“We’re going fast,” he’d said after their third stop to pay the toll. “It won’t take us long to get there.”
“Eight days,” Father had told him.
“It won’t take us eight days at this speed,” George had said.
“This is the easy part,” Father said. “We’re on level ground. We have to cross the mountains.”
“It may take us awhile going up, but coming down should be real fast,” George had reasoned. “We could make it in seven days.”
“You’re using good logic,” Father had said. “It does take longer to go up than come down, but the mountains will take longer than if we were on level ground, like now.”
How could Father talk to George like that without yelling, “It’ll take eight days! Now be quiet.”
As she lay on the pallet on the floor of the inn, Betsy thought of how she could use the cheese. She doubted she could get it into George’s valise without someone seeing her. However, she might be able to smear the cheese on the handles. When they loaded their belongings that morning, Uncle Paul had picked up the valise by the bottom and held it up so that his son could grab the handles. If they followed that pattern tomorrow, George would get smelly cheese all over his hands. Knowing George, he’d rub his hands on his clothes and make them smelly, too. Then he’d have to ride up with the driver in the cold wind. And he not only wouldn’t be the center of attention, the silence in the cab without his chatter would give the others a welcome rest.
Betsy set the lunch pail near the fire so the cheese would soften in the night and fell asleep thinking that Mary would be pleased with her. When they got to Pittsburgh, Betsy would write to her friend and tell her how well the cheese worked.
Early the next morning, as soon as they had breakfasted, Betsy slipped outside with her gear. The temperature was nicer, more like spring, but the air still held a bit of winter’s chill. She stowed the violin in the rear boot and set her lunch pail on the side of the stage that couldn’t be seen from the inn. She stuffed the quilts and her cloak in the cab. She’d smear the cheese before she put on the bulky cloak, so it wouldn’t get in her way, and she wouldn’t soil it. The driver was hitching the horses, but he paid no attention to her. Where were the others? She stepped back into the inn.
“George, are you ready?” She couldn’t see him in the dining room.
“He’s out back getting Jefferson,” her mother answered. “Could you carry this please? Your father is fetching Silverstreak, and I think we’d better hurry before our driver gets impatient.”
Betsy picked up the bag. “I can carry another one. Is George’s valise ready?”
“Why thank you, dear,” Aunt Eleanor said. “It’s right here.” She pointed to it and then gathered her own belongings.
Betsy fairly skipped outside. This was better than the plan, but she didn’t have much time. She heaved her mother’s bag onto the luggage rack then disappeared behind the stage to do her duty on George’s valise.
The smell of the cheese nearly gagged her. It had gotten stronger in the tightly closed pail. She quickly opened the package, careful to keep her hands on the packaging and not touch the moldy cheese. She smeared the handles with the soft cheese, and for good measure spread some on the top, too. Then she quickly ran to the bushes on the far side of the road and tossed the cheese. Mother and Aunt Eleanor were on the small porch, and Father, Uncle Paul, and George were coming around the side of the inn.
“Load them up,” the driver called. Betsy giggled. She’d actually done it without being seen. She sauntered toward the group and petted Silverstreak while Father tied the horse to the back of the coach. Another stagecoach was loading behind them, and the driver yelled, “Load them up,” again.
Betsy stood on the passenger step and started to climb into the cab, but Father stopped her. He’d come around to the side where George’s valise sat on the ground. “Find a place for this, Betsy,” he said.
“But that’s George’s bag,” she said. “Where’s George?” She glanced inside the cab and saw George already in his normal seat, holding Jefferson.
“Hurry,” Father said. He was holding the bag on the bottom and handing it up to her. He wrinkled his nose and glanced around as if looking for the source of the odor. What could she do? She froze.
“Betsy?”
She reached for the handle, trying to lift the bag with two fingers, but it was too heavy, and she had to take it from her father with a firm grip. She could feel the slimy cheese residue on her hand but held her breath and shoved the bag on top of the coach. The valise teetered, so she wedged her foot against the wheel rim and hoisted herself up to stuff the bag in place. At that moment the impatient horses shifted, causing the wheel to turn slightly. Betsy lost her foothold and pitched headlong onto George’s bag.
She gagged and pushed herself off the luggage rack. The stuff was in her hair, on her face, on her hands. She screamed, and Father reached for her.
“Don’t touch me,” she shrieked and jumped off the stage. She whirled around and saw the others staring at her from inside the cab. She’d made herself the center of attention. Stop, she told herself. Calm down. She had to get the cheese off.
Father leaned toward her then backed away. “Betsy, what’s that smell?”
“Limburger cheese,” she mumbled and darted to the well at the side of the inn. She lowered the bucket and pulled it up, spilling cold water on her dress.
“Betsy, what have you done?” Mother had climbed out of the stage and stood beside her. “What is this in your hair?”
“Limburger cheese,” Betsy said again, this time more plainly. She plunged her hands into the water and splashed some on her face, scrubbing at the cheese.
“You can’t wash your hair now and travel all day with wet hair. You’d catch your death of cold,” Mother said. “Where did you get this cheese?”
“On George’s bag,” Betsy said.
“George Lankford,” Mother called toward the stage. “Get out here this minute.”
“No, Mother. He didn’t put it there. I did,” Betsy said in a small voice.
“Load them up,” the stage driver yelled.
“We’ve got to go,” Mother said. “We’ll straighten this out on the way.”
They walked back to the stage, and Mother climbed inside. Jefferson barked and jumped out of George’s arms and onto the narrow floor when Betsy sat down by the window.
“You stink,” George said. She ignored him.
Jefferson growled; then he howled, and he backed away from Betsy.
The stage lurched and pulled away from the inn, and the chaos inside the coach grew louder.
“Make Jefferson stop,” Betsy commanded.
“He can’t help it. You smell bad,” George said.
Betsy glanced at the others. George’s parents looked bemused. Father’s nose was wrinkled, and his eyes were sharp on her. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Mother. They were disappointed in her behavior, and they had a right to be.
“It was a harmless prank,” Mother said in a loud voice to be heard over Jefferson’s whining. “Where did you get the cheese?”
“I brought it from Boston.” Betsy could have placed the blame on Mary, but that wasn’t honest. Mary may have given her the cheese, but she hadn’t forced her to use it. Betsy was already in big trouble. To lie would have made it worse. That was one of God’s commandments, and Mother said to break one was a sin.
“You put it on George’s valise?” Aunt Eleanor asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Father asked.
What could she say? That George teased her too much, and she couldn’t stand it anymore? That she wanted to make him pay? That Father really wanted a son and he was stuck with her? A too-tall gangly girl.
Jefferson let loose with a long howl and some short yaps, saving Betsy from answering.
“This can’t continue,” Mother said. “Thomas, would you ask the driver to stop? Betsy had better sit outside until she a
irs out.”
“But, Mother,” Betsy began then stopped. She deserved this. She deserved to be punished. And she couldn’t stand the yelping of Jefferson anymore. At least sitting outside she’d be away from George and his dog.
Father hailed the driver who pulled up on the reins. The gruff fellow didn’t look any too happy to have a smelly passenger sitting beside him on the driver’s box, but he scooted over to make room for Betsy.
The March wind whipped against her, and she shivered into the quilt that she wrapped tightly around her, keeping her hands deep in the folds. She wished she could put on her hat, but with the cheese smell still in her hair, the hat would be ruined.
When they stopped to pay the first toll, George jumped out of the stage with Jefferson.
“How’s the weather up there?” he called, but Betsy ignored him. She wallowed in her misery, and although her conscience argued with her, she vowed to find another way to teach George a lesson.
CHAPTER 5
The Embarrassing Horse Ride
At the end of the second day of travel, under the watchful eye of her mother, Betsy scrubbed the cheese off George’s valise and apologized for playing what the family was calling her “harmless prank.” She took a bath, washed her hair, washed her too-short traveling dress, and hung it in front of the inn’s fireplace to dry.
The point of her whole ordeal with George was to make him as miserable as he’d made her by embarrassing her. And that plan was to get him isolated, to not let him be the center of attention that he seemed to thrive on. All she’d managed to do so far was embarrass herself. She sat in front of the fire and finger-combed her hair until the curly brown locks were dry.
“I’m sorry,” she’d heard her mother say to Aunt Eleanor. “That action was so out of character for our shy Betsy. I don’t know what got into her, but I’ll talk to her.”
And her mother did talk to her. It wasn’t a discussion; it was a lecture about how unladylike her conduct had been. About how it wasn’t the Christian thing to do to play pranks on George. About how we must all get along on this trip. About right and wrong.
She knew all that. And she knew she had been wrong. The next time she planned how to get George, it would not involve other people.
How did George so effortlessly hurt her feelings? Did he plan those things out? Or was it a natural part of his personality to embarrass her? She would teach him to think more about other people’s feelings. How exactly to do that escaped her for the moment, but she gave it a lot of thought as the journey continued.
The days of riding in the stage fell into a pattern. Part of the time they were walking, letting the horses pull the stage up the steep mountains without the added weight of passengers.
“We may as well have walked all the way to Pittsburgh,” George complained.
“At least we’re not carrying our bags,” Betsy had pointed out to him, one of the few times she directed a sentence his way. Mostly she stayed to herself—out of George’s way.
She missed Boston. She missed Mary. What would she be doing now? Did she go down to the harbor to look for Richard?
On Sunday, the group didn’t observe a day of rest.
“I believe the Lord will understand that we must travel,” Mother told Betsy. “Although He also must know how weary we are from the trip.”
Father led an early worship service before they climbed back into the stage, and Betsy played a hymn on the violin. She found solace in her music, and she prayed that she would find a happy life in Cincinnati. She desperately needed a new friend.
“Today’s the eighth day,” George announced on Monday. “We’ll get to Pittsburgh today, won’t we?”
“We should,” Father answered. He was still as patient as ever with George, to Betsy’s dismay. “I suspect it will be early evening when we arrive.”
George talked a blue streak the entire day. He asked about Pittsburgh, about building the flatboat, about where they would stay, and about when they would leave for Cincinnati.
But it was Betsy who spotted Pittsburgh first. The telltale sign was the haze of smoke that hung over the horizon.
“They have factories,” Father said. “Lots of them—and they burn coal. That’s what makes all that haze.”
They were still a few hours from settling in for the night. They had to wait for their turn on the ferry that would take them into Pittsburgh where they’d stay in yet another inn.
All along the riverbank were little wooden huts. Children scampered around, shouting as they played tag. Their voices carried to the ferry dock and combined with the sound of hammering from across the river. It was quite a noisy din. Betsy’s senses were reeling from the smoke and the noise. Pittsburgh wasn’t the country town she had thought it would be. It reminded her of the manufacturing part of Boston. Would Cincinnati be like this, too?
Once they were settled at an inn for the night, Betsy fell into a deep sleep and awakened again to the clattering of hammers.
“What are they building?” she asked Mother at breakfast. Both families were grouped around the large table at the inn.
“Boats, of course, but there are a lot of foundries for ironwork, too. We’ll explore today while your father and Uncle Paul make inquiries about the boat.”
“Can I go to the stable and see Silverstreak?” This time Betsy turned to her father.
“That would be very helpful,” he said and told her the name of the stable and gave her directions. “She could use a good grooming and some exercise, but that will have to wait. Your uncle Paul and I want to see if there are some adequately built flatboats before we make lumber purchases to build our own.”
“Can I go with you?” George asked.
“It would be best if you stayed with the women today,” his father replied. “Once we start building, you’ll be part of the crew.”
“If we build,” Father said, “it will take awhile, and we won’t be able to make the trip with the others when the thaw comes. The innkeeper said at the first sign of the spring floods, the river is crowded with boats.”
“But we aren’t going as far as the Louisville Falls. We’re stopping at Cincinnati, so we don’t need the high water,” Uncle Paul said.
The two men left, still discussing whether to buy a boat or build it.
“Can we go down by the river?” George asked.
“Perhaps you and Betsy can after we walk around this area,” his mother said. “I don’t want you down there alone.”
Wonderful, Betsy thought. She had to watch out for George again.
Betsy coughed when they walked outside the inn. The haze was the same as yesterday. Women on the street wore black with a little white lace peeking out of their bonnets and collars. She imagined they had to change the white lace quite often. Everything seemed various shades of gray.
The foursome walked the area around the inn, George in the lead with a long rope tied around Jefferson’s neck and Betsy and the women following behind. They paused to glance inside the brick mercantile stores that lined the streets.
“We should make a list of supplies we’ll need,” Mother said to Aunt Eleanor. “There are plenty of mercantiles here with everything we’ll need in Cincinnati.”
“I wish we knew what could be purchased there and what we must take with us,” Aunt Eleanor said. “Perhaps the men will know more when they return.”
They walked down one side of the street for several blocks and up the other side of the street, then returned to the inn.
“You may go to the stable now, Betsy. Do you remember the way?” Mother asked. Betsy nodded, for she had noted the stable’s location on their walk.
George piped up, “Can I go with her and then to the river?”
“That will be fine, but be back before noon,” Aunt Eleanor said. No one had asked Betsy if it was all right for George and Jefferson to tag along. She sighed. Was there no escaping this boy and his dog?
He dashed ahead of her, staying in sight, so she didn’t have to walk w
ith him. When he reached the corner where they were to turn to get to the stable, he waited.
“Hurry up, Betsy.”
On purpose she slowed her step. It was a small victory, but this was her errand, and she wouldn’t be bullied about by George. Once she made the corner, George again ran along ahead of her, stopping now and then to look at stores or businesses.
She didn’t know what his hurry was. When he reached the Blackburn stable, he didn’t go inside in search of the horse but stayed outside.
“Coming in?” Betsy asked as she swept regally by him.
“No, Jefferson and I’ll wait, but don’t take long. I want to go down by the river.”
Betsy ducked inside the dimness of the stable and found the mare with no difficulty, even though she was in the last stall on the left. A stableboy was brushing a horse in a stall she passed, but she walked like she knew what she was doing, and he didn’t bother her. She gave Silverstreak a good grooming, knowing that would please Father, and leaned her head against her only friend. She wished she could take the mare out for a ride. And why not? Silverstreak needed the exercise, and Father would be grateful that she’d done it.
She’d have to talk to the stableboy, and that wasn’t something she wanted to do. Maybe she could get George to do it. She strode purposely back outside.
“What kept you so long?” George asked.
“We’re going to take Silverstreak out for a ride. Tell the stableboy what we’re doing,” she ordered.
“I’m not riding that horse,” George said. “Come on. Let’s go down to the river.”
“We can ride Silverstreak and get there a lot faster.”
“I’m not riding that horse,” George repeated.
“Are you afraid of her?” Betsy asked. Surely not. But now that she thought about it, he’d given the horse a wide berth the entire trip on the boat and in the mornings and evenings when she and Father had tied Silverstreak behind the stage.
American Challenge Page 25
