by Tim Champlin
Carrick faced them. “If you kids are dead set about trailing these two, you’re welcome to join my wagon train. You don’t want to travel by yourselves, even though there is one adult with you,” he said, indicating Jim.
“Mister Carrick, is there some way I can notify my father, Judge Thatcher, that I’m safe?” Becky asked.
“Where is he?”
Becky looked at the boys.
“Me and Huck was supposed to row our yawl on down the river to meet up with the judge and the sheriff at the St. Louis levee,” Tom said. “But that was more than a week ago. They likely give up on us by now. No telling where they might be.”
“Can’t send them a letter without an address, unless you mail it to St. Petersburg,” Carrick said. “And mail delivery is mighty sketchy anyhow. No tellin’ when, or if, they’d even receive a letter.”
They all thought for a moment.
“Well, never mind,” Becky said, with a sigh. “If we head out after those outlaws, somethin’ bad might happen to me yet. So I don’t want to send a message that I’m safe, and then have him later find out I’m dead or something.” She shuddered and bit her lip. “Best we go on and see what happens. I’ll contact him when this is all over.”
“The wagon train can’t travel fast and we might not see those outlaws at all,” Carrick cautioned. “So don’t boost up your hopes. You have any money for provisions?”
“Yeah, we have a little gold.”
“How much?”
Zane looked at Jim. “I haven’t counted it, but I think a little less than two hundred left.” He would not have revealed this to anyone else, but felt Carrick could be trusted.
“Okay, that’s plenty. If you want to go all the way to California, it might take all of that.”
“Is that your decision, then?” Carrick looked at Becky, then Jim and Tom and Huck, and lastly at Zane who’d been talking.
“I’m agreeable,” Huck said. “We don’t have nothin’ to lose.”
“Only a little time and some money,” Becky added.
“Po niggers don’t have no luck, but ah wants to catch dem robbers, too,” Jim said.
“I go where they go,” Zane said, wondering how he’d fare if he were in this alien world on his own.
“Okay,” Carrick said. “You won’t need a wagon since you’re not carrying anything along. Supplies and animals are expensive here because of the demand. But I’ll help you buy some horses and saddles and what little food and gear you’ll need. If you don’t go all the way to California, you’ll have enough to return.” He gestured. “Whoever has the money, come with me. We have to supply you quickly. Time is moving and my train is second in line to cross the ferry in the morning.”
All of them went with Carrick to buy their mounts and slickers and food. The total they wound up having to spend put a larger dent in their remaining money than they’d expected.
Zane’s main worry was riding a horse. He’d have to find a gentle animal since he had no experience.
CHAPTER 24
* * *
The train of twenty wagons with all their stock started across the Missouri next morning at 6:40 a.m., the ferrymen heaving on the hawsers that drew the flat raft across the turgid stream. It took four trips to land them all on the other side.
Zane had the feeling they were in a different country and he was relieved to be beyond the mass of people, wagons, and animals. The previous afternoon, after considerable searching, haggling, and eyeing of horseflesh by the experienced Carrick, a sturdy riding mule was selected for Jim, who seemed very satisfied with the choice since he had experience riding mules. The animal was a bit fractious at first, but Jim had a way with animals, Huck said, and Zane noted the black man stroking the mule’s neck and talking quietly into one of the long ears. In no time at all Jim and his new mount were a team.
A small pinto was selected for Becky; Tom and Huck bought bays, and Zane was given a good-sized burro when he admitted to zero riding experience. He wanted no high-strung horse that would shy at a snake or would jump out from under him at the first crack of lightning. Burros were sure-footed and not as likely to break a leg on rough ground or in a prairie dog hole. “Besides,” Tom said, “I druther sleep near a burro anytime since they’ll stomp a snake in a minute. Them sharp hooves will keep you safe from copperheads for sure.”
After looking at the muddy, swirling water, Zane had his doubts that Weir and Smealey had been able to swim their horses across with at least fifty pounds of gold coin. But they had disappeared from the Penrose, and how else but swimming with the gold—perhaps with the help of driftwood. These two appeared to be fearless. If they were on the trail ahead, would Zane and the others ever catch up?
The expedition quickly settled into a dull routine. Nobody traveled faster than the plodding oxen. But it gave Zane a chance to become used to his gray burro. Becky and Carrick had given Zane a few riding pointers and he soon settled in, although he could never become accustomed to the idea of a living animal under him who might rebel at his slightest lapse of attention and throw him. He would have much preferred an impersonal mechanical device like his familiar bicycle.
Would they have to travel all the way to the west coast? How far would Weir and Smealey go? They already had their golden treasure. No need to travel cross-country to the gold fields where they might have to work. He guessed they’d ride two or three days into Indian Territory and then hole up until they thought the law had quit looking for them before returning to the states. Then Weir would likely start south to New Orleans. Tom said Smealey had mentioned lighting out for Texas, which had recently been won from Mexico.
Ahead and behind Zane could see other wagon trains. He certainly hadn’t expected anything akin to a crowded twenty-first-century highway, creeping as slowly as traffic on a torn-up interstate.
As they moved northwesterly into what later would be southeastern Nebraska, the terrain began to change. Trees thinned out, with copses in hollows apparently growing where water was abundant.
The sky grew wider, the land emptier. As long as the soil was still damp and no dust was being churned up, the five rode at the end of the train. As the mounts plodded along, the young people conversed until they ran out of topics or the afternoon sun hammered them into a semi-doze.
An hour before sundown, the train halted for the night. Tom and Huck rode out with a few other men from the train to find firewood.
Zane and Becky were too exhausted to stir after they unsaddled their mounts and Becky showed Zane how to rub down the animals and give them some oats to eat. Then one of the men from the last wagon in line showed him how to hobble his burro so he couldn’t wander off.
“There have already been too many trains over this trail,” Carrick explained when Becky wondered about the lack of grass for forage. “This prairie grass will never provide the needs of all the animals who pass over it in a season. We’re already well into June and pretty soon, as we move farther west, the men will have to take the oxen and horses a long distance to either side of the trail to find sufficient grass. Trains can’t carry enough hay or grain to feed them for the whole trip. When we hit the desert near the Humboldt River, we’ll be down to feeding the stock a slurry of flour mixed with whatever water we can find.”
The first night Zane found himself falling asleep over his beans and bacon as he sat on a blanket near the campfire. His watch said it was already 11:48 p.m. and it was barely dark. Then he realized his watch was still on Eastern Time. But in 1849 there were no time zones. How confusing was that? But out here, people seemed to rise with the sun and go to bed by the sun. And right now daylight would last longer than at any other time of the year, regardless of what a watch said.
Even soccer and baseball had never tired him out like a long day on a burro. He guessed it was as much stress as physical exercise. As soon as he could after eating, he stretched out on a blanket on the ground and fell into a deep sleep.
Next morning, Zane was so sore he could hard
ly walk around. His buttocks and inner thighs in particular.
“Saddle sore,” Tom said, when Zane mentioned it privately. “You’ll harden up to it in a couple days. Meanwhile, try sitting on one cheek and then the other. Me and Huck are right tender in them parts ourselves, not being brung up to horseback ridin’.”
“Becky must be a lot tougher than I am,” Zane observed. “She never mentioned being sore.”
“You think a girl’s gonna to tell you somethin’ like that?” Tom was scornful. “She’d die of embarrassment.”
Another lesson of the nineteenth century. Yet, after breakfast, he gained a measure of satisfaction when he noticed Becky accepting the invitation of one of the women to ride on the seat of their family’s wagon—allegedly for talk and company. Becky’s pinto was trailed along behind.
An hour after the six wagons were on the trail, Zane reined up and dismounted. “Let’s you and I both get a little relief,” he muttered to his burro as he moved ahead to walk and lead the animal.
For the next several days, the routine was the same. Zane did, indeed, toughen up to the saddle and the trail.
They struck the Platte River and the trail turned to follow it. Zane thought there was a major highway along this route in his time, but couldn’t recall the number of the interstate. When he’d traveled any distance from his home in Delaware with his parents, they’d always flown, so he didn’t have the intimate familiarity with the country as travelers of this slower era.
In spite of the fact that he was trying to gain weight, he found himself growing leaner, his muscles hardening and the skin of his face and hands weathering darker. The incessant prairie wind kept blowing off his straw hat, so he borrowed a strip of rawhide from one of the men and fashioned a cord to tie under his chin and keep his hat in place. Lacking any dark glasses to protect his eyes from blowing dust, he took to wearing his prescription glasses part of the time. He didn’t have to look at himself, but he must have presented a rather ludicrous sight, he thought. He wondered what his friends back home would think if they saw him now, perched atop a burro, wearing a straw hat and horn-rimmed glasses, pants with one suspender and a belt. All he needed now to look completely ridiculous, he thought, was a parasol to hold over his head to resemble one of the illustrations he’d seen in Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad.
For variety, Tom and Huck sometimes rode back and forth alongside the wagons, but Zane kept to the rear, unsure of his riding skills, usually letting his burro have his head to walk along contentedly, now and then pausing to crop a tasty morsel of grass.
One still moonlit night, Tom, Huck, Zane, Becky, and Jim sat up late around a campfire after the adults in the wagon train had taken to their beds for the night.
Tom, Huck, and Becky had compared notes about their experiences as captives, then speculated on the current whereabouts of the kidnappers.
Then, for a short time they sat staring silently into the fire, with their own thoughts. The lonely silence was punctuated by the yipping of a distant coyote.
At last Tom said, “Zane, should we tell Becky where you came from?”
“Sure. The rest of you know. After what we been through, she has a right to the whole story.”
“Zane is from a future time—almost two hundred years from now.”
“What?”
The boys related what they had deduced of Zane’s origin.
“That’s hogwash!” Becky said.
But Tom and Huck persisted, while Zane chipped in what he knew. He even showed her his cell phone and retrieved a snapshot of an airliner he’d forgotten he’d stored in the device. “This here is what replaced balloons for people to fly around in,” he told her, simplifying the story. “The main thing we haven’t decided is whether the whole world has moved back to 1849, or it’s only me,” Zane said. “If it’s the whole world, like Tom thinks, then none of these future things has happened yet—like wars and such, and my parents and great-great grandparents haven’t even been born yet. But if it’s only me that came back, my folks will be wondering where I went—unless Providence puts me back into my former life at the exact point where I left it, in which case nobody will even know I’ve been gone.”
The boys grinned at the incredulous look on her face.
“Jim, I think these three been chewing loco weed or they’re moonstruck.” She stood up, brushing off her skirt. “I’m going to bed before this gets any crazier.”
Several nights later, Carrick was unable to find room for his small wagon train down in a hollow near the Platte River. Earlier arrivals had jammed this camping spot with hundreds of wagons that stretched along the river for nearly a mile. So he’d guided his train to higher ground north of the river and circled them up to form a dry camp.
As he squatted by the fire that night, sipping coffee, he seemed more concerned than Zane had seen him before.
“This is worse than the roads back east near the cities,” Carrick remarked to one of the men next to him. “The trail is being overwhelmed by hundreds of wagons and thousands of animals. The water is being polluted, and every usable stick of wood has been stripped off the cottonwoods along the stream. No grass within miles. Looks like a plague of locusts has been through here.”
He had already given orders for everyone on the train—men, women, and children—to begin picking up dried dung, buffalo chips and cow chips, for fuel and toss them into squares of canvas slung beneath the wagons.
“Jacob, I’m putting you in charge of the train tomorrow,” Carrick said to the man finishing his meal beside him. “I want to make a foray off to the north to see if I can find some better forage. If so, we’ll fill our water barrels and break away from the main trail for a few days.”
He stood and stretched. “I’m turning in.” He looked across the fire. “Boys, if you want to ride with me in the morning on a scout, you might see some of the country. I’ll take my rifle and maybe if I bag a deer or antelope—even a buffalo—we can all have some fresh meat and then smoke the rest for later.”
Tom and Huck looked at each other and grinned so wide their faces nearly split. Except for their scabbed wrists, they had apparently recovered from their earlier ordeal.
That night, Zane was kept awake until late by the mournful crying of coyotes. Or was it wolves? He’d never heard either so didn’t know the difference. What a lonely sound in the still light of the moon!
A northwesterly breeze kept any dew from forming that night. It made for comfortable, dry sleeping under the stars and wagons, but lack of rain was becoming a concern. “It’s not normally this dry this early this far east,” Carrick summed up the next morning as they saddled up. “Keep an eye open for any streams or springs. In this open country you can spot clumps of green trees from quite a distance. That indicates there’s water down in the swales.”
All of them except Becky had volunteered to go on this scout. She had struck up a friendship with a young wife on one of the wagons, and preferred to stay close.
Tom seemed to thirst for adventure more than the animals thirsted for water. To him, adventure was better than fresh-baked rhubarb pie.
Huck was pretty much game for any new enterprise.
And Zane and Jim went along to break the monotony and see something for a few hours besides plodding oxen, creaking wagons, and dust.
They filled their canteens and hung them on the saddles and stuffed some strips of dried, smoked beef and buffalo hump into their saddlebags to eat. Zane thought these withered, dark strips of jerked meat looked like licorice.
The sun was topping the eastern horizon when they rode away, following the river for a ways and then striking north and west.
With his feet firmly in the stirrups, knees steadying himself and a good grip on the reins, Zane was beginning to feel more confident about his riding.
Besides Carrick, who had a single shot rifle and a Colt revolver, Jim was the only one carrying a firearm—the small, .31 caliber Baby Dragoon. But, in this wide-open country where he
could spot danger from a long way off, and with the seasoned frontiersman nearby, Zane had no qualms about being completely defenseless.
Only a mile from the wagon train, they startled a big brownish bird that flapped up heavily from the deep grass, a jackrabbit in its talons. After a short distance, the bird dropped its heavy prey and, thrusting mightily with a six-foot wingspan, began to gain altitude.
“Wow!” Zane breathed.
“A golden eagle,” Carrick said. “Lotsa small critters out here they prey on. A magnificent bird.”
They’d been riding about two hours and the view of the gently rolling plain gave Zane the feeling that a person could ride on and on forever until he fell off the edge of the world.
They topped a slight rise and Carrick drew up so they could take a breather and have a look around. The guide pulled out his telescopic spyglass and began to scan the countryside around.
While his burro put his head down to graze, Zane stood in his stirrups and breathed deeply of the fresh prairie wind. No farmhouses, no roads, no fences, no telephone poles or railroad tracks, no cornfields or waving wheat—only thigh-high grass rustling quietly in the great distances.
When he glanced at the sky, there were no jet contrails. But a slight movement from the south caught his eye. Something coming toward them across the sky. As it approached, he saw it was a dense flock of birds, flying close together, darting like swallows with similar sharply defined wings. He gasped as they came on, massive numbers of them veering and swooping as one, less than a hundred feet above the ground. The whooshing of thousands of wings startled him more than the sudden thunder of quail taking flight.
He cringed as they swooped overhead. The dense flock came on and on. He slid out of the saddle and stood transfixed, gripping the saddle horn as if to hold himself in place while the unending feathered mass flowed overhead, causing vertigo while he watched it.
More than five minutes passed and still they came like a seething, flowing river in the sky. At length they passed and he let out a deep breath when the flock flew away to the northeast like the passing of a storm cloud. A few feathers drifted down in their wake.
