by Gary Paulsen
He remounted and followed the track, which seemed to go west by slightly south, and tried not to hope.
It was only midday, but by late afternoon the tracks seemed to have faded more and he was having trouble following them. It had struck him as odd that a single wagon would come out here alone, but there was something drawing him on and he decided to give it another hour or two before turning back to the west.
The country was the same. Rolling flat, or what seemed to be flat with shallow dips into more flatness. He thought he could see for miles, and he couldn't see anything like a wagon, and at last he decided to end the run and cut north again.
His turn to the north took him onto a low rise, and at the top of the rise he happened to glance left and something caught his eye.
He stopped and studied it. Way off, over a mile, there was something round sticking up out of the grass. It wasn't white, quite, but a gray color. A gray spot and he realized it was tarp, canvas, and that he was looking at the top of a covered wagon.
The mare turned west again without his meaning to turn her—answering pressure from his knees—and he nudged her into a fast walk.
II it was a wagon it would have people. And if there were people they might know where they were, or where the main wagon train was.
But as he drew closer he felt a strangeness about the wagon. It was stopped dead, as if camped. But he could see no stock, no sign of life, and there wasn't any smoke from a cook fire.
He stopped a hundred yards from the wagon and sat on the mare, his thumb on the hammer of the rifle. “Hello!”
No answer.
“Hello at the wagon—is anybody there?”
Silence. For a second he thought he heard a small sound, almost a whimper, but it could have come from the mare or the mule breathing.
“I'm coming in and I'm friendly!”
Still he sat, tensed, waiting for any sign of movement or threat. Again he thought he heard a small sound, but it was so soft he could not be sure and other than that, nothing.
The mule ended it. He had been standing in back of the mare, but he saw the wagon and decided to investigate and walked past the mare and went up to the wagon.
Nothing happened, and Francis took it as a good sign and thumped his heels against the mare's ribs and moved to the wagon.
“Hello!” he said again, but there was no answer. He could find no sign of life until he came to the rear of the wagon and looked inside.
There were two children sitting on a quilt, a girl and a boy, their eyes wide with fright. The girl was eight or nine, wearing a sunbonnet with most of the stiffener out of the brim so it drooped. The boy was five or six. Both of them were blond and covered with freckles. As Francis stared at them—-finding children was the last thing he had expected to do—the girl made a sound, a cry, and Francis recognized it as the sound he had heard.
“Where are your folks?” Francis looked around the wagon and could see nothing. “And how did the wagon get here? Where are your animals?”
The boy jumped at the sound and stuck a thumb in his mouth and started sucking. The girl seemed startled as well but seemed to have more spunk than the boy.
“Are you a savage?” she asked. “Are you one of them savages?”
Francis shook his head. “I don't think so. My name is Francis. What's yours?”
She relaxed. “I'm Charlotte, but folks all called me Lottie. This is Billy. Of course, it's William and not Billy, but Billy is the short way of saying William just like Lottie is short for Charlotte, and ain't that the strangest thing? Who would think Billy would come from William instead of it being Willy or just plain Will …”
Francis held up his hand. “Easy, easy.”
“I like to talk,” she said. “Sometimes it gets away from me a little.”
Francis nodded.
“It's like there's a place in me full of words and when I open the door to the place they just start coming and I can't seem to stop …”
Again Francis held up his hand. “We have other things to talk about now. Where are your folks?”
“Folk,” she said. “It was just Pa. Ma went on must have been two years ago when some croup came and took her. Pa decided to go West, but he got the water sickness and they made us leave the train.”
“Water sickness?” Francis stopped her again. “You mean cholera?”
She nodded. “That's the one. He was taken sick, and we came out here so he could get well except that he didn't. Get well I mean. It started to take him down, and he left us with some flour and biscuits that he made and took off walking until he got over it so we wouldn't take the sickness from him.”
“How long ago was that?” Cholera, Francis thought. Cholera. They said it came from drinking bad water, but nobody was sure and he wondered if he could catch it just by being close to the children. “When did he go off?”
“It's been two days and a little more now.” She hesitated, and Francis saw a tear come down her cheek and saw that Billy was crying as well, and perhaps had been the whole time. “He ain't coming back, is he?”
Some died in a day, Francis had heard. Some had a fever in the morning and were dead by noon. The man had gone off to The alone to protect his children, although leaving them alone in the prairie was close to a death sentence. Pushing the sick ones out was the only protection wagon trains had, getting the sick ones away from the unsick people. But it still seemed a brutal thing to Francis, pushing these children out with their sick father when they obviously weren't sick, making them go it alone.
Except, Francis thought, they weren't alone. Not now. He couldn't leave them. They wouldn't last a week. And they weren't sick, or didn't appear to be.
“Wait here,” he said. “I'm going to look around a bit. I'll be back.”
He left them in the wagon and started searching out and around the wagon. He was looking for the father on the off chance that he had survived— some had, he knew, although it left them sickly— and he didn't want to leave the man here if he wasn't dead.
He found the father on the fourth circle around the wagon. He had gone a good distance—two hundred yards—before settling into the grass. Francis read the sign. He was flat on his back and very dead, although the coyotes and wolves hadn't been at him yet. His arms were at his sides and he had a peaceful look on his face—if, Francis thought, dead people can have any look—and it looked like he'd been sitting and just laid back when death came.
I should bury him, Francis thought, but he knew he couldn't. He shouldn't even be this close and he backed the mare away shaking his head. He hated to leave but the sickness could still be here, still be around the body, and he didn't want to take any chances. He'd have to leave the body.
He went straight back to the wagon where the children still sat inside on the quilt.
“Did you find Pa?” Lottie asked.
Francis didn't answer the question but instead scanned the prairie around the wagon again. “Didn't you have horses or oxen when you came?”
Lottie nodded. “Two horses. Buck and liooger. liut Pa he let them loose just before he got bad sick and something run them off.”
Wolves, Francis thought. They're probably dead and if not they're so far away I could never find them.
“What are we going to do?” Lottie asked, and Francis thought, That's it, that's it exactly, as Courtweiler would have said. What could he do?
Suddenly he was not alone. He had two children to care for and nothing else had changed. He didn't know where he was or where to go, didn't know anything except now rhere were three of them instead of just one.
He shook his head. It would have to be taken a step at a time and one thing was sure, they couldn't stay here.
“Get your stuff together,” he told Lottie. “And Billy's, too. We're going to go.”
“Where?” Lottie asked.
Good question, Francis thought—and I don't have the tiniest part of an answer. But he smiled, a smile he didn't really feel, and pointed with his chin
.
“West,” he said. “We're going to go West …”
Again the mule saved him.
It was one thing to say they were going to go West, something else again to do it. The children were small, but they could not have all three ridden the mare and they couldn't have walked. Francis could have walked and led them on the mare and was thinking of doing just that when he saw the mule standing by the wagon.
“Could you carry them?” he said aloud and Lottie misunderstood, thought he was talking to her.
“You mean me? Could I carry Billy? Well, for a little ways …”
“No, no. I was talking ro the mule.”
“The mule? You were talking to a mule? Do they know how to talk? They look so dumb the way they just stand all the time except this one seems to eat more than anything I've seen …”
“Is there a halter in the wagon?”
“Yeah. Pa he kept extra ones for the horses but I'm not sure he'd want you taking them … Oh. I guess it doesn't matter, does it?”
She climbed into the wagon and came out in a moment with a halter. Francis tied the mare to the wagon wheel and dismounted, walked up to the mule with the halter and was surprised when the mule stuck his head through it and let him buckle it in place.
“I thought mules were s'posed to be fractious,” Lottie said. “Pa he said mules were all the time being fractious but your mule seems to be a right nice fellow. Time was I saw a mule belonged to our neighbor, her name was Nancy and she had red hair and lived a mile away down a rocky road and worked all the time. Anyway she had a mule name of Plover and he could kick so fast he'd kick a rock if you threw it at his back end, …”
Francis let her talk and used a rope to tie a folded blanket from the wagon on the mule's back. It was makeshift at best, but it would give them something to sit on.
He had thought fleetingly of trying to harness the mule and the mare to pull the wagon, but it was too heavy and they were much too lightweight to take the load for very long. And besides, he didn't want to be encumbered with a wagon. They might hit rough country where a wagon couldn't go.
There were other things he took from the wagon. Another rifle, and under the seat wrapped in a grease-stained sack of soft leather, he found a .44 Colt's cap and ball revolver. He wasn't much on handguns—they were mostly inaccurate and didn't have any range or punch—but it held six balls and he thought there might come a rime when he would need to shoot without reloading so he took it, along with a bullet mold and a box of caps and a full flask of powder. There was some flour—he ate half a handful raw—and some matches and salt and a cast-iron Dutch oven with a lid. All of this he placed in a canvas bag he'd found in the wagon, which he hung on the mule.
He took two more blankets and the quilt to make a bedroll for the children, cut a large piece of canvas from the top of the wagon for a tent or lean-to, rolled them all and tied them across the mule's shoulders and stood back to look at it. It was bulky, but light, and the two children together wouldn't make half a man—they were skinny as well as small—and he thought the mule would not have any trouble carrying them.
He led the mule up to the rear of the wagon and reached in, loaded Billy and Lottie onto the mule's back. The mule took the load easily and didn't flinch or buck, for which Francis was thankful.
Then he mounted the mare, took the mule's lead rope in his hand and left the wagon. He did not look back for some time and when he did the wagon was a spot in the endless grass and Lottie was looking straight at him. But the boy had somehow turned around on the mule and was sitting backward, sucking his thumb, still silent, staring at the wagon.
The Indians found them in midafternoon.
Or, in reality, Francis and the Indians found each other.
Francis and the children started from the wagon about noon, working west and slightly north. He could think of no reason for the northerly movement except that it seemed right, a hunch, and he decided to follow it, hoping to cut a wagon train— the one he'd left or the one that had set the children and their father out. But he understood there was little chance.
The boredom set back in. There were long silences while they rode. Francis thought of his family, his mind triggered by the two children with him. Ma. Pa. His little sister Rebecca. He kept wondering how she was doing. He could not remember her face, how she looked, and found himself thinking that she must look a lot like Lottie.
Billy seemed to prefer sitting backward on the mule, sucking his thumb. The only time he changed was when Francis gave them each a piece of the venison jerky he'd brought from the deer he'd killed. Billy grabbed the meat like a puppy— revealing a thumb that was amazingly white and clean—and almost swallowed it whole before going back to thumb sucking.
The silences were punctuated at intervals by Lottie, who would “go off,” as Francis came to think of it, at the slightest provocation, the sunbonnet wobbling as she talked.
“See that buzzard up there? How can they fly like that without ever moving their wings, just hang there like they was floating on the air? Is it like they float there, like sticks float on water? How can the air be thick enough for them to float that way when it's still thin enough to breathe? I wish I could do that, just float up there and see it all forever and ever …”
The talk had a lulling effect and between the boredom of the prairie—which he knew was deceptive—and Lottie going on, he soon fell into a kind of haze.
He should have known better. Every time he'd let his guard down something had come at him. But he rode and dozed, the mule following easily, and Lottie was talking about the neighbor Nancy.
“… she goes to making things that are so pretty they take your breath away. Things to put on shelves and just look at, little boxes with trees on them and designs and colors—Oh.”
The stopping startled Francis. His eyes had been half closed, his body rolling with the motion of the mare, his mind on a million other things and when she stopped talking he snapped his eyes open, but it was too late.
In front of him on either side were two Indian men. One had a rifle and the other a bow with an arrow in the string and they were both on foot— almost unheard of on the prairie. The one on the left was older, a grown man, the one on the right was young—fifteen, sixteen—and they were standing looking at him.
Francis's rifle was across his lap. The handgun hung in the sack off the saddle horn. The two extra rifles were back on the mule.
All of this, the Indians, the way they looked not twenty feet away, their weapons, his own weapons not being ready—all of this he registered in half a second. And at the same time he knew that there was no time. Even if he could swing the rifle up and get a shot off at one of them the other would get him.
It could have gone in any direction and for a full five seconds—it seemed like an hour—the tension was wound so tight Francis could hear his heart beating. He stared at them, they looked at him.
Then two things. He saw they were not wearing paint, which they would be wearing if they were looking to war. and at the same time the older of the two smiled and said something to the other who smiled as well.
They were looking back at Lottie and Billy— who was still sitting the mule backward, ignoring The Indians. Lottie had seen them but she had to hold her head back to peer out from beneath the flopping rim of her sunbonnet.
“Are they savages?” she asked.
“Be quiet,” Francis said.
“Because if they are, you know, savages, then I think maybe you should do something. Of course I never have seen no savages and only heard about them in the wagon train where everybody said if they come upon you they'd cut you open and eat your heart and I don't want nobody cutting me open and eating my heart out so maybe …”
The older Indian's smile widened and he made a sign in front of his mouth, his fingers fluttering and moving away. Francis knew some sign from when he'd lived with the Indians, and literally the sign meant butterflies or birds flying. But in front of his mouth it meant wo
rds flying, and Francis nodded and smiled back and imitated the sign in front of his own mouth.
The young Indian put his bow down, took his fingers off the string and Francis knew it was over.
“English?” Francis asked, using sign. “Do you talk English?”
The boy shook his head, but the man nodded.
“Speak small, not big. Why you here?” His hands moved when he spoke, making sign to back up his spotty English.
“I'm looking for a wagon train. I've been lost.” Francis also made sign, but he was not as good as the Indian and much slower.
“Young lost, too?”
Francis nodded. “I found them back almost a day. Their father died of the water sickness and I brought them with me.”
Both of the Indians stepped back at this. They knew of cholera—Francis had heard of whole villages being killed in two or three days—and like Francis, they did not know how it spread.
“It's all right now,” Francis said. “Good, good. They're not sick now. But that way a day”—he pointed in the direction they'd come—“that way there is a wagon where the sickness came from.”
The man nodded and made a sign for peace—his palm up and facing out—and the boy did the same and Francis raised his hand and showed his palm.
“Hunt,” the man said, pointing south, “that way.”
Francis nodded and pointed west. “We go there.” And because he couldn't resist it—the thought had been on his mind since he'd first seen them—he asked: “Why no horses?”
From living with and watching the Indians he knew they wouldn't move fifteen feet without a horse under them. They were all—man, woman, and child—better riders than Francis, and Jason Grimes had told him he thought they were born on a horse. Two men hunting on foot was rare.
But the man made the sign on his head for antlers. “Deer, better on foot, low, in grass. Closer. Shoot more. Horses back there with family.” He made the sign for children and women. “Waiting for meat.” He smiled.
Francis nodded, remembering the buck he'd killed by waiting in the grass. He started to say more but the mare moved under him, making him look down and when he looked up they were gone, vanished in the grass.
