Bill saw him at once. “Pa,” he said excitedly, “this is Mrs. Hance.”
She looked up and he was immediately uneasy. She had blue eyes, not dark eyes like Mary’s had been, and there was a friendliness in them that disturbed him.
“Bill’s been telling me about you, Mr. Miles. Have you found a mule?”
Glad to be on familiar ground, he shook his head. “Hassoldt won’t sell. I’m afraid I’m out of luck.”
He was absurdly conscious of his battered hat, its brim limp with rain and his unshaven jaws. He wanted to get away from her. Women like this both irritated and disturbed him. She was too neat, too perfectly at ease. He knew what such women were like on the trail, finicky and frightened of bugs and fussing over trifles. Also, and he was frank to admit it to himself, he was a little jealous of Bill’s excited interest.
“We’d better go, Bill. Say good-by to Mrs. Hance.”
He walked out, red around the ears and conscious that somehow Bill felt he had failed him. It was not necessary for him to have been so abrupt. Just because he looked like a big backwoods farmer was no reason he should act like one.
They lived in the wagon. It was a big new Conestoga, and his tools were all new. He had his plowshare, he’d make the plow when he got there, and he had two rifles and plenty of ammunition. Bill was nine, but already he could shoot, and Scott Miles wanted his son to grow up familiar with weapons. He wanted him to be a good hunter, to use guns with intelligence.
A boy needed two parents, and being an observant man Scott had not failed to notice the wistfulness in Bill’s eyes when other children, hurt or imagining a hurt, ran to mother. Bill would never do that with him, he was too proud of being a little man in front of his father. But it wasn’t right for the boy.
Farmer Bidwell had a daughter, a pretty, flush-faced girl with corn-silk hair. She had been casting sidelong glances at him ever since their wagon rolled alongside. Tentatively, Scott Miles touched his chin. He had better shave.
He did, and he also trimmed down his mustache. He wore it Spanish style and not like the brush mustaches of Bidwell or so many of the company. He got into a clean shirt then.
Bill eyed him critically, “Gettin’ all duded up,” he said. “You goin’ back to see Mrs. Hance?”
“No!” He spoke sharply. “I may go to see Grace Bidwell, later.”
“Her?” Bill’s contempt was obvious. So obvious that Scott looked at the boy quickly. “She isn’t as pretty as Mrs. Hance.”
Scott Miles sat down. “Look, Bill,” he said, “we’re going into a mighty rough country, like I’ve told you. We won’t be in a city. We’ll be in the mountains where I’ll have to fell trees and trim them for a cabin.
“Now I need a wife, and you need a mother. But just being pretty isn’t enough. I’ve got to have a wife who can cook, who can make her own clothes, if need be. A wife who can take the rough going right with me. I need somebody who can help, not hinder.”
Bill nodded, but he remained only half convinced. Scott Miles was shouldering into his coat when Bill spoke again. “Pa,” he was frowning a little, “if we get a new mother, shouldn’t it be somebody we like, too?”
Scott Miles stared into the rain, his face grim. Then he dropped his hand to Bill’s shoulder. “Yes, son,” he said quietly, “it would have to be somebody we like … too.”
The rain stopped, but the sun did not come out. Slopping through the rain, Miles made inquiries about mules. Yes, there was an old hardcase downriver who owned a big black mule. The man’s name was Simon Gilbride. Sell him? Not a chance! He wouldn’t even talk about it. Nevertheless, Scott Miles saddled his bay mare and rode south.
As he started out of town he saw Mrs. Hance on the hotel steps. She waved, and he waved back. He saw something else, too. Something that filled him with grave disquiet. Hassoldt was standing on the steps talking to three roughlooking men from the river. All wore guns. They turned and looked at him as he passed, and Scott had the uncomfortable feeling they had been talking about him.
Gilbride came to the door when Scott arrived. He was a tall, old man with a cold patrician face and the clothes of a farmer. “Sell my mule? Of course not!”
And that was final. It was dusk before Scott returned to the wagon. He was tired and he sagged in the saddle. It was not so much physical weariness, for he was a big man and unusually strong, but the weariness of defeat. Only a few hours remained and there was only one mule in the country the size of his. Of course, wagons were arriving all the time. If he could keep circulating …
He pulled up. There was a fire going and Bill was squatted beside it. He was laughing and eating at the same time, and the girl who was cooking was laughing also. “Good!” he muttered. “Grace has finally got to him. Now things will be easier all around.”
Only when she straightened from the fire it was not Grace. It was Mrs. Hance. She smiled, a little frightened. “Oh! I didn’t expect you back so soon. I-I was worried about Bill going without his supper.”
The food was good. Had a flavor he didn’t know, but mighty good. And Bill was eating as if he hadn’t eaten in years. Of course, Bill could digest anything.
“Mr. Miles,” she spoke suddenly as if nerved for the effort. “I have a favor to ask. I want to ride in your wagon to Santa Fe.”
He blinked. Of all things, this was the least expected. Bill had looked up and Scott could almost feel him listening. He shook his head. “I am sorry, Mrs. Hance. The answer is no. It is quite impossible.”
He walked to the door of the hotel with her, then back to the wagon. Suddenly he decided to check the mules and, nearing them, he was almost positive he saw a shadow move in the darkness near where they were picketed. He waited, his gun ready, but there was no further movement, no sound. He waited for a long time in silence, seriously worried. Hassoldt wanted mules badly, with a big contract to fill for the government, and he did not impress Miles as a very scrupulous man. In such a place as this there would be thieves, and Hassoldt impressed him as a man likely to stop at nothing to obtain something he wanted.
When he reached the hotel next morning there was no sign of Mrs. Hance. He hesitated, faintly disappointed at not seeing her.
Pembroke and Bidwell were together. “Well, Miles,” Pembroke was abrupt. “Have you found a mule? I’m sorry, of course, but if you haven’t one tomorrow we’ll have to make other arrangements.”
Wearily Miles walked back to camp, leading the mare. He was walking up to the wagon when the mare whinnied. He looked up. Tied to a wagon wheel was a magnificent sorrel stallion. At least sixteen hands high, it had a white face and three white stockings. After tying the mare, Scott Miles walked admiringly around the stallion. It was one of the finest animals he had ever seen.
Mrs. Hance came out of the trees with Bill. They hung back a little, then walked toward him. “This,” he inquired, “is your horse?”
“You like him?”
“Like him? He’s splendid! All my life I’ve wanted to own just such a horse. Of course,” he added quickly, “I could never afford it.”
“With your mare it might be very profitable,” she assured him quietly. Then she lifted her chin.
“Mr. Miles, what would you do for another mule?”
He laughed grimly. “Anything short of murder,” he said, “if I got him before tomorrow.”
“Even to sharing your wagon with a widow?”
He chuckled. “Even that!”
“Then prepare to have a passenger. I’ve got a mule!” He shook his head. “That’s impossible. There isn’t a mule within miles and miles of here. I’ve looked.”
“I have a mule,” she said, “as big as yours. He was sold to me by Simon Gilbride.”
Scott Miles sat down, and she explained very quietly. Determined to go to Santa Fe, she had decided the only thing to do was to personally see the old man. Gilbride, it turned out, had been in her father’s command in Mexico. That, a little pleading and a little flattery had done the trick.
; “So,” she said, “I have a mule. I have the only mule. So if you go you take me. What do we do?”
Scott Miles got to his feet and bowed politely. “Mrs. Hance, will you do me the honor of allowing me escort you to Santa Fe?”
She curtsied gravely, then her eyes filled with mischief. “Mr. Miles,” she replied formally, “I was hoping you’d ask!”
Pembroke was in the hotel, seated with Bidwell and several others, shaping last details of the trip. “Count me in.” Scott could scarcely keep the triumph from his tone. “I’ve got my mule!”
As he explained he saw Bidwell’s face stiffen. Pembroke frowned slightly, then shook his head. “It won’t do, Miles,” he said. “The women would never stand for it. We can’t have an unmarried couple sharing a wagon. It just won’t do.”
“Look,” he protested, “I-“
Argument was fruitless. The answer was a flat no. Disgusted, angry and desperate, he started back toward the wagon. He was nearing it when he heard a shot, then another. Running, he whipped his pistol from his waistband and broke through the trees to the wagon. Mrs. Hance stood behind the wagon with a smoking rifle. Her face was white. “They got away,” she said bitterly, “they’ve stolen our mules!”
She continued icily, “Have you decided to just stand there or are you going to take Admiral and go after them?”
“Admiral?” He was astonished. “They didn’t get him? You mean he was tied here?”
“Behind the wagon,” she said shortly. “Now take him and get started!”
“He might be killed,” he warned Her lips tightened.
“Take him! We’re in this together!”
It was morning when he realized he was closing in. Admiral was not merely a beautiful horse, but one with speed and bottom. And one of the men was wounded. He had come upon the place where they bathed and dressed his wound at daylight. He had found fragments of a bloody shirt and fresh boot-tracks. Two hours later he stopped on the edge of a grove and saw them disappearing into a cluster of pinons a half mile away. They had the mules roped together and they were moving more slowly. The wounded man was riding his mare.
He had no illusions about fair play. They would kill on sight. If he survived he must do the same. Studying the terrain, he saw a long draw off on the right that cut into the plain to the south. If he could get into that draw and beat them to the plain … Admiral went down the bank as if mountainbred and on the bottom he stepped out into a run. Despite the long night of riding, the big horse had plenty left. He ran and ran powerfully, ran with eagerness.
At the draw’s opening, Scott Miles swung down. Grimly, he checked the heavy pistol he carried. Thrusting it into his waistband, he walked along through the scattered greasewood and pinon until he was near the entrance of the larger draw down which they were coming.
The mules came out of the draw with the men behind them. Scott Miles drew his pistol and stepped from the pinons, but as his foot came down a rock rolled and he lost balance. He fell backwards, seeing the riders grabbing for their guns. He caught himself on his left hand and fired even as a bullet whisked by his face. He rolled to one knee and fired again. The second shot did not miss. One man lurched in his saddle and there was blood down the back of his head, and then he fell into the dust, his horse stampeding. The wounded man had disappeared, but the third man leaped his horse at Scott.
There was an instant when Scott saw the flaring nostrils of the horse, saw the man lean wide and point the gun straight at his face. And then Scott fired. The man’s body jolted, seeming to lift from the saddle, and was slammed back as the horse leaped over Miles, one hoof missing him by a hair. The rider hit the sand and rolled over. Taking no chances, Miles fired again.
One man left. Sitting on the sand, half-concealed by brush, Miles reloaded the empty chambers. Then he started through the brush, moving carefully. The wounded man sat on the ground, holding his one good arm aloft. “Don’t shoot!” he begged. “I tossed my gun away.”
Scott gathered the guns, then the mules and the horses. He left one horse for the wounded man. “You do what you like, but don’t cross my trail again. Not ever.” The mules made a nice picture ahead of the big Conestoga wagon, and on the seat Scott Miles sat beside his wife. She was not only a very pretty woman, this Laura Hance Miles, but, as he had discovered, a useful one. He was, he admitted, very much in love, a richer and more exciting love than he had ever experienced.
There would always be a place in his heart for Mary, but this woman was one to walk beside a man, not behind him. She had shown it since the first day they were two together, a team, working toward a common end. It was what he had wanted. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had believed a man could never get close to a woman like this. But that had been a long time ago. And Bill had been right. It was necessary to like somebody, too.
War Party
We buried pa on a sidehill out west of camp, buried him high up so his ghost could look down the trail he’d planned to travel. We piled the grave high with rocks because of the coyotes, and we dug the grave deep, and some of it I dug myself, and Mr. Sampson helped, and some others.
Folks in the wagon train figured ma would turn back, but they hadn’t known ma so long as I had. Once she set her mind to something she wasn’t about to quit. She was a young woman and pretty, but there was strength in her. She was a lone woman with two children, but she was of no mind to turn back. She’d come through the Little Crow massacre in Minnesota and she knew what trouble was.
Yet it was like her that she put it up to me. “Bud,” she said, when we were alone, “we can turn back, but we’ve nobody there who cares about us, and it’s of you and Jeanie that I’m thinking. If we go west you will have to be the man of the house, and you’ll have to work hard to make up for pa.”
“We’ll go west,” I said. A boy those days took it for granted that he had work to do, and the men couldn’t do it all. No boy ever thought of himself as only twelve or thirteen or whatever he was, being anxious to prove himself a man, and take a man’s place and responsibilities.
Ryerson and his wife were going back. She was a complaining woman and he was a man who was always ailing when there was work to be done. Four or five wagons were turning back, folks with their tails betwixt their legs running for the shelter of towns where their own littleness wouldn’t stand out so plain.
When a body crossed the Mississippi and left the settlements behind, something happened to him. The world seemed to bust wide open, and suddenly the horizons spread out and a man wasn’t cramped any more. The pinched-up villages and the narrowness of towns, all that was gone. The horizons simply exploded and rolled back into enormous distance, with nothing around but prairie and sky.
Some folks couldn’t stand it. They’d cringe into themselves and start hunting excuses to go back where they came from. This was a big country needing big men and women to live in it, and there was no place out here for the frightened or the mean. The prairie and sky had a way of trimming folks down to size, or changing them to giants to whom nothing seemed impossible.
Men who had cut a wide swath back in the States found themselves nothing out here. They were folks who were used to doing a lot of talking who suddenly found that no one was listening any more, and things that seemed mighty important back home, like family and money, they amounted to nothing alongside character and courage.
There was John Sampson from our town. He was a man used to being told to do things, used to looking up to wealth and power, but when he crossed the Mississippi he began to lift his head and look around. He squared his shoulders, put more crack to his whip and began to make his own tracks in the land.
Pa was always strong, an independent man given to reading at night from one of the four or five books we had, to speaking up on matters of principle and to straight shooting with a rifle. Pa had fought the Comanche and lived with the Sioux, but he wasn’t strong enough to last more than two days with a Kiowa arrow through his lung. But he died knowing ma had sto
od by the rear wheel and shot the Kiowa whose arrow it was.
Right then I knew that neither Indians nor country was going to get the better of ma. Shooting that Kiowa was the first time ma had shot anything but some chicken-killing varmint-which she’d done time to time when pa was away from home. Only ma wouldn’t let Jeanie and me call it home.
“We came here from Illinois,” she said, “but we’re going home now.”
“But, ma,” I protested, “I thought home was where we came from?”
“Home is where we’re going now,” ma said, “and we’ll know it when we find it. Now that pa is gone we’ll have to build that home ourselves.”
She had a way of saying “home” so it sounded like a rare and wonderful place and kept Jeanie and me looking always at the horizon, just knowing it was over there, waiting for us to see it. She had given us the dream, and even Jeanie, who was only six, she had it too.
She might tell us that home was where we were going, but I knew home was where ma was, a warm and friendly place with biscuits on the table and fresh-made butter. We wouldn’t have a real home until ma was there and we had a fire going. Only I’d build the fire.
Mr. Buchanan, who was captain of the wagon train, came to us with Tryon Burt, who was guide. “We’ll help you,” Mr. Buchanan said. “I know you’ll be wanting to go back, and “
“But we are not going back.” Ma smiled at them. “And don’t be afraid we’ll be a burden. I know you have troubles of your own, and we will manage very well”
Mr. Buchanan looked uncomfortable, like he was trying to think of the right thing to say. “Now, see here,” he protested, “we started this trip with a rule. There has to be a man with every wagon.”
Ma put her hand on my shoulder. “I have my man. Bud is almost thirteen and accepts responsibility. I could ask for no better man.”
Ryerson came up. He was thin, stooped in the shoulder, and whenever he looked at ma there was a greasy look to his eyes that I didn’t like. He was a man who looked dirty even when he’d just washed in the creek. “You come along with me, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll take good care of you.”
L'Amour, Louis - SSC 30 Page 26
