Wagon Train West

by Lauran Paine

  At dawn Lige lined them out. Every team and span of oxen had yoke and collar bells on them. They made a festive, joyous sound, and it couldn’t have been more appropriate, either, although the purpose had nothing to do with the exuberance and thankfulness of the people. The bells were to let each wagoner know how far ahead and how far behind each wagon was when they got into the gap up ahead. This eliminated a lot of riding back and forth and served to let each drover know what the distance ahead and behind was.

  The soldiers didn’t herd the Dakotas. Some of the Indians were given horses to ride, but most of them walked. At Lige’s grim suggestion, they were kept up with the army and not allowed to drop back where the emigrants were.

  The animals were hard to handle because of their recent starvation, so an early nooning was made. After that, they made good time and hit the gap in the late afternoon and kept right on going, their bells ringing, their animals strong and willing, and the people silent with gratefulness.

  Kit awakened late in the afternoon. He caught Lige riding by, and sent him after a razor. Shaving and washing inside the lurching, rumbling Conestoga was no mean feat, but he accomplished it. Then he was fed by the solicitous people who owned the wagon, and Lige brought his horse up, saddled and bridled. He mounted it and rode beside Lige for an hour. They talked of a hundred things, and when the conversation lagged, Kit rode over to the Burgess wagon—as though drawn by a magnet.

  Allie was riding a horse, astride. She watched him swing around her parents’ vehicle and smiled at him. She looked freshly scrubbed. Except for the stillness in the background of her eyes and the leaner, more mature look to her face, she was exactly as the picture in his heart showed her.

  “Feel better, Kit?”

  “Lots better. I even took a bath.”

  “You look a lot better without the whiskers.”

  “You’re a picture yourself, Allie. Prettiest picture in the West.”

  She flushed, and her gray eyes sparkled. He turned and gazed up at the towering spires on each side of the pass. “How’d you like to ride up there?” he asked, without looking around at her.

  “I’d love to. Is there a way?” She, too, was studying the purple monoliths with a hushed look.

  “Yes, there’s a trail I used to use when we trapped this country. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She followed him far down the wagon train at a lope. He wasn’t conscious of the eyes that followed them, but she was. Where the southern slope of the bisected crags hunched low on the valley floor, he found the old trail and started up it. She followed behind him with high color in her face.

  They plodded upward until they came to a sentinel clearing, where the great, warm strokes of the sun’s bloodred paint were lavished on the sere, wind-swept space, and there he dismounted and helped her down. Up here, high above the wagons, with just the faintest echo of the team bells coming very, very faintly, the quiet was louder than any noise could have been.

  She stood looking out over the race of landfall southward, then down where the big old wagons were creaking and lumbering, as small as little animals. She turned and looked at his profile. “Is this where the Sioux sentries were?”

  “Yes.” He smiled gently back at her. “This is also a place where their medicine men come to pray. It’s a sacred spot. They’re pretty close to God up here, at that.” Embarrassed at what he’d said, he turned away and looked with a brooding expression northward. The jumble of mountains and forests and broad, green valleys ran out to the limits of the world and merged with the paling horizon.

  “You never talked about God before, Kit.”

  “No,” he said slowly, without looking away from Dakota country. “Lots of men don’t. That doesn’t mean they don’t talk to Him, Allie. Places like this are churches to me.”

  She dropped down on the barren knob and looked up at his lean, weary face. “Sit here, Kit, beside me.”

  For a long time neither of them spoke, then Kit raised his arm and pointed with a little twig he was holding between his fingers. “See that black-looking mountain over yonder, the one with the pinch of snow still on it?”

  “Yes.” But she didn’t look at it very long. His face held her attention fully.

  “That’s what the Dakotas call the Mountain Monastery. You go up there to seek visions and talk to God.”

  “Have you ever been up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seeking a vision?”

  His arm dropped and the little twig made a scratching sound against the stony ground. “No, to talk to God. Once, about five years ago, I went on a vision quest. I don’t believe white men have much success there. Maybe they don’t believe … I don’t know … but I didn’t get any vision. Just cussed near froze to death.” He turned to her with a wry smile. “That’s one Indian trick I don’t put too much faith in.”

  “Kit, you love this country, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ve traveled around quite a little, Allie. I always come back here. I reckon I’ll die here.”

  “Is that why we rode up here?” she asked with rare insight, looking at him steadily with her smoky-eyed gaze.

  He nodded. “Yes, Allie, you’re going on, but I belong here. I’d never be any good as a farmer. Maybe I believe like the Indians do. I don’t want to plow a big wound in the breast of my mother, the earth.” He twisted the little stick between his fingers. “I love you, Allie. I want you to know that. But maybe it’d be better if I didn’t. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll never forget you, Allie. Never.”

  She looked for a long time into the failing light before she said anything, then her voice was low. “No, Kit. I’m not going on. I told my folks. Dad understands.”

  “Told them what?”

  “That this is your country, that you’d never be happy anywhere else.” She looked at him quickly. “I knew that, Kit. I’ve always known it. Don’t ask me how I knew. It was a dozen things. The way you feel about the Indians, the way you know every trail. It all came to the same thing. This is Kit Butler’s country. I knew it right from the start. A woman who loves a man like you, I suppose, has to adjust, Kit, and make herself understand things like this.” She looked down at the crawling wagons. “I’m not going any farther than Fort Collins, Kit.”

  He put down the stick and looked at Allie. There was nothing said for several moments, and the wagon bells were fainter. He arose abruptly and walked over to where he could see the sun curling around the distant landfall beyond the pass.

  “How do you know you’ll be happy here, Allie?”

  She walked up behind him. “Because you’ll be here. That’s enough.”

  He whirled. “Is it? Are you sure?”

  “As sure as any woman ever was, Kit.”

  He didn’t reach for her, just felt for her hand and drew her up beside him, where they could both see the distance and the little worms that were Conestogas breaking out into the sun-splashed plain beyond the pass. They stood there looking westward before she broke the lingering, hurting silence.

  “I need you, Kit,” she said in a small voice.

  “Allie.”

  “Let me tell you something else, too. You’re a great man. You’ll see pretty soon. I’ll be terribly proud of you one of these days, Kit. I didn’t understand you before. None of us did. We do now. Even my mother and father do. You’ll be a big man when this country comes of age. I’ll be proud of you. So will our children, Kit.”

  He squeezed her hand and looked down at her with an embarrassed little wisp of a smile. “I reckon, then, we’re going to get married.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Then he kissed her.

  the end

  About the Author

  Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms, has written over a thousand books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a yo
ung age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures, where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the nineteenth century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday night brawls.” He served in the US Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market, and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured, along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.