In the Shadow of the Mountains

by Rosanne Bittner

  Kirk nodded. “Maybe.”

  “I’d like to start the new house, Kirk. Maybe we can get enough of it finished to have Irene’s party in it next spring. What do you think?”

  “Oh, yes, Mother, I’m sick of this house,” Elly blurted out. “You said you would build something much finer when we came here, but you’re always too busy.”

  Kirk frowned at the girl’s snobbish attitude, but Bea seemed to pay no attention. “Well, I intend to keep my promise,” she told Elly. She looked back at Kirk. “I want the best carpenters, and I want you to send some men to California to buy up silks for draperies and some oriental rugs and vases and such. I have already wired New York to order some Italian marble and Asian teakwood. I need a good carpenter, to decide how much oak we’ll need, how many chandeliers, and such. And I want you to find a good silversmith who can make us some candelabras and other decorations from our own gold and silver.”

  Kirk gladly obliged. The fact that Bea was ready to build her dream house meant she intended to stay in Denver. “I’d hire Henry Brown to build the house,” he told her. “He’s got a young Mexican man working for him who does the most beautifully detailed carving you’ve ever seen. If you want fancy latticework and detailed wood trim inside the house, he’s the man to do it. I think his name is Ramon. He’s only about twenty, but he’s got a great talent with wood.”

  Bea sighed. “If you say so. You know how I feel about mingling with the Mexicans.”

  Kirk scowled. He was always irritated by his wife’s attitude toward people of other races and nationalities, which was rubbing off on Elly. He was happy to realize that so far Irene had not been affected by her mother’s arrogant ways. “You wouldn’t be ‘mingling,’ Bea. The man works for Brown, that’s all, and he’s good at his trade. He’d be an employee, not a social acquaintance. And Mexican or not, he’s a fine young man. I’ve met him a time or two.”

  “I’d like to see some of his work,” John spoke up. “I’ve carved a few things myself. I’d like to know what he thinks of them.”

  “You’d be better off concentrating on your studies, young man,” Bea reminded him. “Carving wood won’t help you make business decisions or help you get into college.”

  John looked down at his plate. “Maybe I don’t want to go to college. Maybe I’ll be a carpenter, too, some day.”

  Bea stiffened. “You’ll go to college and learn to take care of all the things your father and I have worked hard to build for you,” she answered.

  John said nothing.

  “Leave him alone, Bea.” Kirk sighed. He excused himself and rose from the table. “I’m meeting with the committee tonight. Keep the house locked up.” He looked over at John. “I’ll take you to meet Ramon tomorrow,” he told the boy, pleased that two of his children had inherited his tolerance.

  John’s face brightened, and Kirk could feel his wife’s vehement reaction without looking at her. Kirk left the dining room to get a jacket from the hallway.

  “Mother, aren’t you going to tell him good-bye?” Irene spoke up. “He might get hurt.”

  Bea was still glowering at her son. “He’ll be all right,” she answered. “Your father can take care of himself. He’s been doing it for years.”

  She rose from the table wondering why she couldn’t run to her husband and tell him to be careful, tell him she loved him like she wanted to do. Irene quickly excused herself and hurried past her mother, running up to hug her father before he could get out the door. “Be careful, Father.”

  He looked down at her, thinking what a treasure she was, how she was a child of his heart. “I’ll be all right. How about going for a ride tomorrow after I get back with John?”

  “Oh, I’d love that! It’s been such a long time.”

  He touched her hair. “Then we’ll do it.” He leaned closer. “No matter how mad it makes your mother,” he whispered.

  Irene smiled and watched him leave, hoping there wouldn’t be trouble. She closed the door and thought about the young Mexican carver named Ramon. Could he be the handsome carpenter who had caught her eye the day they arrived in Denver two years earlier?

  It had been so long ago and she had not seen him again, yet she had always remembered him. Thoughts of him made her shiver with feelings she did not yet understand. Her whole body tingled at the memory.

  Bea called to her to come back and finish her dessert, and Irene was glad her mother could not read her thoughts. Their mother’s accusing looks were something none of the children relished, although Elly seemed little affected by anything her mother or anyone else thought or demanded.

  Elly was Elly, stubborn, determined and spoiled. Irene tried hard to love her sister, but Elly did not make it easy. Irene was closer to John, who cared as little as she did about putting on airs and impressing people.

  She took a chair beside John at the table, while Bea went into the kitchen to talk to Elsa about dessert. Elly flounced after her mother to tell her she wanted an extra helping. “I’ll be glad when we get a new house with more servants and a way to ring for them,” she said on her way out of the room. She turned at the door. “By the way, Irene, Mother might be having a coming-out party for you next year when you’re sixteen, but I’ll be thirteen next year, so she’ll be having a party for me, too.”

  “Of course she will,” Irene answered pleasantly.

  Elly sniffed and went through the door. Irene turned to John, smiling and shaking her head. “She’ll be having a party for me, too,” John mimicked his sister, twisting his mouth into a sneer. Irene laughed. “I can’t stand her sometimes,” John grumbled. “Hey, Irene, I wonder if that man Ramon will teach me more about carving. I’m glad Father is going to let me see his work.”

  “He must be very good for him to take you,” Irene answered. “You must tell me what he’s like, what you learned from him.”

  “Sure. And I’ll make something just for you.” He sighed. “I’m happiest when I’m working with wood, Irene. I hate my business studies, and I hate the thought of going away to college.”

  “It’s probably best, John. When you’re through with school and all grown up, you can do whatever you want, and Mother won’t be able to stop you.”

  He looked at her seriously. “Sometimes I think she’ll be telling us what to do our whole lives, maybe even from the grave.”

  “John! She’s our mother. She means well.”

  Bea came back into the room, and the conversation ceased. Irene heard Kirk’s horse gallop off, and her chest tightened with fear at the thought of anything happening to her father.

  Chapter Six

  Stories of nightly looting and killing by Harrison’s bummers ran daily in the News, and for several nights Irene lay awake in dreadful fear for her father, who left the house after dinner, never saying where he was going or who would be with him. There were wrongs to be righted, and there was no law in Denver but the Safety Committee.

  One night Irene thought she heard her father groan in pain after coming in late, heard her mother’s muffled but distraught words of concern. The next morning Kirk came to the table limping. He told the family he had taken a spill from his horse, but Irene knew better. She was sure he had been shot. She approached him alone in the parlor later, tears in her eyes.

  “You didn’t really fall from your horse, did you?” she asked quietly. “You’re too good a rider, Father.”

  Kirk looked up from his chair and put a finger to his lips. “Don’t you tell that to anyone else.”

  She came closer. “I won’t say anything.” She knelt in front of him, putting her head on his knee. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Father.”

  He touched her hair, thinking how she was the only one of his three children who had come to express concern that he’d been hurt. He thought what a beautiful, loving wife she would be someday, and he hoped she would find a man worthy of her. She would be nothing like Bea. Irene would be gentle and caring. She would know how to express her love. “Nothing is going
to happen,” he assured her. “We’re doing what we must to make the city safe. You just remember your old father here has been in a lot worse situations than this and survived them all.”

  The only good thing Irene could see in any of the trouble was that it kept her father home for several weeks. The whole household always seemed more happy and contented when Kirk was around; and to Irene’s joy and Bea’s consternation, Kirk had taken Irene riding several times.

  John was happier than Irene had ever seen him. He spent every day carving objects from wood, and had presented Irene with several carved animals, which she thought looked very realistic. She kept them on a shelf in her room. John talked almost constantly about Ramon Vallejo. Kirk took John to meet with him every week. “I never saw anybody work with his hands like he can,” he told Irene.

  Although she had never met the man, Irene felt as though she already knew Ramon. He was twenty-one, he could read and speak good English, and his family were successful farmers and ranchers. They lived several miles south of Denver, near Colorado City. Ramon had come to Denver because he felt he could make money in the growing city using his talent for working with wood. So far the young man had managed to save a considerable amount of money, and John told Irene that Kirk had even advised Ramon on how to handle his savings.

  “Father likes him,” John told her, “even though he’s Mexican. You’ll get to meet him in the spring. The house will be finished enough by then that Ramon will have to start on the interior woodwork.”

  Irene felt a strange anticipation at the remark. She would finally get to meet the mysterious Ramon.

  Over the winter a few men were hanged for murder, but Kirk would not discuss details. One night William Byers himself was dragged by bummers from his newspaper office and taken to the Criterion, where he was questioned and threatened before they released him. When the bummers marched to the offices of the Rocky Mountain News to destroy it, they were greeted with a shotgun by Byers, who wounded one of them. The newly appointed marshal shot and killed the wounded man, and the other three who had taken part in the fracas were run out of town by Kirk and the Safety Committee, men the bummers referred to as lawless vigilantes.

  “Maybe we don’t do everything right, but we’re all Denver has right now,” Kirk said one evening at the dinner table. It was January 1862, and a winter wind was roaring out of the mountains, battering the house and making the windows shake. Irene noticed her mother was unusually nervous, as she always was when the mountain winds blew. She supposed it reminded Bea of the harsh winters she had spent in the Sierras when she and Kirk first went to California.

  “We try to be fair about things,” Kirk was saying, unaffected by the blizzard outside. “At least we have finally convinced Gilpin we need something more. He’s gotten permission from Washington to organize a regiment of volunteers, uniforms and all. With no tax base or territorial treasury, he needs some of us businessmen to put up the money. The government will reimburse us, as well as provide money to pay the volunteers.”

  Bea frowned. “Can we trust Gilpin to make sure we get our money back?”

  “We don’t have much choice,” Kirk answered. “We need to do this, Bea. I want it to be safe for my wife and children to go into town. Besides, this country is at war now. Word is, the Confederates have their eye on all the gold we’ve got in these mountains. They just might decide to try to take over this territory. That’s part of the reason we’ve got to keep an eye on Harrison and his bummers. They’re Southerners, and if they can help from the inside, they’ll do it. We’ve got to be extra careful now, and with most regular soldiers being pulled out of the West because of the war, all we’ve got left is our own volunteers. We’ve got to put up the money, Bea, and trust we’ll get it back.”

  Bea sighed, always wary of any investment whose payoff seemed unreliable. “I suppose you’re right. It isn’t just the Confederates I worry about anyway. With hardly any regular soldiers left out here, the Indians are going to become more of a problem. Elizabeth Byers said there are rumors the Cheyenne have been moving away from treaty land down on the Arkansas River, raiding some of the outlying settlements. With no soldiers left in the territory, they aren’t going to pay any attention to the Fort Wise Treaty. They’ll have a heyday, once they realize we have no protection. Maybe the Volunteers will help keep them where they belong.”

  Kirk glanced at Irene, wondering if her brother was among the Cheyenne who had been forced onto the small reservation in southeastern Colorado. Already people talked of totally ridding Colorado of its Indians, forcing them much farther south and east, into what was being called Indian territory. Kirk knew that land, knew that forcing the Cheyenne to live there would kill them physically and spiritually. They needed this land, these mountains.

  He was gladder than ever now that he had kept Irene. If he had not, she might be dead or belong to some other Indian family, perhaps a wife to some warrior, with one or two children already. At one time he had thought nothing of the difficult life Indian women led, but now he could not bear the thought of Irene living that way, perhaps being sold as a squaw to some white trader. With her light hair and blue eyes and exquisite beauty, she would have been very valuable.

  “That’s the only thing I regret about the growth of this territory,” he said aloud. “I don’t like what it’s doing to the Indians.”

  “They have to understand that we’re here to stay,” Bea said firmly. “And since they don’t seem ready to live like decent people, they’ve got to go, Kirk. Why, just the other day some Arapaho walked right into Bela Kramer’s house without any warning. They just stood there. She didn’t know if they intended to beg something from her or kill her. She ordered them out, and they left, but the fact remains we can’t have things like this happening. We have two young girls in this house, and I’ll not put up with such things. If any Indians walk into this house, I’ll shoot them.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” he said sternly, surprising her with the sudden anger in his voice. “You want to start an uprising right here in town?” Have you forgotten your own daughter is Indian? he felt like asking. Bea met his eyes, looking offended. “That’s just their way,” Kirk continued. “There’s not much privacy among the Indians. If they want to come visiting, they come visiting. There’s no sense trying to explain it to you. All I’m saying is if they should happen to walk in here, it wouldn’t be to bring you harm. Don’t you dare grab a weapon!”

  She sniffed, picking at her food, while the children watched and listened. “Well, we’ve managed to chase the Utes farther west. I still say something has to be done about the Cheyenne and Arapaho. They continue to camp all around us and beg. And you and your Safety Committee or Volunteers or whatever you call yourselves should do something about it…as well as arrest those slovenly whiskey traders who sell rotten liquor to those poor savages. There is nothing more dangerous than a drunken Indian.”

  Kirk said nothing. He excused himself from the table, and Bea clinked her fork against her plate nervously. “Children, I have hired a new attorney to join the others at Kirkland Enterprises. He’s a fine young man, and I want him to meet the family.” She moved her eyes to Irene. “Especially you, Irene. You’re getting close to the age where you can receive men, and I want you to be thinking about marrying into the proper class. Chadwick Jacobs is a wonderful man, handsome and intelligent and well educated.”

  “Mother, I’m not sixteen yet—”

  “I’m only having him for dinner,” the woman interrupted. “I just want you to meet him, that’s all.”

  Irene sighed deeply, deciding not to argue. No one liked to argue with Bea Kirkland. Her father usually made more headway than anyone else, but even he had given up tonight. Irene had noticed there always seemed to be a point where Kirk gave in to her mother. Bea would give him an odd, hurt look, a look that seemed to say, “How can you do this to me after all I’ve done for you?” She sometimes wondered if there was some secret to their marriage that always made
her father back away from angry confrontations with his wife, but she was too young to understand everything that went on between a man and a woman. Still, she was sure that when she married, she would never treat her husband the way her mother treated her father. She would be gracious and loving, and she would allow him his pride and honor and never raise her voice to him.

  She thought about meeting Chadwick Jacobs and dreaded it. She didn’t mind meeting young men; and had in fact given it more thought lately than ever before. But she didn’t feel ready to have one shoved on her by her mother, or to be “inspected” by someone of whom her mother “approved.” She wanted to tell her mother as much, but like her father, she could see that Bea Kirkland was in no mood to be crossed.

  A week passed, and so did the winter storm. Bea was elated at the temporary good weather as she lined up her children, inspecting them all to be sure they were properly attired for their guest who would arrive soon.

  Jealousy burned in Elly’s chest when she noticed that her mother fussed over Irene the most, retying the wide sash of her rose-colored silk and taffeta evening dress. Bea had allowed Irene to wear a dress with an off-the-shoulder neckline for the first time, and Elly knew it was because Bea wanted Irene to impress Chad Jacobs, about whom Bea had raved all week.

  “Not only is he a very handsome young man, but he is so well educated,” she had told them more than once, as though to be sure Irene understood what a wonderful catch he would be. “He is going to be a fine addition to Denver society. I see a great future ahead for him. And he’s so friendly. He prefers to be called just Chad.”

  The woman repeated the words now as she fussed with Irene’s sash, wanting to show off her daughter’s slender waist. “Perhaps Chad will want to be your escort at your coming-out party,” she was saying. The décolletage of Irene’s dress was graced with delicate white lace, which only enhanced the tawny, satiny skin of Irene’s lovely shoulders. The same white lace gracefully edged each tier of ruffles that cascaded down the hooped skirt.