Mae Stuart was at the house when I returned, making paper decorations for the dance, helping Lorna. Lenny Sampson was there, too.
Cain was sitting by the fire, making nails. He pushed a nail-rod and a header toward me, and I looked around for a steel wedge, trying not to look at Mae.
Mae was wishful of being looked at, and a pretty girl is hard to ignore. On the wagon train there had been so many folks it was easy to fight shy of any particular one, and Mae had seemed flighty and man-crazy. Now being man-crazy can be a bad thing unless you’re the man she’s crazy about.
Yet even as I thought that, a warning voice told me that Mae’s swishing skirts were a trap. She could be mighty pretty and enticing, but supposing something came of it?
What Mae had in mind, I didn’t know. Maybe she just wanted attention, and maybe she wanted a man, and maybe she was thinking of a wedding, but a wedding for me at eighteen would be no good thing.
A wife and family don’t go along with dreams. They hamper a man’s movements, they restrict the risks he can afford to take to get ahead, and even the most helpful of women is usually more expense than a very young man can bear.
No doubt Mae wasn’t thinking of that. Seemed to me she was hearing the mating call and wasn’t thinking of anything else. Well, I was. And besides, Mae was no girl for me. Yet no doubt she had her dreams, too. Trouble was, I don’t think they had much to do with mine.
So I kept my eyes away from her and tried to close my ears to her laughter.
But it wasn’t easy. Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
WE LIVED WITH hope, but we lived also with fear. Without hope and faith we could not have come west, nor could we have established our town, but fear was ever-present, not only of renegades or Indians, but of man’s age-old enemies, hunger, thirst, and cold.
Gathering fuel and hunting pleased me because they offered time for thinking, and now I thought of how close hunger and cold must ever be. Man’s civilization is a flimsy thing, a thin barrier between man and his oldest enemy. Truly, man must be like the beaver, a building creature, only man must build cities as a beaver must build dams. There may be no reason in it whatever. Give a man a pile of sticks, and he will start to put something together, even as we had here.
A town means order, and order means law, and without them there can be no civilization, no peace, and no leisure. Surely, the first towns came when men learned to domesticate animals and plant crops, but the first culture and good living began when man learned to share the work and so provide leisure for music, for painting, for writing, and for study. As long as a man is scrabbling in the dust for food and fuel, looking over his shoulder for enemies, he cannot think of other things.
Yet I could see that the more involved a civilization became the more vulnerable it became, and any disaster, war, fire, flood, or earthquake can put man right back to the hunting and food-gathering level on which we now existed.
No one of us is ever safe. There is no security this side of the grave. A shipwreck or a hurricane can put man back to the brink of savagery, in both the means he uses to get his food and the lengths he will go to get it. The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.
Our town was an example of what could be. The leaders of our community were the hunter and the fighter. Ethan and I had done more than all the rest to bring meat to the people, and whenever we were gone they looked eagerly forward to our return. When spring came Cain and Ruth would be looked up to, but now it was us.
Cain worked quietly, doing his share to gather and cut fuel, but always looking forward to spring, to building his smithy and his mill. Cain was not a hunter but an artisan, a sharer of labor, a builder of civilization.
“When spring comes there will be more people,” Cain said to me, “and we will need some law. If we are to be free to work we must have somebody to wear a badge.”
“Can’t we do without that?” I asked.
“No. Until man can order his own affairs, until he ceases to prey on his brothers, he will need someone to maintain order. A lawman,” he added, “is not a restraint, but a freedom, a liberation. He restrains only those who would break the laws and provides freedom for the rest of us to work, to laugh, to sing, to play in peace.”
I had not thought of it that way.
Twice, hunting beyond Limestone Mountain I came upon pony tracks. It was a distance to go for fuel, but I remembered bitter cold days and wanted to leave the closer fuel for days when we could not go so far afield.
There was an old travois trail leading up the mountain through the trees, and I had followed it for a short distance. One day on that trail Ethan Sackett rode up to me. He got down and helped me to throw wood into the small cart I was using to collect it.
“Game’s staying far out. I haven’t seen a track today.”
“Might be a good time to ride to Bridger. Lay in a few supplies while the weather is mild.”
“Take you a week, if all went well.”
“Worth it,” I said. “Are you going to fiddle for the party?”
“Tom is. I’ll spell him, time to time.” He gave me a sharp look. “Watch yourself, Bendigo. Mae Stuart is settin’ her cap for you.”
My ears grew hot. “Aw, no such thing! Anyway, I ain’t about to marry.”
“I’d caution against it. Not to say a word against Mae, but she’s flighty and marriage won’t make a spell of difference.” And then he added, “Many a man who had no thought of marrying suddenly finds himself in a place when he’s either got to marry or run.”
My eyes ranged the edge of the woods. I leaned against the wagon watching the steam rise from the horses. It was cool, but pleasant, and time to be starting for home.
“Have you ever been to San Francisco, Ethan?”
“A time or two. You figuring to go there?”
“Maybe…I haven’t decided yet. I want to make something of myself, and I don’t want to live out my days here. Not that I don’t like our town, but there’s not many folks.”
He grinned at me. “Not many girls, either.”
I got red around the ears. “All right, there aren’t. Girls are part of it, but a man needs room to swing an axe, and I want my axe to cut deep and true. Maybe I’m a damn’ fool,” I added.
“You’re not. You’ve got good ideas.” He looked over at me. “Ruth Macken thinks you’ll make a great man, someday.”
I flushed again, but I was pleased. “She said that?”
“Uh-huh…if you don’t get your foot caught in some girl’s trap before you get started.”
He got up in the saddle. “We could trap some beaver, you and me. There isn’t the money in it that there used to be when everybody wore a beaver hat, but a body can still get a price for prime fur.”
“I’ll need money, but I’ll need education. Mrs. Macken says the big cities have libraries, some of them free for the use of anybody.”
We started down the mountain. “I’ll never be the smith Cain is, and I’m not cut out for farming. With learning I might find my way to something.”
“This country needs cattle. No town can depend on hunting, and all the stock you folks have got won’t last. There’s cattle in Oregon, Bendigo.”
“Do you reckon a man could drive a herd from there?”
“What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough. Following some rain, a body just might make it.” He glanced at me. “You figuring on that?”
“It’s in my mind. If you’d come along to keep the boogers off.”
He chuckled. “Seems to me you’d do pretty good at that yourself.”
“Trouble is, it takes money to buy cattle, and we don’t have it.”
“You might find gold. The first gold was found here back in 1842.”
“Gold is a chancy thing. Still, a body might find enough to buy a few head and make a start.”
When we reached town he headed
off for his dugout, and I stopped by Ruth Macken’s to throw down some wood.
She came out with Bud, and whilst Bud was stacking wood I told her about my idea of buying cattle in Oregon.
She did not laugh as I half expected she would but asked me about the trail, and I told her what Ethan had said.
“Bendigo,” she said, after a bit, “when you’ve gotten rid of your wood, come back by and have supper with us. We’ll talk about it.”
Well, now. I won’t say the idea hadn’t been in the back of my head. Helen was a fine cook, but she cooked plain. Ruth Macken fussed over her meals. Helen’s was straight, honest food with no nonsense about it, but Ruth did a little extra to everything she fixed, and it was tasty, mighty tasty.
So while she cooked and fixed a supper, I sat astride a chair, my arms on the back, and told her my thinking. Most of it had just come to mind while I talked to Ethan, but once started it worried at my thoughts like a coyote over a fresh buffalo hide.
“Ethan would go along. We could scout for water and grass on the way out and plan each day’s drive to end where there was water, even if the drives were short. We could hire a couple of men out there, bring back a small herd, and if it turned out well, go back for another.”
When I was fifteen I’d helped drive three hundred head from Illinois to New York state, and I told her of that. We ate, talked, and then Ruth Macken said, “Bendigo, if you decide to go I will buy a share in your herd and take my money in cattle at the end.”
Well, I just looked at her. There’d been no such thought in my mind. All I’d been doing was hunting a good meal and a chance to tell my idea to a good listener. I wanted to hear it take shape in my mind as I talked. Now, all of a sudden it was no longer just talk, the chance was staring me right in the face.
“It would be a long drive, Mrs. Macken. I’d be wrong not to warn you we might lose all we started with.”
“We need cattle here, and I believe you can do it.”
Cain was sitting by the fire when I came back down the hill, but the rest of them were all asleep. He was putting a long splice in a rope so I sat down, fed a stick or two in the fire, and explained my idea.
“You’d have to have an outfit, and grub for the trip,” he said, “and money to buy cattle.”
“Ethan would go with me.”
Cain took a strand of rope and tucked it into place, working it tight and snug with his hands. “The idea is a good one, but you’d best give it some thought. I doubt if we could spare both of you.”
Well, I should have thought of that. Ethan and me, both gone for months on end. It would be a danger to the town, and they’d have less meat.
“There’s Webb,” I said.
“Yes, there’s Webb.” His tone said a lot. Cain did not trust Webb in a time of violence. Webb was eager, far too eager. Such a man might bring trouble where there was none.
“Well, maybe next year,” I agreed, reluctantly. Another year seemed far, far away, and I’d been building plans and thinking what to do with the money I’d make.
“You could go alone,” Cain said. He turned the rope in his hands, studying the splice. It was so perfectly done as to scarcely increase the dimension of the rope. “The risk would be great, but you’ve good judgment.”
Alone?
“If you go with Ethan you would learn, but you’d be dependent, too. He knows so much you’d be apt to let him lead. If you go alone you’ll do it all yourself.”
There was a lot in what he said, for when I went out with Ethan I always stood back a mite. Much as I knew, he knew more, and it was easier to let him have the responsibility. Suddenly the trip seemed a whole lot longer, yet more exciting, too.
One thing I realized. If I would make it back to our town by the following fall, I must have my herd and be ready to begin my drive with the first grass of spring, and that meant I must leave sometime after the new year, while winter was still upon the land.
Thinking about it, I lay awake long and slept late, a rare thing for me. When I awakened there was laughter in the house, and I could hear Mae down there with Lorna, and it came to me that today was party day, and everybody was fixing for it.
It shamed me to be getting up from bed with all those folks downstairs, and me the one who was always the first out of bed. I’d got into my pants and was reaching for a shirt when Mae stuck her head over the edge of the floor.
That girl was a caution. She had climbed right up there with Lorna daring her. She was looking at me with eyes dancing with fun, but there was something else in them, too, something that made me wonder what she’d have done if we’d been in the house alone.
She was a bold one. She reached right over and put her hand on my arm. “Oooh! Look at all those muscles! I had no idea you were so strong!”
“Lorna!” I yelled, embarrassed. “Get this girl out of here!”
Lorna just laughed at me, and I grabbed for a shirt, and pulled it on. Maybe it was a good thing I was taking off down the Oregon Trail. She was pretty, too pretty to be running around loose, and I thought Ethan implied truly when he said marriage would not keep her from running.
“You get down from here,” I said, “you’ve got no call to come up here like this. You’re a big girl now.”
“I didn’t think you’d noticed,” she said, laughing at me. “That nice Mr. Trask surely did. He wanted me to come to Salt Lake with him.”
“Which wife were you to be? Second or third?”
“I’d be first, no matter when he married me!”
Well, I got into my shirt and climbed down to where my boots were, smelling all the good things cooking and baking, and watching the girls sewing clothes and chattering away about the party. I’d never seen such excitement in our town, and for the first time I began to feel excitement myself. For the first time also I began to realize that the event itself is not more important to women-folks than the chattering about it, before and after, and the fixing up and doing for it.
Cain was down at the shop, sharpening a saw. He paused, holding the file in his hand. “I’d have to leave right after Christmas,” I said.
“I was thinking of that.”
Much as I wished to go, in another way I didn’t want to at all. The town would have one less rifle to defend it and one less to hunt for game to survive the winter. A late spring could mean disaster.
Yet we would need cattle; not only for my own gain, but for both milk and beef, and to build supplies against the winter that would follow.
It was too soon to worry but not too soon to plan. I would not leave for another month, and in the meantime I must go over the trail with Ethan.
And tonight was our first party, the first entertainment in our town.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
TOM PLAYED THE fiddle, and John Sampson played the fife, and we danced until the sun came up over the eastern hills. Cain played the accordion for a while, and I danced with Lorna and Mae, with Ruth Macken and Helen, and with Mary Croft and Neely Stuart’s wife, who did not like me, I think.
It was a fine night, gay with laughter and singing. Few of us sang well but we all loved to sing, and the sound of our voices went out across the snow to the wintry hills beyond.
Yet we did not forget, in all our fun-making, that our lives were lived with danger, and every now and again one or the other of us would step out, walk away from the inner sounds to listen to the night.
Let it never be said that a man does not develop a sixth sense, a feeling for danger when there are no outward signs of it. Perhaps subconsciously he perceives things not registered on his conscious mind, but whatever the reason, I have myself been warned time and again of danger lurking, and so have many whom I know.
So listening was not only listening, it was sensing, registering the feel of the night.
The moon was clear and the eye carried far out across the snow, down the valley and along the towering cliffs, very white now in the moonlight. Nothing was seen.
Lorna came o
ut and stood beside me. She was flushed and happy, her eyes bright with gaiety. “It’s grand, isn’t it, Ben? I’m awfully glad we came.”
“You left friends behind.”
“I hated to leave them, too, but I will make new friends. I’ve seen so much and learned so much that I’d not have learned at home. You have too, Ben. You’ve changed.”
“Me?”
“Oh, yes! You’re so much older, and wiser somehow. I think you’ve changed more than any of us. Even Cain has spoken of it.”
A change in a man is never so evident to himself, but of course, I had experienced new things. The experiences of the long trek west, the Indian fights along that trail, the responsibilities, rustling food for the people of the town, working, watching, thinking. Even as a man shapes a timber for a house or a bridge, he is also shaping himself. He has in himself a material that can be shaped to anything he wishes it to be. The trouble is the shaping never ceases, and sometimes it has gone far along one line before a man realizes it.
“I can hardly wait for spring. I want to get out and walk upon the hills.”
“You be careful. There’s Indians, you know.” I paused. “And I won’t be here. I am going away after Christmas.”
“Oh, no!”
So I told her our plans, and of my long ride to Oregon alone, and how it would need much of the year to make the homeward drive.
We had turned to start back inside, for the cold was reaching into us, but as I held the door open for Lorna I glanced back.
There was something on the trail, something that had not been there before.
Only a black dot, only a shadow of something, only something that would alter the shape of my own life, but I could not see that. I could see only that something was there that had not been before.
My pistol was in my waistband. To get my rifle might interrupt my people at their fun, so I told Lorna I would be right in, and then I closed the door and went to the edge of the bench to look again, and to look around also, to be sure it was not a trick, something to lure us out away from our buildings.
Bendigo Shafter (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 8
