Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  “You figger ’em for Hargrove’s bully-boys?” Shad inquired.

  “That’un, see how he just spotted us,” Titus replied. “Lookit him turn ’round an’ lick it back to give Hargrove the word that trouble just showed up.”

  They watched that first rider off to their left give his horse a kick and lope away into the midst of the busiest place in camp, just before a second bullnecked horseman dared to ride a bit closer, standing in his stirrups for long moments while he satisfied his curiosity and got himself a good long look at the newcomers, then suddenly reined aside and tore off at a gallop.

  “We ought’n find Roman’s camp straightaway,” Scratch declared sourly. “I figger company’s gonna come callin’ soon enough.”

  “Never thought about it,” Shad admitted. “What if Hargrove an’ his boys say we can’t go along?”

  Bass snorted. “You ever ask a by-your-please of ary a man to ride where you wanted to ride, Shadrach?”

  “No. Onliest I ever give a thought of it was my first time in Blackfoot country up north.”

  “What if they tol’t you, ‘No, you can’t ride across our country’?”

  Sweete said, “We damn well rode across it anyways.”

  “Now ain’t the time to change our ways, Shadrach.”

  “Titus!” Roman Burwell shouted as he stepped from the corner of the wagon. “Come to see Shadrach off with us?”

  He waited a few moments longer until he had stopped near the wagon and dropped to the ground there as Burwell, Amanda, and their children came flocking toward the horses and those two happy, yipping dogs.

  “My stick floats with Shadrach,” he confessed. “Thort the young’uns an’ Waits might like to see some new country!”

  “Y-you’re really coming along?” Amanda asked breathlessly, reaching out to take her father’s hand in both of hers.

  “Till we get you to Fort Hall,” he confessed. “The two of us, we’ll run down a pilot to lead your bunch the rest of the way.”

  Roman’s eyes flicked away, then he turned back to the two old trappers. “Seems Hargrove is coming to welcome you to the train himself.”

  They all turned their heads, watching the three men approach. Train captain Hargrove, with two of his biggest men hard on his tail.

  “Don’t that appear to be a big ol’ smile of welcome on that bastard’s face?” Titus grumbled with mock cheer. “Amanda, why don’t you take Waits and Shell Woman around the other side of the wagon with all the young’uns? Find ’em something to eat, maybe. Put ’em to helping you pack up your goods in that wagon.”

  She could read the seriousness in his eyes. “All right, Pa.”

  For a moment longer he watched Amanda gesture to the women, then start them around the back of the canvas-topped prairie schooner, where she would get them involved with more than the arrival of the wagon captain.

  “Good morning, Burwell!” Hargrove sang out in that easygoing way of a man who always carried a smirk on his face and self-righteousness in his heart.

  “Hargrove,” Roman responded.

  The hair at Digger’s neck ruffed menacingly, and the dog growled, low at the back of his throat. Bass quieted him with a whisper. “Hush, boy!”

  The captain’s eyes raked over the trappers. “I trust you’re here to bid farewell to these members of your family.”

  With a shake of his head, Titus said, “That ain’t why we’re here.”

  Straightening in the saddle and pressing his chin down against his puffed-up chest, Hargrove tried again. “Then it’s probably for the best that you’ve come to try talking Burwell and his wife into staying behind with you here until another train comes through for Oregon. Admirable, my good man—that you should place their welfare so highly, rather than see them risk it all on an unwise gamble on their own.”

  “They won’t be on their own,” Titus declared. “My friend here, Mr. Shadrach Sweete, he was first to jump up an’ offer to ride along to Fort Hall. Likely find some fella there what can lead the train on to Oregon country after you an’ Harris gone off to Californy.”

  Hargrove’s eyes appraised Sweete a moment. “You’ll be part of the Burwell family since you’ll be making the journey by yourself?”

  Shadrach picked at an old scab on the back of one hand and said, “I ain’t goin’ alone. Got my family comin’ too.”

  “Family?” the wagon captain repeated uneasily.

  “Wife, two young’uns.”

  “Wife? She’s come out from the East?”

  Crossing his big forearms across the saddle where he stood on the ground beside his horse, Sweete peered over the animal at the man, saying, “She ain’t been no farther east than the Little Dried River, or the Smoky Hill. She’s Cheyenne.”

  “So you’re a squaw-man?”

  Bass slowly stepped aside and laid his rifle atop his saddle so that it pointed in Hargrove’s direction. “That’s a word you don’t wanna use with neither of us, Cap’n Hargrove. Some things just get under a man’s skin, an’ make him see red.”

  He turned back to Sweete. “You’re married to a squaw.”

  “Cheyenne, like I told you.”

  “An’ my wife’s Crow,” Titus advised. “Her people come from far to the north. Likely you ain’t heard of ’em.”

  Hargrove blinked a few times, then asked of Sweete, “Your … wife and children—you’ll be part of Burwell’s camp?”

  “We will,” Bass replied for them all.

  The wagon master’s head jerked in his direction. “We?”

  “I figgered to go along, show my family some country, give a hand to Roman when he needed it—”

  “I can’t allow all of you to join our train!”

  “That don’t callate to me,” Bass argued. “Two day ago you was tellin’ ever’one how you an’ Black Harris was taking off for Californy on your own. So what the hell say you got in who throws in with these other folks when you’re dropping out soon as you reach Fort Hall?”

  “It’s my train,” Hargrove growled. “I formed it, I—”

  “You was elected captain,” Burwell interrupted as he stepped up suddenly, causing a horse ridden by one of the hired men to shy and shuffle backward awkwardly. “You don’t own none of us. Not our wagons. An’ you sure as the devil don’t own this trail.”

  “We’ll see what the others have to say about that!”

  Scratching the side of his cheek, Titus said, “No man’s got a right to tell me where I can ride and where I can make camp for the night, Cap’n.”

  Hargrove glanced to his right, then to his left, in a way that unmistakably indicated his hired men. With a smile he said, “I think we understand one another. In this wild country, might always makes right.”

  “Most times,” Sweete responded.

  Hargrove wagged his head meaningfully and clucked, “It can make a man nervous, forced to watch over his shoulder for trouble creeping up on him all the time.”

  “These here friends o’ your’n,” Titus began, wagging the muzzle of his rifle at one, then the other, of those horsemen arrayed on either side of the wagon master. “You figger they very good at killing a man? Maybe good for killin’ two of us?”

  “I’m certain they—”

  “I ain’t,” Bass interrupted. “This coon’d lay down good money none of your gun-toters ever kill’t a man.”

  Sweete had his hat off and was wiping the sticky moisture off the sweatband as he said, “Hargrove, I want you to look at that rifle my friend is holding on you. See them brass tacks he pounded into the stock, up an’ down the forearm too?”

  “What business is it of—”

  “Ever’ one of ’em is a dead man he’s kill’t.”

  Titus watched how that caused all three of them to train their attention on his rifle, where it was propped atop the saddle.

  “Near as I know, he ain’t added the last two tacks he should,” Shadrach continued. “Pair of Frenchie fellas who thought they was gonna run off with the man’s half-
blood daughter—figgered a half-wild white man wasn’t gonna care ’bout his family an’ all.”

  Hargrove’s eyes grinned mirthlessly and he said, “Sometimes justice can indeed be swift out here on the frontier.”

  Shadrach added, “But I doubt any of your hired men done more’n rough up some poor folks they had outnumbered. They don’t appear to have the stomach for killin’—just for making you look bigger’n you are to sodbusters and settlement folk.”

  From his right side, out of the corner of his good eye, Titus watched three of his grandchildren poke their heads beneath the wagon. Then a fourth shadow: little Lucas, plopping onto his belly and squeezing his way between Lemuel and Annie. All of them intently listened in on the conversation between the menfolk and that talk of the brass tacks on his rifle, talk of his life of killing. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted his grandchildren to know about him.

  Hargrove was already starting a sentence with something about the council he would call when they had reached that night’s campground to decide the matter—

  But Titus interrupted, “You best keep your boys away from our camp.”

  “They were hired by me to patrol the line of march every day,” Hargrove huffed. “And they stand their rotation of watch every night, just like the rest of the men. As long as I’m captain, there can never be anywhere that is off-limits to my men.”

  “I warned you once, Hargrove. Won’t waste my breath again,” he declared, then turned a quick glance at those four grandchildren of his, wide eyes peering out from under the possum belly slung beneath the wagon, every one of them getting a real earful. “But, I’m sure men like you an’ me don’t want no trouble with the other. Do we now?”

  “This is my train, Burwell,” Hargrove fumed as he turned to gaze at the farmer. “You signed on with your family—but these … these others didn’t.”

  “We ain’t part of your train,” Titus said. “We’ll ride with this family. Keep to ourselves. Ain’t gonna cause no trouble … but we ain’t backin’ off from trouble if it comes neither. Be sure to tell all your boys that. Don’t want none of ’em crossing tracks with me or mine here on out.”

  The wagon master sputtered, “I can’t have my train providing for you—”

  “We take care of ourselves,” Shad declared. “Don’t we, Scratch?”

  “We ain’t taking nothing from another’s mouth, Hargrove. We’ll hunt for what we eat,” Titus explained. “An’ we’ll camp off from the rest of your farmers.”

  Pulling himself up to full height again in the saddle, Phineas Hargrove took a moment to sneer down his long, patrician nose at the poorly dressed farmer and his two friends arrayed in greasy buckskins and faded calico. “Enjoy your day on the trail with these new companions of yours while you can, Burwell. After our council meeting tonight, the men and their families will have no choice but to turn back come morning.”

  Scratch watched the three ride off. First one, then the other hired man twisted round in the saddle or looked back over his shoulder. Only Hargrove refused to give the newcomers another glance.

  “Better we gave ’em that warning right off,” Shad explained as he stepped over.

  Roman declared, “I don’t believe we’ll be troubled by them after that council meeting tonight.”

  Wagging his head, Titus felt weary, deep-down bone weary. As he turned to gaze down at those four young faces peering out at him from the early-morning shadows beneath the wagon box, he grumbled, “Way I read the sign—our trouble with that Hargrove an’ his bunch o’ bullies only gonna turn uglier from here on out.”

  THIRTEEN

  Two hours after crossing the gentle loop of Muddy Creek some eight miles north of Fort Bridger, a pair of Hargrove’s hired men came loping back along that path the scattered emigrant wagons were plying. As they huffed past on their dusty horses, the men bellowed their orders to one and all.

  “Making camp ahead! Form up for camp! Form up!”

  Titus Bass quickly regarded the rocky ground and reminded himself he would have to warn these woodland emigrants, especially his grandchildren, to be vigilant for the rattlers that grew numerous and bold in this high, arid country. The very thought of a white-skinned little one getting bit put a sour, queasy ball in Bass’s stomach.

  A little off to his left, Scratch saw Amanda stick her head around the front bow of the canvas top on their long wagon as her eyes searched for him and the family. The faded red gingham of that poke bonnet, which shaded her eyes and much of her face from most of the sun’s cruel burn, was unmistakable even at this distance.

  Right from the start, he and Shadrach had chosen to ride their families on the far right flank of the train rather than spend that hot morning, and even hotter afternoon, chewing on the tons of dust spun into the air by the four wheels of every one of those sixty-seven wagons. Where they could, most of the farmers gradually worked themselves into a wide formation rather than suffering the stifling dust in rigid single file. By this point in their journey, these sodbusters-turned-teamsters had learned that some, duties on this overland journey, like guard rotation, required military precision. But this did not. When the land became wrinkled and the coulees sank deep, the procession slowed as one team after another slowly dragged their wagons into line behind the others, a process of crossing each gully one at a time that made for agonizing delays. But when the next mile or so ahead foretold easy going, the emigrants gradually loosened their tight formation and spread across a broad front.

  Many were the times that first morning when Scratch and Sweete had stopped their group on a low rise to wait for the train to catch up, or even to allow most of the wagons to pass on by. No matter how fast they could travel on horseback, it made no sense to outstrip the plodding pace of the train. Excruciatingly slow, those teams of oxen preferred by most farmers managed to set one hoof in front of the other with a steadiness that saw that first day waste away by the time they had reached the south bank of Muddy Creek. Far in the advance, Titus watched Moses Harris ride to the east along the bank, then back to the west aways, before the pilot found the approach he most desired and led Hargrove’s first wagon down to the ford of the shallow stream. This time of the year, Bass thought as he watched one after another begin the slow, but noisy, descent down the sharp slope and make the crossing, there wasn’t water enough to worry a man in this narrow creekbed. Yet it was the bottom on these shallow western creeks that should give a man pause: sands shifting almost by the hour—what was solid footing beneath the first wagons, could, by the time the last few teams entered the creek, have turned itself into no more than a bowl of mushy grits beneath the two-inch bands of iron welded around every wagon wheel.

  It had taken him most all of yesterday, his last in Bridger’s forge, but he and Roman had managed to swap off those much-worn two-inch-wide iron tires the Burwells had rolled away from Westport on, then hammered and shimmed wider, three-inch rims around their shrunken wooden wheels.

  “Wished I’d had these back in May after we got ourselves out on the prairie,” Roman had commented as they were muscling one of the hot tires onto a wheel there in the shade of the awning. “When all them rains come, day after day—a narrow tire sinks faster.”

  “Ain’t nothing gonna keep your tires from sinking under a heavy wagon,” Titus had told him, “but out here a wider tire do better crossing creek bottoms and rocky ground too.”

  The water in Muddy Creek was turgid and slow, brown as its name and tepid to boot. Only good thing about the stream, he thought as he watched his two oldest urge the pack animals across and up the north bank, was that the Muddy was running so shallow that it hadn’t so much as lapped at the bottom of a wagon box or licked at the bellies of their ponies. Besides, these small western streams weren’t all that wide. It wouldn’t be until these farmers got to the Bear that they would face their first test, a crossing that would prepare them, or weed them out, for the crucial two crossings of the capricious Snake River before they ever reached the mighty C
olumbia.

  There wasn’t much water to speak of in the bottoms around that great grove of cedars where Harris and Hargrove chose to stop the train an hour or so earlier than usual—but then, another hour wouldn’t find them camping at any better a place. Here they would have to hack away at the wind-stunted cedar for firewood, and scratch at the sandy bottoms in the nearby coulees to see if they could pool up any murky water. Bass was sure they could find enough here to satisfy their thirsty stock. But for the dust-choked humans, each wagon had carried along at least one pair of hardwood kegs filled with clear, cool water drawn from Black’s Fork. Water enough to boil their supper and brew their coffee until they camped tomorrow night on the Little Muddy as they neared the rugged north end of the Bear River Divide.

  All three women pitched in to get a fire pit dug and a supper fire started, while Flea and Magpie helped Lemuel and Leah lend their father a hand in dropping the heavy cottonwood yoke from the thick necks of the docile oxen. Four teams had managed to make it this far on the westward journey. With an eager dreamer’s foresight, Roman Burwell had started out from Westport with a full six teams. Two of the oxen had fallen dead either of disease or exhaustion back along the trail not far out of Laramie, and Roman had traded a third animal to Bridger for those four new three-inch iron tires Titus had fashioned for him. That left the farmer with nine oxen to get them across the roughest stretch of the road to Oregon. For the present, two of the beasts had the first signs of cracked hooves, but the farmer was doing all he could with salves and plasters to see those wounded creatures through each day’s long, dusty journey. As it was, Burwell carefully, thoughtfully, rotated his teams, so that after one day’s bone-jarring labor each two-ox hitch would have the next three days to rest up, dawdling along under the watchful care of Lemuel and Leah, both of whom herded them along on foot, using lean, seven-foot-long teamster’s whips. And when a long, steep slope was confronted, he could always bring up two or more of the fresher oxen, temporarily chaining them in tandem to drag the heavy wagon to the top of the rise.