He thought of Anna Bennett, willful, devoted to the rights of women. Mary Bridge and Lloyd Jones, whose blossoming romance Skye had been slow to discover, perhaps because their healing came first and they were afraid there would be no future for them without the blessings of dry air, sun, and rest. He thought of Peter Sturgeon, so sick he was carried the whole distance, coughing, his eyes bright with pain and fear, and yet clinging to life because his elders told him he would have a chance in this new Zion where the sick might be healed.
He thought of the Tucker twins, Grant and Ashley, and how pretty the fevered Ashley looked. He thought of Eliza Bridge, her lungs hurting, struggling west, hoping to heal, see the sun rise one more day, and one more day after that, so that someday she might enjoy a family of her own.
And Sterling Peacock, sole heir of all this after Hiram had been buried, struggling to fill his father′s boots even while he wheezed his way west, the sinister disease eating away his lungs and his spirits.
He thought of them all, and at last let them be dead in his mind. They were gone.
He saw Victoria stiff before him, her body unnaturally rigid, and he reached for her and drew her to him, and comforted her, or was it that she was comforting him? He held her, and then saw Mary, still sitting her pony, the infant slung in her shawl, and he reached upward and drew her hands to his face, and kissed them, and felt her fingers in the strands of his beard.
It seemed to be a chapter of his life without an ending and yet it had indeed ended. He had been hired to deliver this company of the ill to their own Zion and he had lost every single one of them. He had lost the man who had hired him, entrusted the safety of this company to him. He had lost this man’s children, his neighbors, his trusted yeoman. All were gone. Never in his life had he, as a guide, lost a whole company, every soul entrusted to his care. Had he failed? Had there been some way he might have spared them? He knew he would be worrying that in his head the rest of his days. He thought he would never again guide another party.
Gradually, the present returned to him, and he was standing again on a clay street in Great Salt Lake City, on a mild late September day, in bright sunlight. He found Mickey gazing patiently at him.
“We’re going to Victoria’s people, and you are welcome to come with us, Mickey.”
“Naw, it’s no place for two East Enders, mate. One Londoner′s enough for any tribe, eh? I’ll stay here.”
“What’ll you do?”
“What I’ve always done. Why did they call me Lord Cutpurse, eh? I blawdy well know how to make a living.”
The little fellow smiled brightly. “Don’t you worry about old Mick, eh? Let me tell you something. This’ere profession of mine, it’s right’onorable, and it beats butchering innocent people, eh? I’ll tell you something. These’ere people, they need a cutpurse or two around, they need a crime wave to teach’em a thing or two. Maybe if they’re busy with a crime wave, they’ll quit picking on strangers.”
Mickey thrust a nimble hand in Skye’s direction, and Skye shook it heartily.
“This’ere’s been a hard time. I like you, Skye. I surely do. Go now, get out of this’ere place before they decide to turn you into missing people, eh?”
Mickey grinned crookedly and walked swiftly away. Skye watched him amble down the street and turn a corner, and then he, too, was gone. There was only Skye’s family there beside him, Jawbone, two riding ponies, and one hauling a travois.
Skye thought Mickey’s last advice was sound. This was a war capital. Yet everywhere, in the temple square, in the architecture, in the decorum of its people, this city spoke of passionate faith.
It was time to leave. Skye climbed aboard Jawbone and his small family worked north, hemmed by the mountains to the east and the great salty lake to the west. No one stopped them. This road would take them to the Bear River and into the towering mountains beyond, and with luck they would make their way across them before the snows closed them.
This way would avoid the militia gathered near Bridger′s Fort to resist the federal column. They made good time, and found abundant ducks and geese in the marshes and bays of the great lake, which Victoria gathered with her arrows. There would be food enough; more food than they had eaten or collected during their entire journey in Utah Territory. That evening Victoria and Mary industriously plucked the fowl, disemboweled them, and roasted them. Skye ate heartily. He ate as if he had never eaten before, as if he had been starved for months.
There was constant traffic en route to Ogden, but the Saints kept to themselves, and Skye’s family did not interest them. Ogden was a small, bright stair-step town rising into the mountains. The Saints had made a paradise of it, putting its ample water to good use in gardens and lawns. It was a good place, but Skye and his wives hurried past. Someday, sometime, it would welcome strangers.
They rode north, the days hurrying by, but they didn’t escape settlement. The industrious Saints had built homes and farms and ranches in country that only a few years earlier had been wilderness. It made Skye uneasy. He turned away from the great basin and headed toward Bear Lake, in a mountain valley to the east, a place all trappers knew and loved. It had seen many a frolic during the beaver days. But here too settlement had pushed in, so that Skye wondered whether this amazing growth would soon overwhelm the Rocky Mountains forever.
Every time they rounded a bend and found some new ranch or farm, Victoria muttered to herself. This, plainly, was uprooting her whole life, her very nature. They finally reached Bear Lake, and found the Saints busy there, turning it into an agricultural valley. Was there no end to it? Who were these people, who turned thousands of square miles of wilderness into settled country in the space of one decade?
But a few days later they ran out of Saints, and headed toward Davy Jackson’s Hole on the Snake River. Now, at last, they slid into the eternal wilds. Snow laced the Tetons, but the valley was still verdant. Bear and wolves and elk roamed the bottoms. Skye had no trouble making meat.
His women cut lodgepoles and put up the lodge on a sunny meadow beside the river. This would be a good place for a while, and later they could follow a water-level route taken by the Astorians long before, and find themselves in Crow and Eastern Shoshone country on the other side of the mountains.
It had been a trip steeped in silence. They hadn’t talked about the missing, but their thoughts never strayed from those consumptives seeking their own Zion. Indian summer bloomed there, in the valley, while the aspen on the slopes turned to gold and the Snake River sparkled by.
The women scraped elk hides, made fresh moccasins, and looked after the ponies. They jerked elk meat, made pemmican, gathered nuts, and sewed new skirts for themselves. Jawbone guarded the camp, chased coyotes, and fattened on the dried grasses. Skye at last did nothing. It was enough to let the wind sing through his hair, let the October sun warm his neck and shoulders, let the deer drift by unmolested, and turn his back to the settled world to the south. Some would call it civilized. He did not.
But the thing he loved most was to see his infant son lying peacefully on a thick, brown buffalo robe before the lodge, on a sunny afternoon, sometimes sleeping, sometimes writhing, making his little muscles work. Sometimes the infant stared at Skye, recognizing him. Other times the child seemed lost in his own small world. Mary smiled at the sight of Skye and their son, stretched out side by side on the warm brown hair of the robe, getting to know each other. The boy was one year old this day, if the women had reckoned it right.
In this boy was Skye’s own blood, the part of himself that he would pass along to the future. Here was a son: North Star or Dirk.
Skye counted himself lucky. Lines ceased. The Peacock family had vanished forever from the face of the earth, leaving no trace behind except Hiram Peacock’s great dream and courage.
But here was a son who would grow up in a risky and changing world, one that would be unrecognizable to Skye. The boy would probably live in towns as yet not founded, or in imperial cities. He would liv
e in comfort unknown to Skye, whose adult life had spun out in places like this.
This boy, too, might die young, might even die of consumption, or any of the white men’s diseases that were decimating his mother′s people. But Skye was glad the child had come into the world.
Mary, sitting beside him, lifted the boy and lowered him onto Skye’s chest, where Skye’s great brown hand held him in place. And she smiled.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. But it is drawn from actual circumstances in southern Utah, in 1857.
BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
SKYE’S WEST
Sun River
Bannack
The Far Tribes
Yellowstone
Bitterroot
Sundance
Wind River
Santa Fe
Rendezvous
Dark Passage
Going Home
Downriver
The Deliverance
The Fire Arrow
The Canyon of Bones
Virgin River
Aftershocks
Badlands
The Buffalo Commons
Cashbox
Eclipse
The Fields of Eden
Fool’s Coach
Goldfield
Masterson
Montana Hitch
An Obituary for Major Reno
Second Lives
Sierra
Sun Mountain: A Comstock Novel
Where the River Runs
SAM FLINT
Flint’s Gift
Flint’s Truth
Flint’s Honor
Praise for Richard S. Wheeler and the Skye’s West series
“Wheeler deftly balances the violence and cruelty of frontier life with the love and tenderness of a husband and wife caught between cultures.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Fire Arrow
“Let’s face it, it’s always nice to spend time with Barnaby. Recommended most heartily to fans of the long-running Skye series (it’s going on twenty years old) and to anyone who likes a good, old-fashioned Western yarn.”
—Booklist on The Fire Arrow
″Wheeler′s Skye is a much more well-rounded character than one usually finds in Western literature. He is intelligent, erudite, compassionate, and self-aware. The thirteenth entry in the series is one of the most satisfying.”
—Booklist on The Deliverance
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author′s imagination or are used fictitiously.
VIRGIN RIVER: A BARNABY SKYE NOVEL
Copyright © 2008 by Richard S. Wheeler
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429992657
First eBook Edition : January 2011
First Edition: March 2008
First Mass Market Edition: September 2009
Virgin River Page 25
