“The bishop.”
“Not the marshal?”
Mickey glared. “Ye’aven’t got it yet, eh? This is a church war.”
Skye wasn’t chastened. “Claiming land is not church business. This is territorial business.”
“Ye damned Englishman, go home then.”
There was a final blessing echoing from the open windows, and then the doors swung open and a few people, mostly women in gray or brown dresses, eddied into the softening light of evening.
More tumbled out, white-haired men, a crippled man on crutches, and still more women. Skye thought the congregation must be almost entirely women.
“The militia took the young men,” Mickey said.
That answered Skye’s question. The able-bodied men were off to war. That in itself was worrisome.
The crowd eyed Skye and Mickey speculatively but no one approached, and some of the women drifted down the slope to the town, along with children.
Then men appeared at the church doors, a slender gray-haired one, his hair brushed straight back, wearing a white collarless shirt and a shirtwaist. To either side of him stood burly younger men. These were the only young men Skye could see, and both looked to be bodyguards. But who could say?
This contingent started straight for Skye and Pick, who waited beside their horses. As the gray-haired man approached, Skye discovered muscle and determination in the man’s gait; an imperial force propelling the man toward Skye. The man’s flinty stare seemed the drilling probe of a Cyclops.
Then the three reached Skye. Skye lifted his top hat in polite salute and settled it.
“I’m Barnaby Skye, sir, and this is Mister Pick. To whom do I speak?”
The question went unanswered. “We know who you are, Englishman,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”
“Hoping for some friendship. I’m guiding a company of invalids that plans to settle nearby, and we are seeing how it might be done.”
“It won’t be done.”
“They have come a long way seeking healing, and have found a desert place that suits them. We’ve come to notify your county officials and register their claim.”
“You have, in your dubious wisdom, come to the right person, and you are too late.”
“I didn’t catch your name, sir.”
“That is because I chose not to supply it. To my flock I am Bishop Simon Wellborn. To you, who I am makes not the slightest difference.”
“Mister Wellborn, the people I represent have a right under the laws of your country to take up land. They are doing it. They will exercise their right. I’ll add that they pose no threat to you.”
“Londoners, both of you, I have it.” He turned to Mickey. “And one in bad grace with us.”
″You ′ave it, mate.”
Wellborn’s voice escalated, almost into fevered pitch. “The word from our elders is clear,” he began, his words crackling in the hushed evening. “The Apocalypse is upon us. Zion must be purged of every Gentile, every enemy. Zion is ours. Even now, while you waste my time, a militia is enforcing the edict. You are too late. Good afternoon. It is only because you are Englishmen that you are free to go. It is a mistake; you are accomplices. But I am bound by the council.”
“Who are these gentlemen?” Skye asked.
“They are deputy marshals.”
“Where are the territorial officials? Where may I plead the case?”
“You have already pleaded, and I have already dismissed you. This is Zion.”
“What may they do to appeal this, sir?”
“You seem to be slow, Skye. Have you no wits about you? What is set in motion I cannot stop, and will never stop, because I favor and bless its every act.” He paused. “Flee for your safety. If you linger here, I won’t care what country you come from. You will be subject to whatever fate I choose for you.”
Sky nodded and boarded Jawbone. Mickey climbed onto the Morgan mare.
“They’ll claim that land. And I’ll defend them,” Skye said.
The bishop smiled.
Skye was tired of being smiled at.
“Thanks for the warning,” he said. He doffed his topper and smiled back. He kept on smiling until the bishop looked away.
They slipped out of town, each wrapped in deep quiet.
There could be no more attempts at reconciliation.
Skye chose the dogleg valley route back to the camp, fearful of getting caught in a box canyon or trapped on a mesa at night. It had been a feckless journey. All of southern Utah seemed to be caught in a hellish cauldron of bitterness. It was something new to him. In all his years in London and then the Royal Navy, he had never seen or felt such seething passion. Among the mountain men, there might be private hatreds, but not this obsessive madness that gripped so many people.
“I’d be better off lifting a man’s purse in East End, I would,” Mickey said. “I don’t like this thing’ere. They’re sending out skull-and-bones men, is what they’re doing, regular murders all whipped up. There was nawt a thing like it in London.”
They could not fight, so they must hide. Skye knew he must speed back to camp, waken them, hasten them out of their tents, urge them to pack up and leave that place. He would take them up that creek, cover their tracks, dip into a canyon, find a hidden valley or a remote canyon, and hide them all from that murderous militia roaming like a hydrophobic wolf across the empty lands. Someday, this would be over and they could return to their meadow on the creek.
The September night was chill and peaceful, and the trail easy to follow by the pale emanation of a quarter moon. The valley was flanked by a single brooding cliff to the east, and that only made passage easier by orienting them at all times.
They were alone. No Saint horsemen clattered through the night, no couriers trotted by, carrying commands from the elders in Great Salt Lake, or intelligence from the outlying provinces, including all this area.
They rounded a bend, and found themselves in the valley of the Virgin, and now they hastened toward the meadow where his friends and family slumbered in soft silence.
Even in the dim light, the valley could be limned, and Skye turned Jawbone up the side creek. The horse snorted softly and laid its ears back, so Skye slid his Sharps from its sheath, fearing trouble.
“Where’s the camp, eh?” Mickey asked.
A good question. There was no camp. No wagon, no mules, no burros, no ponies, no cart, no lodge, no tents.
“The light’s playing tricks. The camp must be up higher,” Skye said, not really believing his own words.
But there was no camp anywhere. There was an extinguished fire. A ring of stones where Skye’s lodge had stood. Disturbed grasses where the tents had stood. Wagon tracks leading down toward the trail by the Virgin River.
There was nothing at all but the sad breezes eddying over empty fields and the whisper of ghosts.
forty
Where were they? Had they fled? Were they in trouble? Anguish gnawed at Skye.
“I’d rawther be in London,” Mickey said.
Skye held Jawbone quiet to listen closely, but he heard nothing. No voice calling, no snort of a horse. He eased Jawbone’s rein. Let him point. But the horse just stood. Skye started to do what he always did when trying to read a story from what lay on the moonlit ground. He began a slow spiral that would take him farther and farther from the camp, until he knew where people went, and possibly knew why.
He turned Jawbone around a widening circle. And then the moon quit him. The only cloud he had seen all night slid overhead and blanked the moon. Suddenly it was pitch-dark. It was a large cloud too, one that would not quickly pass.
Why was nature so perverse? Why extinguish the lantern? He raged a moment. Half of his life he had spent raging at nature, which froze him or soaked him or starved him or thirsted him or clawed him or tormented him at the worst possible moments. But it was black now.
“Mickey?”
“Ya’ar,” came a voice.
“I
’m talking to guide you here. Join me.”
Skye actually began humming a sea chanty, and soon enough he heard the soft rustle of the Morgan.
“What’ll ye do, bloke?”
“If the cloud lets up, find the creek and head up it.”
“They’re well gone.”
“I think trouble came and Victoria took them to safety.”
But he sensed the wrongness of that even as he said it.
“I got me some dandy eyes and ears, old bloke. Leave it to this East Ender for prowling the night, eh?”
“All right,” Skye said. If ever there was a nocturnal male, it would be an East London pickpocket.
“Now, follow me, matey,” Mickey said.
Skye did, and soon they heard the babble of the tributary creek. Mickey turned up the creek, and Skye followed, marveling that the man and horse could go anywhere at all.
Not that the Morgan didn’t stumble now and then. It was too dark for movement, and Mickey’s only compass was the purring of the brook on the left.
Skye thought of discharging his rifle, and perhaps Enoch Bright would respond with a shot from his fowling piece. But that was too dangerous. A militia could be prowling this country.
But then Mickey cursed some brush that had whipped his face, and quit.
“Now, in London, every alley, it’s in me head, but this isn’t in me head,” he said.
Patience. That’s what Skye needed and what he didn’t have. He dismounted and prowled restlessly, looking for edges in the black cloud mass working its way across the heaven. But he saw nothing. Just blackness.
“Limey, do ye want a fire, eh?”
“It’s worth the risk. Signal fire. But there’s no wood.”
“Old Skye, you haven’t learned about me,’ave you? In London town, I could pick a pocket in fog, in dark so thick I couldn’t tell the shape of the bloke I was crocking. Mate, I could cut a purse loose on the blackest night of the year, from a man wearing a black coat and black boots and a black hat. I got me the night sense. I know what something is without seeing it, you bet I do.”
Skye felt something vague stirring, and the faintest whisper of movement.
“There, ye fool, I’ve got yer powder horn.”
Skye roared, “Give that back.”
But Mickey the Pick was laughing. “Now just sit tight. I got senses you never knew a man had, and they didn’t call me Mick the Pick for nawthing.”
Skye felt but did not see the little pickpocket stirring about, but there was nothing he could do but sit tight on the dew-damp grass and wait.
“Hurry it up or I’ll put Jawbone on you,” he grumbled.
But Mick the Pick just laughed softly.
“And now, bloke, a pinch of powder and we′ll ′ave a bonfire.”
Skye saw a shower of sparks as flint struck steel, and then a flare of light a few feet in front of him, and then some flames tentatively licking a heap of twigs and sticks and dried reeds and bark. It caught, somehow, and there was Mick, a mean little smirk across his mug. Mick handed Skye his powder horn. The leather suspension cord had been neatly sliced.
“All right, get away from that flame, get into darkness, face the darkness, and see what’s out there. I know something about fires in the night, and the danger of fires, and I didn’t learn it in London,” Skye growled.
Both men crept well apart from the tentative flame and studied the silent valley.
There was nothing to be seen. They had, apparently, moved a quarter of a mile or so up the creek from where the camp had been.
Skye gathered the horses and drew them into darkness. “All right, we’ll see what the fire does, but we’re staying well away from it,” he muttered.
The Pick added a few more pieces of tinder he had collected, just how Skye would never fathom, and then retreated from the flame. Skye tied the sliced cord together and hung his powder horn from his neck once again, and then the pair of them sat out the minutes and hours until a slow, glum dawn finally broke in the east. As the light thickened, and Skye could see farther and farther up and down the valley, and onto the eastern slopes of hills, he saw not a soul.
Where were the invalids? Bright? His family?
They sat quietly until dawn, when he could read the story of the meadow. He caught Jawbone and rode quietly back to the campground. There was a moil of disturbed grass, iron tire tracks, and it seemed to Skye that a lot of people had been at this place. Mickey, on the Morgan, studied the campsite too.
“They got took,” he said.
Skye was coming to the same conclusion. But he hadn’t yet ascertained whether the visitors were Indians or white men. The meadow yielded no secrets. He spiraled Jawbone out farther and farther until it became clear that nearly all the traffic had come from the Virgin River, had turned up this side valley with the creek, and had come to his company’s camp. And there was now absolutely nothing left in camp.
But there was more. Clear travois furrows plowed up the creek toward the mesa country. And here, where there were fewer marks of passage, he thought he discerned the prints of his ponies, but he couldn’t be sure.
“These are travois marks, and these tracks look like my family,” Skye said.
They followed the creek toward the canyon and mesa country above, where the travois trail took them. Soon they were in cedar thickets, and climbing steadily. Then Skye halted. Ahead was an arrow protruding from a thick, twisted juniper tree. He knew in a glance whose arrow that was. It had been driven there by Victoria’s bow. The arrow had Crow fletching and dyes. And it meant big trouble, watch out, be ready, and come slowly ahead.
He had double feelings, relief that his family, as far as he could tell, was safe, and worry about the rest, and what sort of mysterious trouble might lie ahead. But he unsheathed his Sharps, checked the load, and found the rifle was ready.
“I’d still rawther be in London, mate,” Mickey said quietly.
“There’s trouble. Study the ridges and let me know if there’s anything unusual. We may be observed,” Skye said.
He worked the arrow loose and dropped it into his rifle sheath. Victoria’s arrows were well wrought and valuable.
He thanked her silently for the warning.
They continued up the creek, plunging into a red rock canyon, and then Victoria stood there in the trail, bow nocked with an arrow.
Skye dropped from Jawbone, raced to her, and hugged her fiercely, so glad was he to see her.
“Come,” she said, and led them across naked rock and finally into a pocket hollow in a red cliff, where red walls vaulted upward, leaving only a patch of blue high above. There was Mary, and there was the boy, and there were the ponies, and lying on the clay were the lodge, lodgepoles, and his family possessions.
This hidden place held all his treasure. He gave Mary a hug, studied his boy, who stared up at him from bare ground, and then the women pressed Skye to sit. There would be much telling, and Skye dreaded what he was about to hear.
“The men came, many, many, hundred maybe, riding horses, carrying rifles and revolvers. Men with beards. They don’t ride so good, but they come. It was late in the afternoon, and they come up to the camp, and then they spread out, rifles ready, and the man we know, square-bearded man, he’s the boss, and he walks up when he sees no one’s gonna fight.
“He’s damn cheerful, they all are laughing, pleased with themselves. Bright, he feels their good cheer, introduces himself, and I don’t like this so I nod to Mary, and we slowly pack up, but nobody notices some old squaws. Except the square-beard, he looks around for you, and asks, and I say you’re gone somewhere.
“So the men, they say, they’re taking the invalids away for protection, lots of Paiute Indians making trouble for travelers, and these men, they come to protect white people and get us to safety. So Enoch Bright, he’s smiling. The sick ones are happy, they pack up, and the square-beard, he’s the boss, he says the women and sick go in one wagon, the men walk. Off they go, and that square-beard, he tips
his hat, winks at me, and says nothing.”
“When they got to the Virgin River, which way did they go?” Skye asked.
“They all go down the river,” she said.
To safety.
forty-one
Maybe it was true, Skye thought. Maybe the Paiutes were raiding travelers. Attacks on travelers were common enough on every trail heading across the continent. But it didn’t make sense. Why were the Paiutes stirred up, and why were the Saints suddenly protecting travelers?
“I don’t trust the sonsofbitches,” Victoria said.
She was usually right.
Maybe the Mormon militia was simply rounding up the invalids to expel them from Utah, send them west once again. That did make sense. Bright’s company would be told to head west and keep on going. Surely that’s what all this was about. But that didn’t feel right, either.
Skye ached for some sort of clue, if only to figure out what to do. But he didn’t know what had happened or what to do. It was all guesswork.
“We’ll look for them and come back here when we can,” Skye said. “This is a good place to cache our stuff.”
Victoria glared at him, her way of saying she was seeing things that he didn’t grasp.
It was a perfect place to hide things, a tiny walled alcove in the red cliff. Victoria and Mary had already drawn the lodge cover and lodgepoles into the alcove, so there was little to do but pull everything under an overhang.
He realized suddenly that Mickey the Pick hadn’t been informed. “We’re going after our people before we lose them,” he said. “That means speed. We’ll try to catch up with that militia and find out where they’re going. We won’t be dragging the lodge. We’ll take all the ponies; might have to put Peter Sturgeon on one when we catch up. If that militia’s big and if it knows what it’s doing, this won’t be easy. The first step is to find them. Then we’ll know what is happening.”
Mickey beamed. “I can cut a purse from a bloke at midnight in fog; just let me cut a few invalids from the bunch.”
“Mickey the Pick, you are going to be an asset,” Skye said.
“They called me Lord Cutpurse, they did, long ago.”
Virgin River Page 22
