by Marsha Ward
When the road made a curve around a stand of trees, he looked back the way they had come and caught sight of a mass of dark clouds on the horizon. Rain, he thought. Good and bad, both. Cool us off, but it’ll muddy up the road.
Later, Carl saw the clouds again, but instead of growing upward to pile high into the heavens, these clouds grew sideways, spreading out to cover a good part of the eastern skyline.
Carl stared a moment longer at the cloud, then a mounting dread filled the pit of his stomach as he realized the blackness bearing down on them was not cloud, but smoke. He stopped the mules, threw himself off the wagon to the sounds of Ida’s protests, and ran up the line to Rand’s wagon.
“Rand, hold up a minute. Look at that,” he shouted, pointing to the smoke enveloping the east. “That’s a prairie fire, or I’m not my father’s son.”
“Prairie fire!” Rand exploded, then went white in the face. “What’ll we do, boy?”
“We’ve got to make for the next stream and drive the wagons down into the water. Hurry, man, we ain’t got much time to outrun it.” He left Rand’s wagon and ran back down the line, shouting, “Angus, Tom!” The men started to halt their teams and climb down from their wagons.
“No, keep moving,” Carl yelled, waving his arm. “Fire! Get down to the next creek. Move on.”
He ran back toward the freight wagon, calling out to Andy Campbell. “Throw them stock animals ahead of us. If they stampede, maybe the teams will follow.”
Carl climbed to the seat and cracked his whip. The mules were reluctant to start pulling, and Carl assaulted the air again with the whip until he had provoked the animals into a shambling sort of hurry. He wished the girls weren’t on the seat with him. Maybe then he’d feel like telling the team what he thought of their efforts.
Looking back at the smoke, Carl gauged the fire’s advance. He could see flame now, growing dark orange as the fire paused to engulf a grove of trees. The smoke became black, towering upward into the blue heaven.
Hush, he thought, we ain’t going to outrun this fire.
He turned to urge the beasts onward at a faster pace and caught sight of Ida’s white, set face. She stared straight ahead, fingers tightly gripping the edges of the seat.
“We’ll make it,” he grunted, forcing himself to sound confident. “I ain’t come this far west to burn up in no fire!”
Ida gave no sign of having heard him, but continued to stare ahead. Carl took his gaze from her face and whipped the mules a little faster. The trotting animals smelled the smoke on the wind from the east and lurched into the hames, frightened by the volume of the odor.
He turned to check the fire’s progress again, and a groan escaped his tightly compressed lips, startling Ida out of her trance. She turned and hurled herself against Carl, grabbing him around the neck and cutting off his control of the team.
“Carl, Carl!” she screamed. “Don’t let me get burned. I don’t want no scars!”
He struggled with the panicked girl, trying to loosen her hold on his neck, trying to catch his breath. His right arm came free of her grasp and brushed against his holstered gun. Slipping off the rawhide loop, he drew the Colt and held it overhead, then fired one shot.
Ida jumped at the report of the gun, shrank back from Carl, and huddled on the lurching wagon seat.
At the sound of the gun, the mules took on a new spirit of cooperation and stretched out in a lope, faster than before. Carl replaced his pistol, and seeing that Ida was safe, tried to sooth her with quiet talk.
“Ida, settle down. You’re goin’ to be just fine,” he said softly, his words jolted and cut up from the movement of the wagon. Smoke billowed on all sides of them now as the wind blew fiercely from the rear. Carl’s belly twisted as he realized that time was short, too short, before the fire overtook them.
Like a sentinel of salvation, a lone oak tree stood out against the western sky just ahead. Carl’s heart swelled with hope, and he stood up and popped his whip.
Andy Campbell already had the stock running in the direction of the tree, and the wagons followed, with Carl’s bringing up the rear. He whooped for joy when he saw Rand’s team drop from view into a valley. Then Angus and Tom and their wagons and teams also disappeared, and Carl cracked his whip once more to drive his team over the lip of the declivity.
In a second, it seemed, Carl took in the entire scene. Flowing water gleamed in the bottom of the cut, reflecting the billowing tops of three wagons parked on the stream’s bank. A fourth wagon stood jacked up in the water with goods scattered on both banks, and both rear wheels lay on the ground alongside a shattered axle. The wagons of the second party still careered down the slope.
Recognition flamed in him. Carl heard a voice yell, “Pa!” and from the rawness of his throat, knew it was his own voice. Relief washed over him as his father’s bearded face appeared next to the freight wagon.
“Prairie fire, Pa!” Carl picked up Ida and handed her down to his father, then dangled Eliza to him also. Julia hurried over and took the frightened girls to the stream.
Rod quickly glanced at Carl's smoke-blackened face, then turned to shout, “Ed, Chester, boys, get those wagons into the crick. Grab your shovels and buckets. Fire’s comin’.”
Mary Owen cried out, “Fire! My bed! My food!” and Marie and Julia ran to help her gather up as many of the goods on the near bank as they could handle, and piled them at the edge of the creek.
Tom and Parley Morgan and the Campbell boys helped Chester Bates push the parked wagons into the water as Ed Morgan showed the latecomers where to drive into the stream.
Elizabeth Morgan and Muriel Bates set the girls to wetting quilts and blankets in the water, and Molly Campbell passed them to the men to carry to the top of the slope where they would use them to beat out the rapidly approaching fire.
“Julianna,” called out her mother. “You take the babies and little ones to the other side of the creek out of harm’s way. Keep them happy, daughter, so they won’t take a fright."
The girl ran to scoop up Delia Campbell and her two brothers, their cousin Joshua O’Connor, and her own nephew Roddy, and herded them into the stream. “Let’s play a game,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “Come over here, children. I know a story.”
Rida O’Connor followed her, calling out, “I can tend the young’uns, too.”
Rulon hurried over to consult with his father. “Pa, let’s set a back fire and burn off the grass up there on the rim. It might help us turn the fire away.”
Rod nodded. “Take James and Clay. The women’ll keep the grass and the wagons wet down here. Carl, show them how to wet down the wagons.” Rod grabbed a shovel and ran up the slope, shouting for more assistance.
Once he had driven the freight wagon into the water, Carl started to climb down, but his tensed muscles gave out, and he collapsed into the stream. Wiping the water out of his eyes, he arose, dripping, and grabbed the bucket tied to the side of the wagon. He dipped it into the river and pitched the water over the canvas covering of the freight.
Rand Hilbrands saw what Carl was doing, and cried out, “Stop! You can’t wet my cargo.”
Carl looked wearily up at him from the stream.
“I can let it burn, if you’d druther.”
Rand waved his hand in concession, and his shoulders slumped from exhaustion. Amanda pressed a bucket into his grasp.
“Forget about the store goods,” she shrilled. “Look out for our own things.”
The wind carried thick, black smoke and sparks down into the valley, as Rulon’s fire caught hold ten yards past the rim. He and his brothers nursed the flames in the direction of the rim, scuffing the earth behind the burned section with their shovels to make their firebreak. Ed Morgan sent his sons with filled buckets to help control the burn. “Wet the sides of the bank up there at the top,” he called. “Keep the slope soaking wet.”
Ida shivered in the stream, wrapped in a drenched blanket. Her sister Eliza, busy splashing water f
rom a bucket onto the family wagon, looked over at her and sniffed.
“Ida ain’t working, Mama.”
“Pay her no mind, ‘Liza,” her mother called. “She’s no use to us now. Keep the wagon wet!”
“Here it comes,” James yelled, tumbling over the rim as he retreated from the extreme heat, with Clay and Rulon hard on his heels. The Owen brothers, faces streaked with sweat and grime, came down to the water, wiping the gritty smoke out of their eyes.
“All that smoke puts me in mind of a battleground,” grunted Rulon as he sluiced water up the hill. He paused to rub the back of his neck. “It sure brings back bad memories.” Then he bent to the water again.
Nobody but Ida had time to sit and listen to the crackle of the burning vegetation and the roar of the flames. Nobody but Ida noticed the change in volume of sound of the fire as it veered away to the south. Nobody spoke to Ida, so Ida told no one.
Then Carl saw that the smoke had thinned out, and he straightened his back to look up at the rim. The towering clouds of smoke were gone, and he dropped his bucket and scrambled up the bank of the creek to the top of the slope.
“Pa,” he shouted. “The fire’s gone off to the south. Looks like Rulon’s back fire did the trick!”
His older brother climbed the hill to join him, and Carl glanced back to watch him come. Rulon had discarded his sooty shirt, and for the first time, Carl saw the angry purple scars of his brother’s war wounds.
“It’s a wonder you made it home, Rule,” Carl said gravely. “What did you run into that made so many holes?”
“You ever hear of a mortar shell?” Rulon stopped on the edge of the valley. “Them things explode into a right smart number of pieces when they hit. Shrapnel, they call ‘em. I reckon I was too close one day, and caught a bunch of shrapnel.”
“Whatever they are, they didn’t do you no good. Mary’s lucky she ever saw you again.”
“Most of ‘em are still in there. The surgeon figured I’d die, so he didn’t bother to dig the iron out,” Rulon added, rubbing the largest of the scars.
Carl turned and surveyed the blackened east, wiping his hands on his shirtfront. “Makes me ache inside to see all that grass gone. What a ruin!” He hung his forearm over his shorter brother’s shoulder. “Did you come across any surprises out this way?”
Rulon’s head snapped around to look at Carl. “You mean like that Acosta scum attacking us in this valley? Yeah. We had some surprises.” He spat into the ashes at his feet. “We buried Ed Morgan’s little girl, and put her brother Ezra into the wagon with a bullet through his thigh. Real nice surprise for a ten-year-old.”
Carl dropped his arm from Rulon’s shoulder, clenched his fists, closed his eyes, and swore. He stabbed his shovel into the earth several times. “Anybody else hurt?”
“Couple of near hits, but the Morgans got the worst of it because they was out wood-gathering when the men rode down on us.” He paused for a moment, wiping the sweat from his dripping forehead with the back of his hand.
“How’d it happen?”
“Ed sent Tom out with the kids. The gang rode in from over that rise.” Rulon gestured with his hand. “We heard the shots and came a-running with our rifles. We dropped about half of them outlaws before they pulled out for good. Rode on south.”
“Gone to Texas?”
“Likely. Good riddance. We’d been here a day when they attacked, on account of my axle.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Went off the bank wrong, hit a boulder in the creek. I had a feeling about that axle being flawed when I got the wagon, but I didn’t have much choice.”
“Where did you get it?”
Rulon smiled crookedly. “I stole it off the Yankee who bought the livery for taxes. Clay helped, but he wasn’t real happy about it.”
“I guess nobody’s happy lately. I’m sorry about the Morgans’ loss.”
They stood for a moment, looking and thinking, then Carl spoke up slowly, still looking off
into the distance.
“Is Mary Hilbrands a good wife to you? Does she make you…feel…like a man?”
Startled, Rulon raised his eyes to look at Carl’s face. After a time, he said, “That’s a mighty strange question, brother, but since you make bold to ask, I’ll answer best I can.”
He paused, evidently searching for words. “Mary come to me young, fifteen or thereabouts. I reckon I was in a hurry, leaving soon for the cavalry, and all. We didn’t learn much about…anything, or each other, before I rode away. Then I didn’t see her again ‘til I woke up
ith a mess of holes in me, home in a strange bed. You sure you want to know all this, Carl?”
“Yep.”
“Mary’s a dutiful wife. She keeps the house and cooks the meals and tends Roddy as well as most, I reckon, and she brought me through when I came home all shot up. She tends to my needs, all of ‘em, with no complaint, but sometimes I feel she’s a stranger to me.” Rulon shook his head. “Likely that’s because we ain’t had but one year—no, less than that—to know each other in the four years that we’ve been wed. And most of that time I’ve been laid up with a belly full of iron scrap.”
“Do you reckon you love her?”
“I’ll find that out when I know her better. What we done in haste, we need some leisure to work out. Mary has her talents,” he added.
“No ‘repenting’ at leisure?”
“No regrets. I have a good wife, and she gave me a fine son. Maybe that’s the best we get in life.”
“Pa and Ma have more than that.”
“They been together a long time. Lend me some years, Carl, then ask me again.”
Carl turned to look down the grade. Ida seemed so tiny and forlorn, standing on the side of the stream, and his throat pinched to see her clutch the damp blanket around her shoulders. “I’ll do that,” he said, and started down the slope.
~~~
Carl gently took the damp blanket from Ida’s stiff fingers. “You’ll take a chill, wrapped in that thing,” he said.
She hung her head, turning away from his gaze. “Don’t look at me,” she cried. “I’m all dirty and wet.”
“Well, I’m liable to break a looking glass myself. Let’s go set in that patch of sun up the crick a ways. We both need to get dry.” Carl took her arm and firmly led her away from the wagons.
He sat her down in the full sun, on a rock that jutted out over the bank of the stream, then collapsed into the grass at her feet, spreading full-length on the soft green sod.
“We’ve had us a time lately, girl. Near calamitous for us all,” he said, staring at the sky. “Especially for the Morgans. Did you hear what happened? They lost their little girl to them unholy ruffians from back down the trail.” Carl gazed into the sky, blue and white with wispy clouds drifting overhead. “Now, I don’t blame your pa for having his own opinion, but that ain’t any comfort to Mrs. Morgan, I reckon. Your pa came near ruining our whole enterprise with his notions. We all got to stick together and listen to the leader, and that’s my pa. We can’t take any more bickering, if we’re to get to the Territory before winter sets in.”
Carl looked up and saw great tears flooding silently from Ida’s blue eyes. He sat upright, got to his knees in front of her, and took her into his arms.
“Hush now, darlin’. I didn’t mean to go on so about your pa. You had a mighty hard time out there today, and here I’m just rambling on with a mess of foolish words.”
Ida broke into sobs.
