Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  Then in 1846 the long-smouldering trouble that had begun over Texas burst into a full-fledged war, and everything went to hell in a whirlwind.

  In the villages of the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Apache, and the Ute, the young men danced and painted themselves for war. The whites were busy fighting each other, and while their backs were turned and their hands occupied it was time for the Indian to strike. Mexican and American both were intruders in this land that did not belong to either of them. Now was the time to sweep them out.

  They almost did it.

  Jim and Rich wound up, when the war was over, without a head of stock to divide between them, and they were luckier than many of the rancheros south of the Arkansas. They were still alive. And the end of the war did not stop the raiding. Every season the tribes grew more angry at the increasing influx of whites. The Comanche robbed and murdered wherever they could, and even the Little White Man’s Cheyennes had been pushed almost beyond restraint. It was not then a peaceful nor a prosperous country.

  On top of that, Taos had lost its charm for Jim. He and Rich were there with the volunteers who put down the uprising. They saw Charles Bent lying dead on his own hearth, scalped Pueblo-fashion with a bowstring, and the streets of the town never looked so pretty afterward, even when the flayed and mutilated bodies of the other American residents had been taken away and the bloodstains faded by the sun to a dull unnoticeable brown.

  After the uprising they carried dispatches for the Army between Santa Fe and Fort Leavenworth, a long, hard ride each way with Apache and Comanche out for their hair and Rich grumbling, growling, and cursing at every step. In the midst of all this it seemed completely unimportant that Jim’s girl became violently Mexican and refused to have anything more to do with him.

  “I think,” said Rich, when it was all over, “I’ve seen enough of this country. I want to look at some other rocks and sky for a spell.”

  “California’s American now,” Jim said. “It ought to be safe to go back there.”

  Rich nodded. “I’m going to find me a vine and a fig tree, like it says in Scriptures, and just set. I’ll set in the shade when it’s hot, and I’ll set in the sun when it’s cool, and other than that I ain’t going to move.”

  “Leave some room,” Jim said, “for me.”

  He had money waiting for him at Bent’s Fort and they went to collect it. William Bent looked twenty years older, and he no longer laughed. Charles was dead and so was Owl Woman. The Santa Fe trade was dying. The trading posts along the Arkansas were shut, and there was talk of the Army buying this mud-walled castle as a fort from which to subdue the Indians. Jim walked across the huge courtyard in a high hot blaze of sun, but it seemed to him that the shadows hung very heavy under the porches, and the wind had a hollow sound where it blew. The many men who had been here were gone, the trappers and traders and clerks and hunters. In the empty rooms there was a stillness and a cold peace. Jim was glad to draw his money and go.

  He and Rich rode north to the Platte by easy stages. The Cheyennes were in an ugly frame of mind. Talking to them, Jim began to understand that what was making them ugly was fear, even though they did not realize this themselves. Control of their lives and affairs was being taken out of their hands. Strangers were coming in and changing everything and never asking them if they minded. There were soldiers, and threats, and promises, and all the time the buffalo grew scarcer and more and more strangers came and were furious if the Indians objected. Word had come to the Cheyennes that Broken Hand was on his way to Bent’s Fort to be their agent, and this was good, they trusted Broken Hand, and he would carry their words to the chiefs of the white men. But they remembered a day when they had not needed Broken Hand or anyone else to plead for them, when no army of soldiers threatened their villages, when the buffalo were plenty and no white teamsters shot their people along the Platte.

  “Fitz had better do a good job,” Rich said. “The ’Rapaho are mad too, and the Sioux got their backs up—I don’t know, Jim. I don’t know how it’ll all end.”

  “It won’t end,” Jim said. “It’ll go on for a long time, getting worse.” He added viciously, “Why did you reckon I said California?”

  “Oh,” said Rich, “I knew that. If you was Indian you’d stay and fight the white man. But you ain’t. And if you was white you’d stay and fight the Indian, but you ain’t.” He paused, frowning. “No, that’s not right, either. I’m white, but I don’t figure to fight for something I don’t want, which isn’t white nor Indian, but towns. You know, Jim, I’ll bet if Indians all clumped together in a mess as big as St. Louis I wouldn’t like them one bit better than I do white town-folks. Seems to me people are only good in small bunches. So I don’t have a side to fight on either. Why did you reckon I said I’d go to California?”

  They followed the emigrant road, up to Black’s Fork of the Green where Old Gabe had built a fort and trading post with the veteran Louis Vasquez. Old Gabe was doing well, selling horses and supplies and blacksmithing to the movers, who were pretty well out of everything by the time they got that far.

  “I could see it coming,” Bridger said, meaning the migration and the changing times. “And a man can’t make do with trapping alone any more.” He looked across his beautiful valley, at the mountains. “I can tell you, though, I wasn’t cut out to keep store.” He laughed, shaking his head, and his eyes were bright and restless.

  There were several lodges of Shoshoni camped at the fort. Rich was able to get word of Grass and his daughters. They were far up along the Snake, too far for a visit unless Rich wintered over. The season was getting late and the Sierra passes would be blocked with snow.

  “Do whatever you want,” Jim said. “It’s all right with me. California won’t run away.” The boiling troubles in the eastern plains seemed very distant here. He would not have minded roaming over the old country again.

  “No,” said Rich, “I got my mouth made up for that vine and fig tree, and I never saw any of either growing in a winter camp on the Snake. Grass can wait another season.” He sent a message and a bolt of red cloth.

  They passed westward over the mountains, avoiding the new Mormon settlements where they did not take kindly to strangers, and avoiding the Utes, who did not always take kindly to white men these days. Not all their chiefs had Walkara’s feeling about them. Jim wondered how long Walkara himself would keep it now that he had a white invasion on his own doorstep. The Mormons were not like Pegleg Smith. They were stayers. They would rip up the sod and fence in the pastures and build towns. The Hawk of the Mountains might see the day when he was as frightened as the Sioux and the Cheyennes, not of death but of destruction.

  Over a high and difficult pass in the Sierra Nevadas they came again to California.

  There were not immediately any vines and fig trees. Rich said that a man would be foolish to pick the first place he saw and sit down there, no matter how pretty it was. A man ought to look around. Jim agreed, knowing what Rich’s real trouble was. Now that he was here he wanted to put off settling just a little longer. Jim felt that way himself, he wasn’t sure why, except that there was a strange finality about coming up hard against the Pacific Ocean. All their lives they had fought to go west and farther west, and now they had run out of westing. The mountains were no longer before them. They were at their backs.

  So they looked, and while they were looking gold was discovered on Sutter’s Creek.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jim laid down the pokes of gold dust one by one, stacking them. They made little fat slapping sounds, very pleasing to the ear.

  “Behold!” said Jim. “Thou settest a table for me in the presence of my enemies.”

  “If they ain’t our enemies,” Rich said, “they ought to be, the prices we charge ’em.” He patted the stack of greasy leather pokes. “Mighty pretty. I don’t know how long this’ll last, but it sure beats trapping for beaver.”

  “This” was keeping store, and Jim remembered what Bridger had said about that. He
agreed with him. Only the money came in so fast and so easy you couldn’t turn it down, so you kept staying with it a while longer.

  When the first wave of the flood came pouring into the diggings around Sonora, he and Rich started with a tent and two muleloads of supplies, pants and shirts, picks and shovels, thick-soled boots. Now they had a building and a full-fledged business. Jim knew he ought to be content. He was past fifty, and if he was ever going to lay up enough of this world’s wealth to do him any good it had better be attended to now. The trouble was that he did not feel any different physically from the way he had always felt, and not very different mentally in the fundamental ways that mattered. So he was no more content with being penned up and quiet than he had been at twenty.

  “Yeah,” he said carelessly. “It sure does.” He swept the pokes together into a sack and tucked the sack into its hiding place between the wall studs at the end of the counter, where it would take several determined men a long while to find it. It was dark outside. The front window was covered with calico curtains, which had been made for it by the only women in town, who lived all together in a big house down the street and were not very good at sewing. There was a candle burning, only one because candles were scarce, and by the light of it Rich watched Jim and the way he moved and handled things. From time to time Rich drank from a bottle he took from under the counter and then replaced.

  “I was thinking, though,” Jim said, “we ain’t doing so good we couldn’t do better.”

  “Uh huh,” said Rich.

  Jim walked around the storeroom, slapping and shaking the piles of clothing into order on the tables, shoving the hardware back with a clang where it had been disarranged, kicking some loose boots together on the floor.

  “When are you leaving?” Rich asked.

  “Who said anything about leaving?”

  “Well,” said Rich, “I’ll tell you. I’ve known you for just about thirty years, and being a real shrewd individual, I’ve got so’s I can recognize certain signs. Like when it gets to be spring and you start kicking the boots. Slapping the pants around and cussing the shirts is kind of a beginning twinge, you might say, and when you kick the boots, that’s it.”

  Jim laughed. “All right, I was thinking of taking another look at some of that high country. Stands to reason the gold has got to wash down from someplace, and it might be—”

  “If you find any,” Rich said, “bring me back a bucket or so, but just spare me the buffalo chips.”

  “I don’t believe it’s been thirty years,” Jim said.

  “Sure it has. Count it.”

  “No,” said Jim firmly, “I couldn’t have stood you that long.” A minute later he said, “Why don’t you come with me? The weather’s good.”

  “And I feel good,” Rich said, “so why should I crank my bones all up again sitting in a cold river shaking gravel?” The rheumatism came back on him pretty hard by spells in the rainy season. “I’ll stay and keep the store.” He drank again. “You ’bout ready? This bottle’s running dry.”

  “I’m ready,” Jim said, and blew out the candle. They locked up and walked along the straggling dusty street to the saloon. Rich spent most of his off time here, yarning with the miners about the old days, old Indian fights and buffalo hunts, the big horse raid, how things used to be. He drank quite a lot these days. Jim could never stay very long in the saloon. He was a great yarner himself. He could sit for hours beside a campfire and talk, lying mountain-style when he ran out of truth, so that the tales got steadily taller as the night got later, but this was different. Somehow the four walls and a roof choked off his wind and he could find no inspiration in the attitude of the miners. Either they listened with frank, tolerant disbelief, or they stared with the solemn reverence they might have given to a man who walked in and said he was one of Noah’s authentic crew on the Ark. This did not seem to bother Rich. Jim thought he was telling the stories to himself more than to anyone else, just getting gently drunk and remembering. It made Jim feel sour and old.

  The world had moved fast, he knew that. Since the spring of ’49 it had moved so fast that a man had to run hard to keep up with it. Spanish California was already mostly a memory. Settlers were pouring across the plains in vast numbers, bringing the cholera with them to wipe out whole villages of Cheyennes and Kiowas and line the Oregon Trail with their own graves. William Bent had destroyed his mud castle on the Arkansas, burying half his life in the rubble, but new forts were building along the rivers and beside the emigrant road, and blue-coated soldiers rode the old trails with men like Bridger to guide them. Still and all, it was only a few years. A man wasn’t a curiosity just because he happened to span them.

  Or perhaps it was not so much time as it was distance. These miners were town men. They were noisy and rough and dirty like town men, they worked like town men, they robbed and brawled and murdered like town men. The mountain men had gone, soft-footed and quiet as wolves, running in small packs and leaving little sign of their passing. The miners came like bullocks in great herds, roaring and bellowing, tearing and trampling and fouling the streams. Maybe, Jim thought, it was simply that he and they were of different breeds and that was why there was a gap between them. Certainly there were men much older than himself swinging pick and shovel after gold, and these too had the same way of looking at him as though he belonged to a different century.

  Whatever it was, Jim could only put up with it so long and then he would have to get up and go.

  This night he got his supplies together, ready to load on the pack mule. He slept a while, in the bachelor loft over the store where he and Rich nested. He heard Rich come bumbling up the stairs and fall into bed, and that was the end of his sleeping. Long before daylight he was on his way out of the spraddle of tents and shacks that was so rapidly becoming a town, heading toward the Sierra Nevadas.

  He did not expect to find any great riches. He was making money the best way there was to make it in the gold fields, and he thought probably all the big strikes had been made in these parts anyway. Prospecting was simply an excuse to get out and travel, and if it paid off in the shape of a nice little pocket of dust, which it sometimes did, so much the better.

  He traveled north and east, not hurrying, taking a sort of mute animal joy from the clean wind and the quiet. Some days later he fell in with some Spanish-speaking Indians he knew and camped with them for several weeks, moving from place to place. They were prospecting too. Many of the California Indians were good miners. Jim had several working for him on shares in the diggings, and others came with gold dust to the store, either to buy or to ask Jim to pack in supplies to their remote camps. He got along with them, as usual, better than he did with most of the whites, and the Indios got along with him much better than they did with the general run of Americanos. For this reason a lot of people assumed that Jim was a half-breed, and he did not argue about it.

  Perhaps he should have, because some of the Indians were good at other things than mining.

  Jim looked long and hard at the horse that a smoothfaced young man named Bartolomeo was riding. “It seems to me,” Jim said, “that I have seen that horse before. It seems to me that that was once the horse of Senor Wallace, who owns a ranch over Stockton way.”

  “It is possible,” Bartolomeo answered, with a shrug and a smile. “The ways of horses are well-known. When they escape from a pasture they run far. Who can say how far this horse may have wandered?”

  “See that he does not wander back,” Jim said, “when you are riding him. The Americanos are very angry against persons who find lost horses in a certain way. They have things called Vigilance Committees, because at one time a man’s horse could become lost from the hitching post in front of his own house if he did not stand by with a gun to guard it. I would not like to see my friend Bartolomeo hanging like a ripe fruit from a tree.”

  Bartolomeo smiled again, very widely. “This horse is happy now. He will not run away.”

  “Bartolomeo,” Jim said, �
�I hope you will never be tempted to make my horses happy.”

  Bartolomeo went into a great whoop of laughter. He told the other Indians and they laughed too. “The Vigilance Committees are white men. If we let ourselves be caught by them we deserve to hang. But you—” Bartolomeo shook his head, making circular motions with his finger around the crown, “We are civilized, Christian Indians. We do not wish to be scalped by a wild Indio of the plains.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” Jim said, making the scalp-yell so that all the horses jumped.

  It was on this trip, scrambling over cruel ridges covered with snow and ice, that Jim saw what appeared to be a notch in the mountains far to the southward.

  He asked the Indians about it. They said they did not know, and he thought they were probably telling the truth. Their people had no desire to go east of the Sierras. There was nothing out there but alkali deserts, thirst, and the wild Indios with the scalping knives. Jim left them and went by himself to investigate.

  It was a long way, and several times he thought he must have been mistaken, for the shapes of the mountains changed as he came near them. It was virgin country that he traveled through, aromatic with pine forests and cool with the breath of the snow fields. When he came upon the valley at last he was almost as surprised as though he had not been looking for it.

  It was a beautiful valley, broad and rich and green as the valleys of Absaroka, with deer feeding on the flats and towering snow peaks above, and a clear bright river flowing through it. Jim sat on his horse and looked at it for a long time. Then he rode slowly down into it.

  He kept on riding, following the stream.

  Rich was sitting in the sun in front of the store when Jim got back.

  “Find any gold?” he asked.

  “No,” said Jim. He busied himself hitching the horse and the pack mule. “Found something better.”