to go home. Several times he saddled his horse, and once he actually rode for half a day toward the Wind River range and the passes he had first seen so many years ago. He never made it. Something in him had been broken and was not yet healed. The time for going home would come, he knew that, and he knew that he would recognize it when it came. This was not it.
He returned to Rich and Pegleg and plunged into the icy streams again, setting his traps and noticing in a vague sort of way that when Rich came out of the water after hours of work he had trouble walking, as though his joints had stiffened.
The summer rendezvous were still wild, loud, and drunken, but they were like something hanging on after the need for them was over. There were new trading posts everywhere now, in business all the year round. And all of a sudden Jim found that he and Rich and Fitzpatrick and Bridger, who was now known as Old Gabe, were of a different generation, and there was a whole new young breed to sit at their feet and listen to how it was in the old days before the Platte trail was a beaten highway.
There was something else different from those old rendezvous, when Jim had envied Fitz and Bridger their fame. He was famous himself now. Beckwourth, they would say, and look at him, the milky greenhorns. The name had stories to go with it, and Jim heard them, though not often to his face. Beckwourth the runaway slave who had tried to murder his master. Beckwourth the renegade, who set his Indians onto white traders. Beckwourth the horse thief, who put Fitzpatrick and Stewart helpless on the prairie and then stole their watches too. Beckwourth who had a hundred scalps in his tipi and over half of them white, and there’s plenty of men in St. Louis can swear to it because they saw them.
Jim was furious at first. Then he took a contemptuous revenge by frightening the greenhorns out of their skins, acting as wild and savage as they thought he ought to. Rich sweat blood and got him out of there as soon as he could.
The third winter was a hard one and the spring hunt failed. And there was still a market for horses. So once more they rode down to the valley by the Spanish Fork. This time Pegleg laid down the law to his brother the Hawk of the Mountains. Jim and Rich would go ahead to California and spy out the land. Pegleg would go east to see to the marketing end of it—he had cracked a town official over the head with his wooden leg on that last ill-fated visit and thought it wiser to remain out of sight—and Walkara would gather his band of outlaw Utes. At an appointed time they would rendezvous in Cajon Pass.
This, now, was the time.
Jim and Rich, with the cavallada, moved at the steady Spanish lope that shook the dusty miles behind them, stopping only long enough to change horses. At sunset the pass was before them. The horses began to labor on the steady grade. Darkness caught them, but the pass was broad and the trail well-worn, and they kept going. When they reached the crest they stopped to let the horses blow. The wind was strong up here, a desert wind smelling of sand and dryness. The stars were very bright, and it was cold.
Jim heard the sound of a pony’s hoofs clicking up the trail on the other side.
The horseman came in sight, riding with the limber slouch of the Indian, and Jim recognized Walkara’s brother Arrapeen. “We’re here,” he said. “All’s well.”
Arrapeen turned his head and whistled. His profile against the starlight reminded Jim of a hunting owl. They were all handsome men, these brothers, with narrow heads and finely cut faces. Walkara had more wives than he could keep track of, and he was as much of a dandy
as he was a warrior. He came up the pass a moment later with Sanpitch and Tobiah, and Pegleg Smith.
The Hawk of the Mountains was impatient again. “My men are ready. I am ready. Tell us, Antelope, where the horses are.”
“Hold on,” Pegleg said. “Our friends have had a hard ride. They look downright lathered.” He unhooked a leather bottle slung from his saddle horn and took a long swig himself, then handed it to Jim. “I got everything settled eastward. Bent’s Fort, top price for prime stock, and nobody cares where we get ’em. How did you make out?”
Jim told him. When he was finished Walkara said, “Good. I will take the northernmost herd and come through the Tehachapis.”
They planned how it would be done, standing in the starlight at the top of the pass with the desert wind blowing the long hair of the Ute chiefs, and Jim felt alive and good. They would separate into small bands that could stay hidden and move fast, and they would funnel their herds all into Cajon Pass, except Walkara who would join them somewhere out in the Mojave.
“When you start moving,” Jim said, “don’t stop.” He was talking to Rich and Pegleg, because they would go together. “Because if you do I’ll be over the mountain and gone. This child don’t intend to linger.”
“When?” said Walkara.
They discussed how long it would take to get their men into position and let their horses rest.
“Two days from now,” they said, “after the sun is down.”
NINETEEN
They lay in the brush on top of a hill, waiting for sundown.
The horses were hidden in a deep arroyo behind them. In front was the long, long slope of dark gold that went rolling away to the floor of the valley. There were horses grazing on that slope, or standing comfortably head to tail, brushing the flies from each other and thinking of warm sun and the dry sweetness of grass. Far away the whitewashed buildings of Menendez’ rancho caught the light. It was infinitely quiet. Jim felt as peaceful as the drowsy horses.
Follow the Free Wind Page 16
