Yester's Ride

by C. K. Crigger

  All that stopped her from falling was Kuo, who had a firm hold on her hand as if he expected her to run for it if she got the chance. He jerked her upright before she fell.

  “Whoa up. Watch where you’re going,” he said. “I don’t need you skinning your knees and busting out crying.”

  Offended, she tried wrenching her hand out of his. To no avail, since he only gripped her tighter, pinching her fingers together almost to the breaking point.

  “I don’t cry,” she said, “and I can walk by myself.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” She pondered a moment. “I promise I won’t run away. Where would I go?”

  “Probably to the—”

  He broke off, which provoked Ketta quite a lot.

  “Never you mind,” he said.

  If he’d finished that sentence, she might’ve guessed what to do, in case she did break free. As it was, she had no idea. Surrounded by so many strange, hurrying people, she was afraid to speak to any of them. She’d never in her life been to town, or even seen the children at the school where Yester went when he wasn’t working alongside Big Joe. Big Joe forbade her being seen in public. The only other youngster she knew was Nat, and he was Yester’s friend. If Nat hadn’t been Métis, she’d probably never have met him.

  As far as speaking to, for instance, that old woman who’d looked her over and shaken her head . . . well, the woman had terrified Ketta. So disapproving. Ketta knew what that look meant. She’d seen it often enough in Big Joe’s eyes.

  And in Tug’s. She was glad he’d broken off from their little group and entered a saloon.

  “Where are we going?” she nerved herself to ask Kuo.

  “You said you were hungry.”

  “Yes.” She said it slowly, drawing the word out. What did he mean by that? It almost sounded like he would see she got food. But from where? They hadn’t made a camp. He didn’t have his saddlebags, and, besides, they’d emptied them last night.

  An exciting thought struck. “Are we going to a store? To a mercantile?” She saw one up ahead. The building said so on a sign right out front. What wonderful things might be inside? When Mama went on one of her rare trips to town, she always brought something delightful back for Ketta. Candy, sometimes. Or just a few months ago, as Ketta got older and grew several inches, enough material for a new dress. She supposed it must’ve burned up. She’d seen the smoke rising from the house in the distance after she woke up.

  Her beautiful new dress.

  “Bought from my egg money,” Mama had told Big Joe, her mouth set and defiant. “It’s no expense to you.” And mercifully, Big Joe had said no more.

  “No store,” Kuo said now, drawing her from her memories and dashing her hopes. But then he said, “I told you. There’s a restaurant. A Chinese restaurant. It’s time you learned a little of my culture. Your culture now, too.”

  A restaurant? Shock sizzled through her. He truly meant she was going to a restaurant? Indeed, she felt a little faint. And what did he mean, “his culture”?

  A half block farther on, he stopped in front of a very narrow storefront. One window, with some peculiar characters in black drawn upon it, faced the street. Ketta, with a little skip, stuck her nose into the air and sniffed. A most delicious scent overrode other, more noisome odors, and her stomach rumbled.

  “This is it,” Kuo said.

  “The restaurant?”

  “Yes.”

  But then he looked down at her as if in doubt about something. His black eyes narrowed to tilted slits.

  This time when Ketta jerked her hand, he let her go.

  “You’re dirty,” he said, his disapproval as clear as Big Joe’s ever was.

  Glancing down at her dress, she shivered. Would he beat her now? Take her away without anything to eat?

  Ketta straightened her thin, narrow shoulders. “This is the only dress I have. Of course it’s dirty. I’ve been cooking over a campfire and sleeping on the ground.”

  Expecting a blow for sassing him, she was surprised when Kuo blinked and nodded.

  “There’s a trough over there. Go wash.” He pointed at a galvanized iron watering trough set up for the few horses standing outside the stores. Mostly, people walked in this section of town.

  Ketta’s eyes widened. “Where horses drink?”

  “There’s a spigot. Turn it on, child, and wash your face and hands.” He squinted. “And your arms. Here.” Fishing a comb missing a few teeth from a shirt pocket, he handed it to her.

  “Comb your hair, while you’re at it. It looks like packrats have been nesting there.”

  Mortified beyond words, Ketta took the comb, running it fiercely through her hair, careless of a snarl that broke another tooth from the implement. And pulled several fine strands from her head in the bargain.

  When she’d done the best clean-up of herself possible under the circumstances, Kuo took her hand again.

  “Better. Now let’s eat.” He sounded almost cheerful.

  The suggestion suited Ketta. She was too hungry to care about anything except food. Even the constant worry about her mother faded into the background. Her stomach growled again as Kuo opened the door and pulled her inside behind him.

  She hardly knew what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this dark, pokey little place. Ketta had seen from the outside that the building was confined between two larger ones. All of them needed paint. Inside, counters ran along each side of a narrow aisle. Every couple feet a stool was pushed under the counter—unless it was occupied, which most were. At the back, a tiny kitchen was filled with several bustling people who pushed past each other, all the while chattering in loud, high-pitched voices like a bevy of chipmunks. Ketta couldn’t understand a single word they said.

  Following Kuo, she was aware of these people staring at her. She stared back. To a man—and they were all men—they stopped eating as she passed. Stopped talking, too. Finally, Kuo found two stools next to each other. He lifted her onto the one that butted up against the kitchen, putting himself between her and the other customers.

  “Don’t look at them,” he muttered to her. “Mind your manners.”

  Ketta gulped. “Yes, sir.”

  A woman, and Ketta didn’t know how she knew it was a woman since the small person was dressed just like the men in baggy black pants and a long tunic, charged from the kitchen and spoke to Kuo in that strange language.

  He answered in the same tongue. They spoke for a long time, gesturing, voices loud, then whispering soft. The woman, her eyes as black and hard as obsidian, eyed Ketta up and down and nodded. Kuo’s mouth compressed, and he frowned, then also nodded. He didn’t look real happy, though, at whatever they’d discussed.

  Smirking, the woman turned to her. “What you want?”

  Ketta’s hand came up to cover her mouth as she cowered on her perch. Not knowing what to say, she looked at Kuo. He grimaced and rattled off something more to the woman. She nodded with a sharp flip of her pigtails, darting back into the kitchen to start what sounded like another argument with the other two or three people in there.

  Apparently, the cook, a man, prepared the meals on the top of the stove without pans. Ketta watched as he dumped some tiny meat strips, chopped vegetables, and several different kinds of seasonings on a pile on the stove and spread it around to mix it all up.

  “What did she say?” Ketta nerved herself to ask her captor . . . her father. “What did you say?”

  “She asked if you liked chicken or pork. I said to give you pork. There were many chickens around your house. You must eat chicken often.”

  “They’re laying hens,” Ketta said, astonished. “For eggs.”

  He shrugged. “Pork is cheaper.”

  Ketta nodded. She knew all about cheaper. But she had a notion it hadn’t been food, cheap or otherwise, Kuo and the woman had argued over. What she was certain of is that she’d heard an argument.

  Swinging her legs as they dangled from the stool, she glanced around. Apparent
ly, the others had lost interest in her, for which she was glad. So many eyes watching her every move made her nervous.

  Within moments, it seemed, the woman set a plate down in front of first Kuo, then one for Ketta, and a small jug of some brown liquid between them. Her plate was piled with barely less food than the man’s. Two round sticks stuck up out of the pile.

  Ketta looked at the mound, delighting in the smell. But there was a small problem. She didn’t know how to eat it!

  “Where is the fork?” she whispered to Kuo. “Please, will you ask her.”

  He shook his head and picked up the sticks from his own plate. Somehow, to her amazement, he managed to catch the food between the sticks and place it in his mouth. All without dropping a bite.

  “Chopsticks,” he said, as if that explained anything. “Try it.”

  Just as Ketta was on the point of grabbing up a fistful and stuffing it in her mouth, Kuo finally took pity on her and demanded a fork. The woman gave her a glance of disgust. Even though embarrassed, Ketta loved the food. The salt and tang of the strange brown sauce that Kuo dumped over everything. The different vegetables. The funny crisp little bits of what Kuo called noodles. The whole experience.

  Just think, she told herself. When next she talked to Yester, she’d tell him all about eating in a restaurant. A Chinese restaurant.

  If she ever saw Yester again.

  The reminder brought a lurch to her heart and came close to spoiling the whole experience.

  CHAPTER NINE: YESTER

  Yester, with Nat on his heels urging him on, tromped up the gangplank to the deck of the paddle wheeler tied up at the pier with its steam engine chugging softly. The whole affair—dock, plank, and boat—rocked gently. The motion was a whole lot different from riding a horse. It made him a little dizzy. Looking down at the waters of the Snake roiling beneath them made it even worse.

  A heavyset feller wearing a folded bandana wrapped around his forehead stopped them before Yester could raise a foot to step onto the boat’s deck.

  “Where do you boys think you’re going?” he demanded. “Got a ticket?”

  Yester cleared his throat. “No, sir. We’re . . . I’m trying to find my sister. I just needed to ask if you’ve seen her.”

  “Yeah? You can do that from a distance. No need to come on board.”

  The man studied him to the point Yester felt a sort of itching discomfort at the nape of his neck. What did the man think as he stared unblinking into Yester’s eyes? And Nat’s, for he came under the man’s scrutiny as well.

  At last he said, “Your sister, eh? What makes you think she’d be on my boat? She wouldn’t be a stowaway, would she? I don’t allow no stowaways on the White Queen.”

  Yester and Nat exchanged a worried look. Nat shrugged. “Guess we don’t know what a stowaway is,” he said.

  “Think it’s somebody who sneaks on a boat or a train or whatever to catch a ride and doesn’t pay.” Yester spoke from the side of his mouth.

  The man was nodding. “You’ve got it just right, sonny. So, this sister of yours the sneaking kind?”

  “No, sir. But the man who’s got her, he might be. And my sister is just a kid. She wouldn’t have any say in it.”

  The man’s eyebrows drew together, causing the bandana to slip a little lower. “Suppose you tell me what’s going on. If your sister—your little sister—ain’t a stowaway, is she a runaway?” He seemed to enjoy his play on words, but when neither Yester nor Nat got the joke, he yelled around them at a stevedore wheeling a crate of fruit up the gangplank from one of the farms along the river.

  “Be careful with that. Them melons ain’t a box of rocks—like your brains is.” Then to Yester and Nat, “You boys step aside and make room. We’re taking on cargo and got to keep to the schedule.”

  The whole conversation was getting away from him, Yester thought. He’d better speak up fast, before the feller got any more impatient.

  “My sister, she’s a pretty little girl. She’s twelve years old and small for her age. Dark hair, tilted dark eyes. Looks kind of . . .” he hesitated. “Looks kind of foreign. She’s with a Celestial man. He kidnapped her off our ranch. She’s probably scared.”

  “But not crying,” Nat added. “She don’t cry.”

  Pushing the slipped bandana back in place, the man looked from one to the other of them. “Sorry, boys. I not only ain’t seen a little girl in any way, shape, or form, but I ain’t seen any Celestials lately, either. Only passenger ticket I sold today is to a negro. He had cash money, and I didn’t see any reason to deny him.”

  Yester’s shoulders slumped.

  “Seen any black draft horses go by?” Nat put in. “Maybe a Percheron?”

  The man grinned. “Sonny, I can’t tell one kind of horse from another.” He patted the boat’s gleaming, white-painted rail. “This beauty is what holds my attention.”

  “Shoot, Nat,” Yester muttered as they retreated down the narrow gangplank, “we’re getting nowhere fast.”

  “You’re not giving up, are you?”

  “No. Hell, no.” Yester stepped onto dry land with a sense of relief. He didn’t think he liked boats, bouncing around the way they did. Too different from a horse’s easy rocking motion. “I just wish I knew where to go next.”

  He looked around as if seeing the town for the first time. Spread out along the river, Lewiston was larger by far than the town where Big Joe went on his toots. Everybody knew his Pa there, and, by association, they knew him, too. The Noonans were somebody in their own territory. Here, he was just another kid too young to be on his own. Too young to bother with paying him any mind and answering his questions.

  Yester drew a deep breath. “How’s your feet holding up?” he asked Nat, who sent him a questioning stare. “Feel up to walking up and down the next street?”

  “Sure. And the one after that, too, if we don’t find Ketta beforehand.” Nat puffed out his chest, acting like he wasn’t tired after three days on the trail and an afternoon of poking his head through doorways searching for his friend’s little sister. The thing is, Yester knew differently, because he was tired to the bone himself.

  They set off again, Yester on one side of the street, Nat the other, setting up to meet at the end in another hour, or maybe sooner. By then it would be time to scout up some supper, Yester’s treat, and see if they could sleep in their horses’ stalls. Tomorrow they’d have to buy camping supplies. Five dollars—four after paying the livery—wouldn’t last long, and it sure didn’t stretch to eating in cafés.

  Speaking of which, he passed by a pokey little eatery that was so dark inside a fellow’d have to carry a barn lantern to see what he was eating. Could be worms, for all he could tell. Worse, the voices he heard chattered away like a flock of screech owls carrying on a monumental argument, and he couldn’t understand a word of it. Fine with him. Two steps and he was beyond the place anyhow.

  Besides, a man was sweeping end-of-the-day dirt out the front of the store next door, and Yester hurried to catch up with him.

  “Say, mister,” he started, taking off his hat and spinning it around and around in his hands, “I’m looking for a little girl and wonder if you might’ve seen her.”

  The man didn’t glance up. “Doubt it. Little girls don’t generally wander into this part of town.”

  Yester stared around. This part? It didn’t appear all that different from any other part to him. Kind of dirty, kind of smelly, definitely loud. “Well, she’s probably with somebody. A Chinese man. She’s my sister, and he kidnapped her from our ranch.”

  “You got a ranch?” the sweeper put all his doubt into those few words.

  “Yessir, my family does.”

  Broom action ceased. “A Chinese man, you say?”

  Yester nodded.

  “I haven’t seen any little girls,” the man said, putting a stop to Yester’s sudden rush of hope, “but you might ask next door at that restaurant. It’s run by a Chink, for the Chinks. Men mostly, no women.
Good luck finding somebody you can talk to, howsomever. I don’t think they speak English.”

  Yester had already begun to turn but stopped at that. No English? No women? Not a place, then, worthwhile spending his time on.

  “Thanks, mister,” he said and, jamming his hat over his sweaty hair, moved on.

  At the end of a frustrating hour, the boys met at the end of the street, once again finding themselves near the docks and fairly close to the livery where they’d left their horses. Nat had gotten there first, and, even at a distance Yester knew his friend’s search had come up as empty as his own. Nat stood with an arm wrapped around a red-and-white-striped barber pole and was digging his moccasined toe in the crack between the sun-dried boards of the shop’s stoop.

  “No luck?” Yester asked, wanting to make sure of his first impression. He added, as Nat gave a disgusted shake of the head, “Me, neither.” His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know what to do, Nat.”

  “You want to go home?”

  “Not without my sister.” He paused. “I don’t want to, but what if we can’t get a lead on her? I don’t have enough money to stay here long.”

  “Go see the sheriff, or the marshal, or somebody,” Nat advised. “Get some help. It’s what you figured on doing before we left home, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. But now we’re out of our home territory. Whoever’s in charge here ain’t going to care about a little lost girl—a little lost Chinese kind of girl—like Sheriff Zeigler does.”

  “You don’t know that.” Nat grinned. “Sheriff Zeigler cares about your ma, is what.”

  If Yester hadn’t been so tired, he might’ve taken offense. But why? Nat was right. And there didn’t have to be anything fishy about the caring. Most everybody liked his ma. Why wouldn’t they? She was a fine woman who treated everybody well. Yeah, and even he could tell she was a pretty woman.

  He nodded, even as he gazed down the street. “There’s an eatery over there. How about some chuck?”