Bendigo Shafter

by Louis L'Amour

  Fully conscious the outlaw stared bitterly at Webb. “Give me a gun,” he said, “and I’ll ...”

  His voice faded out as Sampson came from his house carrying a small kit of medicine and bandages. The man was dead, stiffening in a pool of his own blood. Others emerged, shocked and pale from the sudden violence. The women held the children within the cabins that they might not look upon death, yet fascinated and fearful, they strained to see.

  “We should find out who they are,” Mrs. Sampson suggested, “and write to their families.”

  Nobody wished to go into their pockets. We did not want to know who they were, or if they left anyone behind, as some of them must have. It was easier to be impersonal about the anonymous.

  Their rifles and ammunition we would need, for we had too little of either, and each morning we looked upon the hills with fear.

  Black Lutrell was not among the dead. In the melee that followed Webb’s shot he had blurred among the others, and we had not seen him again.

  We gathered guns and belts, catching up the horses that had not run off. Fine, handsome animals they were, stolen no doubt from folks killed.

  We from our town stood together, and Cain read the service of the dead. We buried them upon the small knoll, the first to die there in our time, and when it was over we had drawn a little closer together.

  Once more we had met with fear and emerged a little stronger than before, a little more tightly knit.

  Yet we stood a little further apart, too, I guess, because some of us had killed, and we were not used to killing, nor to violence.

  Only Webb, I think, looked upon what he had done with satisfaction, and I, who knew what was happening out there with a land of instinct, knew that what Webb had done had saved us all. His sudden action had destroyed their timing. They had planned to begin it, and his move, for whatever cause, had caught them short.

  Chapter 5

  When I finished reading Nelson Lee’s book I started on Washington Irving, and followed that with Commerce of the Prairies. Sometimes I talked about what I read to Ruth Macken, and she shared ideas with me.

  Her talk stirred all of us to restlessness, I guess. Neely Stuart did not like her talking to Mae, and said it gave her “notions,” which no doubt it did.

  When Neely spoke to Mrs. Macken about it, she merely smiled at him. “Mr. Stuart, I have no doubt that she has ideas, and she should have them. Nobody got anywhere in this world by simply being content.”

  “What about Bud?” I asked. “Why do you want a school but for him?”

  “I want the school for the town, as well as for Bud. I want him to like it here, but I want him to help it grow. I want him to understand what is happening here, then go on to something bigger, better. Happiness for a man usually means doing something he wants to do very much, something that gives him a sense of achievement.”

  She turned to me. “What about you, Mr. Shafter? What do you want to do? What do you wish to become?”

  It shamed me to say I had no idea. I loved the life, but the feeling rode with me that it was only something passing. Maybe we all had that feeling about wherever we were. We were not like the Europeans from whom we had sprung, we were not settled in villages or classes where we would stay, generation after generation. We were a people on the move, and whether that was good or ill, only time would tell. Many of those who came west came to get rich and get out, but some of us came to stay, and most of us had the idea of enriching the country somehow, although many had no notion of how to go about it.

  What I wanted to do, I did not know. I had wanted to come west, but now that I was west I was not sure. I wanted to help Cain with his smithy and his sawmill, but even as I planned the building of it I knew I’d no idea of staying on. The country was too big, there was too much to see.

  “And then what, Mr. Shafter? What happens when you have seen most of it, and you are no longer a young man, and you take stock of your life?”

  She had a way of worrying a man, and I left her almighty discontented with myself. She had asked me some dangerous questions. Such questions were like a loose tooth or a nail in the shoe, the mind kept worrying about them, unable to leave them alone.

  The books were opening the gates to a wider world, and in part I read for the love of learning and discovering. There was little time for it. To live was to struggle, and to keep our homes supplied with food and fuel was an unending task, allowing little time for considering things beyond the range of our daily lives. What we did not possess we had to make for ourselves or learn to do without, but the little I learned helped me to build a defense against the change that time would surely bring, to teach me that to live was to change, and that change was the one irrevocable law. Nothing remained the same.

  Ours was a land of movement. My people had come from Wales, Ireland, and France at different times. My own parents had come front Pennsylvania to Illinois and Wisconsin, and my mother’s grandparents had come from Maine and Virginia, but the love of new lands was deep within us all.

  It was no static world that waited upon decision, it was a world where only a few positive virtues were required, and where the rights and wrongs of things seemed sharply cut and clear.

  Much as I loved reading I was wary of it, for I soon saw that much that passed for thinking was simply a good memory, and many an educated man was merely repeating what he had learned, not what he had thought out for himself.

  Of those with whom I lived only Ruth Macken had spent time among cultivated people. I envied her this, and longed to sit among people who were traveled and who had read and conversed.

  Yet our town had begun as many of the first towns began, established by a nomadic people, and often when swinging an axe in the woods I wondered if in time man’s brain might not become smaller, for as more knowledge was preserved in books or by other means, he might have to think less and contrive less.

  We who lived upon the wild lands looked much at the sky, told time by the sun and our directions by the fall of shadows, the flow of streams, or the way the limbs grew upon the trees.

  Ethan Sackett knew most about such things, and much of what I came to know was learned from him. His senses were finely attuned to the wilderness, and tracking a man or an animal was never simply a matter of following signs left on the earth or on brush, but of knowing the mind of the creature he was following. He often came with me into the woods when timber cruising, and we hunted together.

  Felling timbers for the mill was more than simply dropping a tree, for once it lay upon the ground I would mark off regular intervals with the adze, then square the timbers into beams with a broad-axe. This was a short-handled axe with a level on one side and sharp enough to shave with.

  We had no long stretches of continuous forest. The ridges were crested with timber, and there were extensive patches elsewhere scattered with meadows until one got up into the Wind River

  By the end of our first month I had felled and hewn ten great timbers besides hunting and doing daily chores. The timbers were placed upon sticks to hold them free of the ground to season rather than rot.

  The days of cold and heavy snow had cut deep into our supplies, and without Ethan’s hunting we would have seen hunger and grief. He butchered his meat and divided amongst us all.

  We were sitting about the fire in Cain’s place. “We’ve enough,” Webb remarked, “if we take it easy. If it’s an early spring, we can make out.”

  “We still got to think about waiting for a crop,” Sampson commented.

  “That’s more’n those folks over east will do,” Ethan said.

  You never heard such a silence. Ethan had just come in, empty-handed, from a hunt. I wondered at it, for there was dried blood on the cantle of his saddle where he’d carried meat.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Sackett?” Ruth Macken asked. “What folks over east?”

  “Passel o’ folks headed for Salt Lake. I never did see such a played out bunch. They’re Mormon folk, come from the old countries to jo
in up with Brigham.”

  “They’re hungry?”

  “Starvin’, ma’am, an’ sick.”

  “Let ’em eat their stock. I et horse a time or two,” Webb said, “and it wasn’t bad.”

  “They haven’t any stock.”

  We just looked at him. No stock? That was impossible. “They’re afoot. Pushin’ handcarts and the like. Many have died, but there may be thirty of them left. I guess they heard about those who came west that way years ago and decided to try it.”

  “Did you tell them about us?” Cain asked.

  “Didn’t figure I had the right. Settin’ back like we are they could pass right by and never see us. I figured if we wanted to do anything we should all make the decision.”

  “Hell,” Neely said, “there’s nothing to decide. We’ve barely enough to last. They’d eat us out of house and home.”

  “I don’t know, Neely,” Croft objected, “I’ve been hungry a time or two.”

  “Whatever will they do?” Lorna exclaimed. “They’ll all die!”

  “None of our affair,” Neely insisted. “Let Brigham take care of them.”

  “He’ll do it,” Ethan said, “and they sent a messenger through. If he makes it, and if help can get there in time.”

  “Bendigo.” It was the first time Ruth Macken had ever called me by my first name. “Will you drive my wagon?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I surely will.”

  “Now, see here!” Neely got suddenly to his feet but Mrs. Macken paid him no mind. She was going for her wraps.

  Neehy’s face was flushed. “Mrs. Macken, you can’t do this! You’ll bring those people down on us like a flock of locusts.”

  She was buttoning her coat. Her eyes were large, the way they looked when her mind was made up. “You need do nothing. You asked me what I intended to sell at my trading post. I intended to sell food and clothing, and that’s why we brought an extra wagon. I shall share with these people.”

  “You’ve got no right!” Mary Croft had never liked Ruth Macken because of her good looks and her independence. “You’ll bring them down on us all!”

  “Now, Mary ...” Tom protested.

  “It should be decided upon,” Ethan said. “I move we vote.”

  “No help,” Neely Stuart said firmly.

  “Help,” Croft said.

  “No help!” Mary glared at Tom.

  “I have already voted,” Ruth said. “How about it, Bendigo?”

  “He can’t vote,” Mary protested.

  “I do a man’s work. I’ll cast a man’s vote. We help them.”

  “No help,” Webb said, after a minute.

  “I can’t turn my back on suffering,” Sampson said. “I believe we should help.”

  Mrs. Sampson and Cain’s wife voted for, as I knew they would, but all this time Cain Shafter had said nothing. He just looked up at me. “It’s coming on to snow. You’ll need runners on the wagon. You’ll need two wagons and all the blankets and buffalo robes we can spare.”

  “You ain’t voted,” Neely protested.

  Cain glanced at him. “Neely, I never gave it any thought. I was just setting here trying to figure out how best to do it.”

  Webb got up. “I don’t believe in it, and I think we’ll pay for it, but I’ll drive that other wagon.”

  “You’re a pack of fools!” Mary Croft said. “Let Brigham take care of them. He got them out here.”

  To get through the wind and snow to the stable I’d built for Ruth Macken was a problem. The ground had been almost bare of snow but the sky was gray and lowering. By sundown snow had started falling again with a few slow, drifting flakes, then it had come down faster and faster.

  Cain, with Sampson and Webb to help, was fitting runners to the wagons. Stuart and Croft, with Neely still grumbling but doing his share nonetheless, worked on the second wagon. At the last minute Bud Macken claimed the right to come with me.

  Ruth Macken said, “Bud, it will be brutally hard, unlike anything you have ever tried before, and if you go along you must do your part.”

  “I know it, ma.”

  Her big eyes were filled with worry, so as I gathered the lines I said, “He’s pretty much of a man, ma’am. He’ll stand up to it.”

  “I believe so. When he’s your age I hope he is the man you are.”

  Her words stayed with me, and even with the cold and blowing snow I felt strangely warm. Ruth Macken had a way of saving the right words when they were needed.

  We drove off, my wagon taking the lead, into the blowing snow. Within fifty yards we had lost sight of our town. Ahead of us was a cold drive that could bring death to the four of us.

  Tom Croft was riding with Webb.

  Chapter 6

  Ruth Macken’s horses were good stock and in better shape than most because of the grass on that bench where she had chosen to settle, which was almost as good as in the meadow below. Her horses grazed in the meadow with the other stock, then grazed on her bench when the meadow grass thinned out.

  We wanted horses because they were faster than oxen and more likely to find their way home if we became lost. None of us doubted the possibility.

  Webb had a good, strong team, and he had worked them a good deal, hauling water from the falls. We had used our wagons for little else since arriving at the town site. Ruth Macken had water at her door, and I was thinking on a way to actually bring it into the house; the rest of us hauled water in barrels.

  Actually, where we got the water wasn’t a fall. It was too small to be called that, just a place where the creek spilled over a rock ledge high enough to set barrels under for filling.

  We used to take a wagon loaded with four to six barrels and fill them to the brim. A good bit of water slopped over the side, turning that stretch of road into an icy pavement higher than the ground on either side by more than a foot.

  It was a little more than a mile to the falls, which were near the main trail. The road home from the falls was along the trail except a few yards at the beginning.

  When we had come down off the bench to make our start, Cain and Helen met us with several covered buckets. “Bendigo, this is soup,” Helen said. “Now there isn’t a lot here, so share it sparingly, but if you heat it when you get there it will give them warmth and strength for the ride.”

  It was cold. The wind was raw off the mountains, and the snow was thin and icy. We could feel the ruts under the wagons. Ethan had given us careful directions, and we held to a steady gait.

  It was two hours short of daybreak before we actually got started, and we checked time by Webb’s big silver watch. It was all of twelve miles to where the Mormon folk were camped, which meant three to four hours each way ... if we were lucky.

  Bud walked up and down the wagon behind me, beating his arms about him in the “teamster’s warming” and stamping his feet to keep them from freezing. Both of us wore buffalo-hide coats and fur caps with ear laps. Mine had been given to me by Ruth Macken. It had been her husband’s cap, but it fitted snug and fine. By the time we had been an hour on the road nothing was warm any more.

  When we stopped for the third time to give the horses a breather, Webb walked up to join us. “I don’t like it, Ben. We’ve got ruts to follow now, but if the snow keeps falling they’ll be buried too deep by the time we start back.”

  “We’ll make it,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. Much of the country we had to cross was a great, wide plain. To the south it stretched away for mile upon empty mile where the wind had a full sweep. If a man got off the trail he might never find it again.

  “Check the time it takes us,” I suggested, “and we’ll watch the time as we start back.”

  The sky turned gray, and I could see the lead horses again. All around us the ground was white, an unbroken expanse of snow.

  “Bendigo?” Bud said. “Can we walk for a while? I think my feet are freezing.”

  “Good idea.” I pulled up and got down. Webb came forward again, and he nodded
when I said we were going to walk.

  His was a narrow, dark face but his eyes were cold and gray. With a stubble of beard showing where his handlebar mustache wasn’t, he looked both cold and cruel. I thought then, as often before, that he was a better man to have with you than against you.

  We knew nothing about him, only that he came from Missouri. He had a good outfit, but on the wagon train he made no friends, and his son made enemies quickly. Foss was large for his age with the instincts of a bully. Webb had none of that, so far as one could see. He minded his own affairs and worked hard, yet there was no friendliness in him.

  He glanced at Bud. “How you makin’ it, boy? My Foss was about to come. Backed out at the last minute.”

  “Maybe he was smarter than I was, Mr. Webb. I just didn’t know when I was well off.”

  “You’re game,” Webb said. “I like that in a man.” We walked on. My face was stiff with cold, and ice gathered on the muffler near my mouth. I wished I had wolverine fur, which Ethan told me wouldn’t collect ice.

  We saw their smoke before we saw them. They were huddled together behind some canvas windbreaks they’d raised against the wind, their handcarts standing about.

  Never in my born days did I see a more woebegone, miserable-looking lot of folks. Shivering with cold, they stood up to greet us; you never saw people more ill-equipped to face such weather. I didn’t know whether to admire them for their faith and courage or to think them downright crazy.

  They stared at us, hollow-eyed and unbelieving. Bud and I got down and carried the soup over to them while Webb turned the wagons and Tom Croft rustled firewood to heat up the soup. “Do you come from Brigham?” Turning my head, I looked at the tall, gaunt man in a flimsy cloth coat. He had an odd lilt to his voice that I took to be some kind of an English accent.

  “No. We come from up the trail a piece. We haven’t much ourselves, but our friend told us of you and we’ve come to help.”

  “The man who brought the meat? May the Lord bless him. May the Lord bless you all.”

  “We can’t take your gear. Tell them to get what food you have and your clothes and guns. We’ll take you to our town and you can return for your gear later.”