Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Th-they laughed about doin’ that when they come back … but I-I didn’t have nothing to do with it!”

  “Gimme your hands.”

  Corrett begged, “You won’t hang me in no tree like Benjamin done to that farmer—”

  Wrenching the man’s hands together, Titus snapped, “Ain’t it just like settlement folks, Shadrach? They’re all full of brag and windy big-talk when they got the bully odds on their side. Damn your kind, an’ damn what your kind’s already doin’ to my mountains.”

  After the moon rose off the horizon later that night, Scratch had slapped Jenks into consciousness and dragged him to his feet. Then the two old trappers shoved their prisoners across the narrow creek and over the first hill, eventually finding a place with enough cover that the two would not be discovered right off.

  “More shade than they deserve,” Titus grumped as they pushed Corrett down at the base of the first tree. “Better that the sun grows so hot it peels their eyelids back.”

  “We’ll tie ’em down so they’re facing west.”

  “Them others, they’ll come looking, they’ll find us,” Jenks vowed. “Hargrove an’ Benjamin, they’ll come lookin’ for us.”

  “Then what?” Bass demanded, grabbing the hired one’s lower jaw in his hand.

  The younger man sneered at the trapper. “Then … all of us come an’ find you.”

  “Smart-assed li’l greenhorn,” Titus growled, bringing his thin-bladed skinning knife up, pressing its fine-honed edge up against the underside of the man’s nose. “Maybeso I ought’n go ahead an’ cut this’un’s tongue in two, Shadrach.”

  He had to admit he liked the way the young bully’s eyes got big at that.

  It wasn’t long before he and Shad were slipping back among the wagons well after the music and laughter were spent, but they did not have to wait until morning for Hargrove and the last three of his men to go stomping through camp in search of the four missing guards, yelling, kicking over cooking tripods and trivets, spilling contents of kettles and water buckets in anger and frustration. Eventually the wagon captain and his trio tore up to Burwell’s wagon, to find the old mountain men armed for bear and not about to be blustered the way the settlement folk had been as Hargrove rudely awakened the entire camp and cowed them all.

  “I know you two got something to do with this!” Hargrove roared with indignation as he stopped directly in front of Bass.

  “Don’t have no idee what you’re so spittin’ mad about,” Titus remarked, his two pistols hanging in his hands at his sides, both Ghost and Digger barking loudly, barely restrained by Flea and Magpie.

  Hargrove’s eyes flicked aside at some movement. Shad stood a few yards away with his two pistols drawn and pointed at the three who had come to back up their employer.

  “Which of you gonna be first?” the train captain asked.

  “First for what?”

  “First to die!” Hargrove said. “Tell me where my men are or I’ll kill both of you. Perhaps when the first one is dead, the other will decide to talk.”

  Sweete asked, “How you figger you’re gonna get away with killing us here?”

  “Look at my guns. There’s four of us against the two of you!”

  “Damn, Shadrach,” Titus groaned. “Appears we forgot to count. No—wait. What ’bout them two women of ours? They know how to handle guns, don’t they … right over there, Hargrove.” And he pointed at the end of the wagon where Shell Woman stood with Shad’s double-barrel smoothbore pointed at the hired men. “An’ over there too.”

  This time he directed their attention to Waits standing just at the edge of the firelight behind them, holding an old trade musket, both its barrel and its stock sawed off to make it a deadly close-range weapon.

  Hargrove’s eyes came back around to rest on Bass in that dim, gray light of the coming morn. With the blackest menace, he promised, “One day, old man.”

  “Yes,” Titus answered quietly. “One day you an’ me gonna dance for sure. If it ain’t Roman chews on your gizzard first … someday it’ll be me tears off a piece of you for myself.”

  * One-Eyed Dream

  * One-Eyed Dream

  SIXTEEN

  As soon as that bloody night had begun to gray into false dawn, Hargrove and his trio were out on horseback. It hadn’t taken them long to find Frakes tied to the tree not far from the grassy patch of ground. They brought the eviscerated body back into camp, slung over the bare back of a horse for all to see.

  “Look at this—everyone!” Hargrove demanded with an indignant roar. “Look right here at the lawlessness I did everything I could to protect you people from! One man’s dead for sure. Maybe three more!”

  He came to a stop near the center of that largest cluster of wagons, shouting at the settlers as they interrupted their breakfast and early-morning chores. “We’ll hold a funeral for this man in fifteen minutes. I want every one of you there to pay your respects, then I want you men, the able-bodied among you, to saddle up with me and my men. We’re going in search of the others those old fur men must have killed too. And when the dead are buried, we’re going to hold us a trial before we hang these guilty ruffians, then get on our way.”

  For a moment it seemed the whole train—man, woman, and child—were staring right at Titus and Shadrach.

  Hargrove started away—but suddenly stopped and wheeled about. He glared hard at Hoyt Bingham. “You, Bingham. You’ll bring your shovel to help dig this man’s grave.”

  But before the emigrant could speak, another voice boomed behind Titus.

  “He ain’t digging no grave for any of your hired trouble.”

  Slowly, Hargrove turned and found Roman Burwell standing as straight as he could, on his own feet beside the tailgate of his wagon.

  “I gave Bingham an order, Burwell,” the captain snarled. “Since you’re in no condition to help him dig this man’s grave, Bingham will dig it for the both of you—”

  “I ain’t going,” Hoyt said, taking a bold step away from his wife at their breakfast fire.

  Hargrove’s cold eyes narrowed menacingly as Benjamin shifted on his saddle, preparing for what violence loomed. “Trouble happens, Bingham. Folks get hurt, sometimes through no fault of their own. Then there’s folks like you and Burwell—they get hurt because it’s their own stupid undoing.”

  “You ain’t gonna bully an’ beat us, not from here on out.” Burwell stood bravely, one arm braced against the bandage that was wrapped tightly around his broken ribs.

  That sudden show of bravery appeared to buoy Bingham and some others with renewed courage. Turning back to Hargrove, Hoyt Bingham declared in a clear voice, “Don’t you remember what happened a few days back?”

  “You do remember that council meeting you called real clear, don’t you, Hargrove?” Truell asked as he stepped up beside Roman Burwell.

  “You was voted out,” Bingham reminded with new backbone.

  “Maybe you and what you got left of these toughs oughtta get outta our camp!” cried the smooth-jawed Fenton.

  Iverson stepped up to the line slowly being formed against Hargrove and Benjamin. “You and the rest shouldn’t travel with our company no more!”

  “You can’t do this to me!” Hargrove bellowed like a wounded bull surrounded by gaunt and hungry wolves. “You said we could accompany your train till we reach Fort Hall!”

  Surprising them all, Roman Burwell unsteadily pushed himself away from the wagon’s tailgate, wincing a bit with the movement. “Don’t you hear what these men are saying?” he asked. “That’s the voice of the people saying you been voted out. Now it’s time you got out.”

  When Hargrove reined his horse aside so he could look squarely at Burwell, both of Scratch’s dogs growled where they were restrained at a wagon wheel, their neck hair ruffing, as Amanda stepped under her husband’s arm, attempting to support him on her shoulders. Roman gently pushed her away, wagged his head at her, and stood there alone.

  The ousted wagon boss
jutted his chin out and told the wounded emigrant, “Not one of you farmers here is man enough to go against me—”

  “We aren’t gonna force you an’ your hired men out, less’n you make us,” Burwell interrupted. “As for the rest of them who want to go to California with you, all of you can stay with us till we get to Fort Hall. We’ll see your bunch is safe till you get to the Snake. But you ain’t our captain no more.”

  At the edge of the gathering crowd a man named Rankin grumbled loudly, “I say the California folks go their own way from here on out!”

  “No!” Burwell cried, wincing with a spasm of pain. “We aren’t gonna become the sort of people Hargrove is.”

  Titus glanced at his daughter as she stood easily within reach of her weakened husband but gave Roman his stand. Amanda’s cheeks glistened with tears, her eyes shiny with pride in her husband. A pride that had long lain dormant until Hargrove’s unremitting cruelty had reawakened it.

  “Why not, Roman?” asked a man named Winston. “He damn well tried to do the same to you!”

  “Maybe that’s the way things was for folks back there in the East,” Roman said steadily. “Fact is, that’s the way it was for most all of us. Them with money had the power to rule over the rest. If we was so happy with that way of things back there—why’d any of us decide to strike out for Oregon in the first place?”

  “Better lives!”

  “That’s right!” Burwell responded to the anonymous cry from the crowd. “But, are any of us gonna have better lives if we all act like Hargrove and his kind when we get where we’re going? What have we made better for our families if we still fight to grab money and power for ourselves?”

  Bingham started for the wounded emigrant, saying, “How’re you saying we’re supposed to make things different?”

  “This here journey to a new land is our chance to do something good for our women and our children,” he explained to the hushed gathering. “We can make a new life for ourselves—not just new homes and new farms. But a new life! We’re not going to Oregon to end up the same sort of folks that Hargrove and them others are! Let him and his kind go to California. We’re going to start a new life in Oregon for our families. For our children’s children.”

  Bingham stepped to Roman’s side and laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “My fellow captain is right! We must make new homes in a new land—not live things the way they were back east. We’ll let those who are happy with the Hargroves of the world stay back there and live out their lives, or let them follow Hargrove to California. As for us, we’re on to Oregon!”

  Iverson leaped up and shouted, “The Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company!”

  “Oregon or bust!” shouted Murray.

  Pushing her way through the crowd that immediately surged toward Roman, Amanda threaded her way to his side, grabbed his face in both her hands, and pulled it down to her mouth as she raised herself on her toes. Watching them together at this pivotal moment, Titus felt his heart grow light, weighing far less than it had ever since that day at Bridger’s forge, when she told him about her husband and the troubles they were running from back in Missouri. For days now Scratch had been consumed by the fear that they would never outrun their mistakes, never get beyond the failures of Roman Burwell. Fear that Amanda had married a man who would one day plunge his whole family into disaster, if not with Phineas Hargrove on the road to Oregon, then surely once they had reached the mouth of the Willamette.

  But instead, his son-in-law had stood up for the right, as Titus saw it. He had stood up to power, greed, and bullies. Here with the coming of the dawn, Scratch had realized his son-in-law was not so simple a man as one might suspect at first blush. Roman Burwell was as loving a husband as any he could hope for Amanda, as good and kind a father as he himself could be to his own children. The farmer was, in the end, the sort of man Scratch believed he could call friend. And to the old trapper there was no finer distinction than that.

  “Oregon or bust!” the crowd echoed again as they washed forward, forcing the two horsemen back from their rejoicing in a swell of noise and a surge of bodies.

  Amanda and Roman were going to be all right. For the first time in days, Titus felt that clear to his marrow. They and their children were going to be all right. The family would get to Oregon, and that country would indeed prove to be their promised land.

  He felt his eyes sting as he watched that crowd of jubilant men, women, and children tighten around Burwell and Bingham, clapping and singing trail songs of Oregon. How proud he was to witness this moment. Strong, simple, good people—the sort who could surely make that new land thrive the way nothing back east ever would again.

  Titus Bass felt as if he was witnessing the birth of a whole new country.

  Off in the distance there was no mistaking that narrow, winding tangle of emerald green, luring and seductive against the sere and sunburned sienna of the summer landscape.

  “That’s the Bear,” Titus said to Waits in English, holding the first two of those fingers left on his right hand in front of his mouth, pointed down as if they were the mighty canines of the beast.

  She repeated in his native tongue, “Bear.”

  “You said that good,” he sighed with contentment. “Off in that country, south aways, I first met Jim Bridger.”

  “How long?”

  “Hmmm,” he considered. “That’s some. Must be … goin’ on twenty winters now.”

  “Too-wen-tee?” she mimed. Then asked again, “How long?”

  So he balanced his longrifle across the tops of his thighs as the horse rocked beneath him, and held up both hands, fingers extended. Then he quickly closed his fists once and extended the fingers again. “Twenty.”

  “Old man, this Ti-tuzz now!”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Some days, I feel so goddamned old I wonder why I’m still livin’.”

  She looked at him with worry creasing the crow’s-feet at her eyes. In her own tongue she asked the difficult question, “Your heart … it’s ready to die?”

  With a shake of his head, Titus answered, “No. Not ready to die.”

  He recalled that her people believed very strongly that every man would know when he was about to cross over. That same mighty power was what had prompted, provoked, and inspired Jack Hatcher to warble his favorite song as he lay mortally wounded in battle against the Blackfoot in Pierre’s Hole.* And the very same spirit that compelled Asa McAfferty to pick his own time and his own place to make what Asa realized was coming down to his final stand. To these warrior peoples of the High Plains and the tall mountains, a man knew in his bones when his time had come to cross over that last, high, and lonely divide. Alone … for dying was at best a one-man job.

  “You stay with me a long, long time still,” she said, the worry gone from her face.

  “Woman—ain’t none of us know what’s in store,” he admitted. “Much as I’d love to die in my blankets with you and our children at my side, a passel of grandpups crawlin’ on the floor of our lodge … in this here country nothin’ lives long but the rocks and the sky.”

  Her eyes misted a little, gone cloudy as a stormy day when she turned away from him and nodded once in agreement. “Only the rocks and sky live long, husband.”

  “But—just look at you!” he exclaimed with good cheer, leaning over in the saddle and grabbing hold of her elbow. “Why, you ain’t ever gonna grow old, are you, woman?” He gazed deeply into her eyes.

  “Many winters have come and gone since you first looked at me,” she said in Crow, gazing at him from beneath those black eyelashes with a profound gratitude for his compliment.

  “But you don’t look no differ’nt than the day you come to sit with me aside the Elk River.”*

  “But, what of the … sickness that ravaged my face?”

  “I don’t see that,” he confessed. “When I look at you I never have seen the sickness scars.”

  “How long … you and me … was together?” She struggled some with his Amer
ican tongue.

  “Fourteen. This’ll be fourteen winters since you come to talk with me on that rock beside the river.”

  She smiled at him. “You give me four good children.”

  “Four?” As suddenly as he spoke the question, Bass realized his mistake and grinned at her, roaring, “Yes! Number four is comin’ this winter near my own birthin’ day!”

  How he wanted to be back up in Absaroka long before then. Before the hard winds blew the yellow leaves off the cottonwood standing so stately along the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, on north to the winding valleys of the Judith and the fabled Musselshell. By the time the trembling aspen on the high slopes had begun to shed their leaves of gold and the snowline crept down, down, down toward the rolling prairie where the buffalo had begun to put on winter coats and take shelter in the lee of the mountains. How he hungered to be back among the places where the white man did not come with his women and wagons, with his ways meant to change everything that had been into what those stiff-backed folks demanded it must be.

  To be back among a people living generations beyond count in a land that had always been. All a man could do was pray that the soft ones back east would never find a way to change that on him. For, if they did … then life would no longer be worth the living.

  If a man could no longer hear the shrill whistle of a red-tailed hawk circling overhead but for the noisy clatter of mankind and his wagons, if he could no longer make out a wolf’s howl drifting down from the nearby hills because the aching stillness of night had been ruined by the nearness of one dirty, stinking settlement after another … then life no longer was sweet. Life was no longer worth the living. Till then, he’d go higher, and higher still, farther and farther back—all to stay away from those who came to take what they could from each new place before they ruined it and moved on. Men like Phineas Hargrove and his kind.

  But then, there had always been that kind.

  Yet wasn’t he much the same sort? Hadn’t the beaver men come to take until there was little left to take? Perhaps it was so … and it made his heart ache with the weight of that realization.