Well Traveled

by Margaret Mills

  “You mind if we eat lunch, since we’re stopped anyway?”

  “Oh, since we’re stopped anyway….” Amusement rang clear as a bell in Jed’s voice, and Gideon grinned at him.

  “Well, there’s grass along this here creek for Star to munch on, and I’ve got those biscuits I grabbed this morning. They’ll sure taste good about now.”

  He took Jed’s shrug and squat as assent, loosened Star’s girth, grabbed the biscuits out of a saddle bag, and pulled off her bridle. “Don’t wander, now,” he told her.

  “You talk to your horse?”

  “I give her commands,” Gideon said. “‘Don’t wander’ is one of a lot of ’em she knows.”

  Jed raised his eyebrows, impressed. Most folks were impressed by Star and the horses like her that he and his daddy had trained up. Gideon handed across the biscuits and bacon. Jed nodded his thanks as he took his share, eating silently as he stared out at the woods around them. Gideon found himself watching the Indian, puzzling over the sense he had that something was different about Jed now, but he couldn’t quite put his hand on it.

  After a time, Jed rose up from his squat and said, “With all of this around us, I cannot understand why you are watching me—unless you don’t trust me.” It was more a question than a statement, but it brought Gideon up short.

  The truth was on his tongue and almost out of his mouth before he caught hold of it, but his good sense won the race and managed to stammer out, “Just feels kinda like a miracle that you’re still with us. Guess I have to remind myself from time to time that I’m not watching a ghost.”

  Jed blinked at that, and his lips twitched just a little before the ends turned up in a quick smile. “Need to get back on the road, if you can get your horse to move.”

  Gideon shook his head, but he was less skeptical than he had been that morning.

  When they got back on the road, Jed went back to the pace he’d set that morning. Gideon, resting astride his horse, was of a mind to talk, but he couldn’t think about what. “You raised up around here?” he finally asked.

  “Yes. And no.”

  Gideon frowned; that cleared that up.

  Jed went on after a minute without prompting, though. “My people were moved to a reservation in northern Montana when I was very young. I was moved away when I was still a boy, but near manhood. To a boarding school. I learned your language, and while I was there, whites found gold in Montana, and my people were moved again. North and west. I learned of your god, too. I was….” He paused and glanced up, pushing his loose hair back over one shoulder, “not very impressed.”

  “Well, there’s lots of views on God,” Gideon said, happy to enter into this kind of talk. “I’ve met folks back East who think the Bible’s all about peace and the light of God inside each man. And woman,” he added. Catholics didn’t seem very generous to women, but the Quakers he’d met were downright egalitarian. “There’s Baptists and Adventists, tent preachers with all the hellfire and brimstone you’d ever want, and—”

  “But there is no Hell.”

  Gideon blinked. “Your people don’t think there’s a place of damnation?” Most Indians he knew didn’t, unless they’d been converted, and even those could have their doubts about the concept.

  Jed waved a hand, taking in the pines that towered above them and the mountains that stretched taller than that. “Your people dig into the earth for precious metals. I’ve been told that most of the time, it’s cooler underground than up here. They say they’ve dug as deep into the earth as that mountain stands tall,” he said, pointing again. “No Hell.”

  Gideon chewed on that for a moment, and frankly he liked the sound of it. For sure, his inclinations would damn him even if his absence from church pews didn’t. “Maybe it’s deeper than man can dig.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t exist,” Jed countered. “Why would your god create a place solely for suffering, when a man’s spirit can cause all the suffering it wants for without any help from the divine?”

  Gideon grinned. He was liking this man, this peaceful Indian brave, more with each passing minute. He leaned over his saddle horn, stretching his back—and giving himself a finer view of the lean form in profile under the guise of checking the man’s gait. Each step seemed surer than the last, so maybe Jed was right about giving that leg some exercise. “This is beautiful country,” he said after a time. “Lots of folks call it God’s country—looks like we’ll be camping in it tonight.”

  “I expect we’ll reach Bozeman first.”

  “Hell, no, we won’t,” Gideon said, rejecting that idea firmly. Bozeman was over 35 miles away, across hilly land and curvy roads; he’d checked on his map before folding it up and stuffing it into a pocket of his suitcase. “An eight-horse team wouldn’t make it from Livingston to Bozeman in a day, and that’s with a stop and a change for fresh horses.”

  Jed glanced over his shoulder again, sly. “Yes. Horses,” he said, but he was smiling.

  Gideon patted Star’s neck. He knew she couldn’t understand the slight, but he still gave her a pat just in case.

  After another hour, when it looked to Gideon’s eye like maybe Jed was starting to limp, he reined in Star and slid off her. “Here, you ride for a while.”

  “No, thank you. She is yours.”

  “And I’m offering to share her,” he said, annoyed. “You come up lame, and it’ll slow us down more than the horse.” He wasn’t at all above using a little manipulation to get his way, and if he was the one walking, he could set a slower pace.

  Jed eyed the horse with a frown, and Gideon frowned back. “She’s plenty docile, Jed,” he said.

  Jed shook his head, and his long hair fluttered back and forth. “It is not that. I learned to ride long before I became a man. Just….” He waved a hand. “Not on your saddles.”

  Gideon shrugged. “I ain’t carrying it, so I reckon you’re stuck with that.” He waited patiently while Jed looked at the stirrups and the height of Star’s withers, and eased up alongside her right shoulder. “You mount horses from the left,” he said.

  “Not with this leg, I don’t,” Jed replied. He gripped the pommel and swung his weight up and over, smooth as could be, ignoring the stirrups and letting his booted feet hang down past them. Star didn’t shy, didn’t even shift her feet under the new, slighter weight Jed’s body offered her, and Gideon hesitated before handing up the reins.

  He set to walking and heard a quiet word from Jed, then Star’s hooves clomping in the dirt behind him. A piece of him—the wrong piece—kind of wanted Jed to take the lead, because he’d gotten a glimpse of Jed’s ass spread across the saddle and liked it. Instead, he remonstrated himself for wishful thinking and kept his eyes front, taking in the scenery. It was worth taking in: tall mountains that looked sheared away on some sides, huge, ancient stands of virgin timber climbing almost to their tops—with the train through here, he knew this would all change soon, so he was glad to enjoy it while he could. Logging in the West had changed Seattle and San Francisco from the drawings of when men had first settled the areas, but lady luck smiled on this part of the country, or had until the Northern Pacific had pushed through; before the train, there weren’t no way to get these trees back to the folks that needed them.

  “The clear cutting has already begun,” Jed said, almost like he was reading Gideon’s thoughts. Far from being uncomfortable, Gideon liked that feeling.

  “Can’t see it from here.”

  “No. But further west, across the Continental Divide, and in all those places where they move the mountains for their coal and their metals, the forest is all but gone.”

  “Can’t slow progress,” he said, quoting some old fool he’d met along the many roads Bill Tourney’s show had traveled.

  “It is not progress. It is….” When Jed paused, it was Gideon’s turn to look up over his shoulder and wait. Jed was frowning now, his narrow mouth turned down at the corners and his fine brows drawn together again. He looked almost like he had tho
se first days, when he’d been hurting so bad. “They kill the land.”

  “Trees’ll grow back,” he reasoned.

  “Maybe,” Jed said. He didn’t sound hopeful, and Gideon could understand that. White folks had taken a lot from the Indians in the name of progress, and there weren’t that many folks, white or not, fighting to hold on to any of it. He’d heard the braves in Bill Tourney’s show talk about the buffalo, seen photographs and nature drawings of the Great Plains to the south, covered with more buffalo down there than there were trees on these mountains. The only live buffalo he’d ever seen, though, were the ones they kept for the show—huge animals, but mostly docile, and fascinating to folks who’d only ever see them when the show, or one like it, traveled through their town.

  “Let’s hope so,” he said, aiming for a lighter mood. They had a long trip ahead of them, and he hoped he’d have more than impure thoughts to keep him entertained on the trail.

  “Yes. This is a fine horse,” Jed said. “You raised her from a foal?”

  Gideon felt like maybe he was being handled, but he didn’t mind. He threw an appreciative smile Jed’s way and nodded, then told the tale of Star’s birth and of her unlikely name. She had a blaze on her face, not a star, but his daddy had told him she’d be one, if he took proper care of her. “So that’s how she got her name,” he finished. He looked back when Jed didn’t reply, and caught the man smiling at him, looking both fond and amused. Mostly, he decided, fond, and felt his pulse beat a little faster. Down boy, he warned his prick. Not that it was showing signs of life at the moment, but he knew it well. It wouldn’t take much to stir it, and then he’d be thinking cold thoughts and walking funny to hide it for the rest of the afternoon.

  They didn’t make Bozeman, which caused Jed to grumble just once, but when they did finally stop for the night, he pulled a rolled blanket off the side of his pack and spread it out, and proceeded to gather up wood and build a fire while Gideon brushed Star down with the curry comb he carried, and loosed her in a patch of tall green grass. Talk was as spare as the fire, until Jed announced that he’d fetch dinner before they lost the last of the sun, and Gideon listened to his rifle crack twice, heard the rustle as he returned with a wild turkey carcass trailing behind him.

  “Supper tonight, breakfast tomorrow,” he announced.

  “I’ll take care of that from now on, you don’t mind,” he offered. He was a skilled shootist, and he couldn’t see how Jed needed to be on that leg any more than he had to be.

  Jed set to burning off the feathers with no more than a nod. That made a powerful stench, so Gideon pulled his own bedroll upwind and just watched. Jed didn’t look like he needed any help tending, and it was soothing, watching the man’s quiet efficiency as he skinned and spitted the big bird, propping it high above the hottest of the coals.

  “Gonna get chilly tonight,” Gideon said, already feeling it. This high up, the days were warm and the nights cool, not unbearably so but he was already planning to tug his bedroll nearer the fire and throw a little extra wood on it before he bedded down for the night. In answer, Jed stood, stretched his leg carefully, then picked up his own blanket and spread it behind Gideon’s.

  “Warmer with two,” Jed said.

  Down boy, Gideon thought again. This was gonna be a challenge.

  Chapter 4

  TWO glorious days of travel later, plenty of which Gideon had decided to spend on foot strolling along beside Jed because darned if Jed wasn’t right, Star was the slowest of the three of them over a long, hard day. She was plenty fit, but she traveled as much by train as any other means of transportation, and didn’t have the stamina she ought to have. She’d earn that stamina on the road, though, and until then, he was glad to have an excuse to keep Jed from pushing too hard.

  The sun was blinding by the time Gideon thought he could smell Virginia City coming up. They topped a rise, and he saw brick smokestacks. Coke and coal burned hot, smelting the metal right out of the ore and throwing thick black smoke into the air. The city was twice as big as Livingston, at least, and Gideon perked up right off even though they clearly had three or more miles of walking and one more valley to cross before they reached the city limits.

  “Hot bath, hot meal waitin’ for us,” he said, feeling his mouth water.

  “For you,” Jed said. “I will wait here.”

  “Come on! We’ve been out here for three days!”

  “I live out here,” Jed said, harder than he’d said most anything else since they’d met.

  “Still,” Gideon argued, “that’s no reason not to visit.” Gideon looked at him and frowned. “Not everywhere is like Livingston,” he said, hoping that was Jed’s worry. “There are good white people—we didn’t have trouble in Bozeman.”

  Jed met his gaze as he answered, “No, we did not have trouble there, but we barely entered it.” They had come across it in the midmorning and, by agreement, skirted around it, to keep moving. Jed’s expression softened a little as he went on, “I know there are good white people. You are one of them, as was that doctor, and the woman who let us stay in her house—let me stay there. But I do not crave the company you do. Cities….” He looked back toward Virginia City, and Gideon thought he might have shivered a little. “Cities have little to offer me—work, sometimes, more at the forts than at the mining communities. I do not visit them unless I have need of a white man’s town.”

  “Baths are a need, in my book,” Gideon said, testing. He’d seen Jed strip down to his pants to wash—hell, he hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away, those times—in just about every creek they’d camped by, using handfuls of fine, clean sand to scrub at his skin then bending precariously over the water to rinse it away. Gideon had caught himself once hoping Jed would fall in, just so he’d peel off those buckskin pants.

  “I agree. Which is why I’ve bathed,” Jed said, quirking an eyebrow at him and purposely wrinkling his nose.

  Gideon grinned. “Hey, that water’s cold. It could do damage to important parts of me.”

  Jed smiled and shook his head. “Then go into the city, if you will. I prefer it out here, where I can think.”

  “Sounds awful lonely,” Gideon said, because it did.

  “I am not always alone. There are many reservations between here and the great ocean. I have visited some of them. We may visit some of them on our trip.”

  That sounded right exciting. Gideon had never been to a reservation, though Bill Tourney’s show had played close enough that they’d had Indians in their audiences. Stone-faced and quiet, a little bit like the Chinese, they weren’t the most easily impressed audiences, but they still came, and usually they warmed up real good once the show was underway. “Still,” Gideon tried, “you don’t think a nice, hot bath is reason to wander into town?”

  “Not yet, no,” he said, slowly, like he was thinking about it. “But you are free to go.”

  Gideon frowned. “Won’t be as much fun without you,” he admitted. It was a small admission, one Jed must surely have figured out by now. Gideon wasn’t exactly hiding his friendly feelings toward the man.

  That earned him another frown, though. “Your choice. I will camp south and west of the city.”

  That decided him. “Aww, come on, Jed, at least let’s camp east of town. Give ourselves a little daylight to hunt up supper.”

  Jed’s face didn’t twitch, but Gideon could still tell his friend was surprised. Maybe even pleased. “There is a pond just west of the city. The water will be warmer for the bath you crave.”

  “Warm enough not to make me look like a boy when I come out of it?” he asked.

  Jed’s laughter was low and soft, a little like his chanting. “Not that warm.”

  Gideon tried to hide his disappointment, because he really had been looking forward to friendly company and a hot meal somebody else cooked—butter, bread… his mouth started to water, so he dragged his brain off what it wasn’t gonna get—he’d had some practice at that all his adult life, and ple
nty in just the past few days. “You’re cooking,” he said.

  Jed didn’t even shrug. “Can your horse lope for a few miles?”

  “She c’n trot, anyway. Why?”

  Jed didn’t answer, just picked up his pace until he was jogging along, so Gideon eased Star into a trot. His suitcase rattled a little, so he tilted sideways as he settled into her pace and put one hand atop it to keep it from bouncing. They turned south when they hit a creek, and Gideon let Star splash through the water beneath the short trestle bridge Jed jogged across—no way would Star like to pick her way across that. Cutting along the bottom of a hill that had been stripped bald for mining timbers, he was glad he’d used some of the time in Livingston to get Star new shoes—they were good on the scree. She was sure-footed, as sure as Jed at least, and when they crossed a set of tracks that ran south, Gideon saw the pond Jed must’ve been talking about and reined her in. Her sides worked, her breath coming heavy but not hard, so he stopped only long enough to pull off her saddle and gear, then walked her around for a bit, cooling her down while Jed set up camp.

  The sun was low over the mountains now but still bright enough to blind him, and he was glad to turn his back on it and head to the fire Jed had burning. “I never did learn how to start a fire with flint,” he admitted easily.

  Jed looked up from where he was adding sticks to the fire to build it up, curious brows raised. “How does one grow to manhood without learning that?”

  “Their daddies know where to buy matches,” Gideon replied.

  Jed nodded. “Flint is almost as easy and more reliable. Even if it is wet, flint still strikes a spark.”

  Gideon hadn’t camped much since he’d become a man, preferring the familiar comforts of tent or train car or hotel room. Still, he and his daddy had gone off now and then when he was a kid, and his shooting made him a damned good hunter. Problem was, it was a lot more convenient to buy the bird in the store with its feathers already plucked off. “Most of what I know, I learned from my folks,” he said as he dug in his bags for the curry comb.