“They are mine,” Mary said.
The man in black, who gazed at her from smirky eyes, merely smiled, tore up the bills of sale, and tossed them to the cobbled street.
“I know the red kind of human better than you know yourselves, and I know these ain’t yours, so I’m confiscating them and getting them to their rightful owners.”
“Would you treat my father this way?” North Star asked.
“No, sonny, I wouldn’t. Not at all. You ain’t your father. She ain’t white neither. I would not treat any red-blood the same as the folks here. Now, from the looks of you, you’re vagrants. You got any means of support?”
This bewildered her, so she left it to her son.
“My father supports us,” he said. “Always has.”
“Your father, your father. I ain’t seeing any father around here. You got means or not? Show me the purse.”
Her son did not reply.
“Vagrants. I thought so. It’s illegal to be a vagrant here, and that goes double for wandering redskins. I’m fining you whatever’s in the packs. So git. It’s over. Vamoose from town, hear me?”
“Those have our bedrolls, our camping gear, our clothes.”
“You heard me. You got fined for vagrancy, hear? Do I have to lock you up?”
“Yes, lock us up. At least we’d be fed and have a bed,” North Star said.
The skinny man laughed easily, yanked the reins and lead rope from Mary’s hands, and grinned. “Git, before there’s an accidental shooting.”
Mary’s heart sank, as this man took away her horses and her packs and left them standing there in the street.
“I’m taking these nags to the livery. If I see you again, your backs are gonna bleed when the whip lands.”
North Star choked back whatever he was about to yell, and sagged. Mary shrank into herself. Several people were watching. Off a way, a train whistle moaned. The smirky-eyed man in black cheerfully walked away with everything.
thirty
Mary’s spirits sagged. They were far from home and had nothing. North Star watched the constable lead the horses away, and then quietly began collecting the scraps of paper lying in the manure of the street. He let none escape, and eventually had every piece in hand.
“We will go there,” he said, pointing toward the large building called the county courthouse. “Let me talk.”
She wanted only to escape this bleak place and its bleak people, but she reluctantly followed her son, wondering what a youth of fifteen winters could do. He paused, and finally decided where he was going, which was a corner street-level office.
She did not know what lay within, but the gold lettering on the glass seemed to inform him. They entered a small anteroom with wooden chairs. Beyond was an office, and sitting behind a desk was a vast man in an immaculate cream-colored suit, stiff white collar, and floppy black bow tie. His face was as wide as his waist, she thought, and made even wider by those bands of hair down the cheeks that white people called muttonchops. He surveyed them from watery blue eyes, sucked on his cigar, and motioned them in.
“Folks from far away, I imagine,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
Mary glanced at North Star, who was steeling himself. “Sheriff, I am Dirk Skye, and this is my mother, whose Shoshone name translates into Blue Dawn, but who is known to my father as Mary.”
“Boggs here,” the sheriff said. “Is there trouble?”
“We’ve just had our horses confiscated by your town constable,” North Star said. “That and our packs for being vagrants.”
Something bright bloomed in Sheriff Boggs’s blue eyes. He drew on the cigar until its tip crackled orange, and then exhaled a plume.
“My mother showed your constable her bills of sale, but he said no Indians could have such nice horses. He looked at her bills and ripped them up.” North Star placed the shreds on the sheriff’s desk. The man eyed them curiously, and then eyed Mary.
“Horses branded?” the sheriff asked.
“No, sir, and not shod, either.”
“What’d he do with the horses?”
“Walked off with them a few minutes ago.”
“Maginnis Livery Barn,” the man said. “What did Constable Barnswallow say?”
“He said we had to leave town fast or he’d whip us.”
The sheriff smiled. “People of color never had much traction with Clete. He sure don’t even like Italians or Spaniards and he’s hard on Greeks.”
“I’ll help you put those shreds together. You can see for yourself,” the youth said.
“Who’s your father?”
“Barnaby Skye. Ask anyone at Fort Laramie. He’s an Englishman, a guide now. American Fur Company, long ago.”
“Yes, Pierre Chouteau’s outfit,” the sheriff said. “And you?”
“I’ve been in St. Louis at St. Ignatius, where the Jesuits teach Indian boys.”
“Barnswallow, he don’t like Catholics, either.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong. We want our horses and packs back. He left us with nothing but the clothing on our backs.”
North Star’s voice was brave and strong. She looked at her son with wonder. He knew something about dealing with these white men.
Sheriff Boggs arose, revealing a vast girth, immaculate in cream except for a few cigar ashes. “You wait right here, boy. I’ll be back in a few minutes. There’s chairs out there.”
With surprising speed, the wide man swept past them and out the door to the street.
Mary found a seat, but North Star stood rigidly.
“How did you know to do this?” she asked.
He looked broken for a moment, and then said something that astonished her. “My father was trying to protect us when he sent me to school.”
A shelf clock ticked steadily behind the sheriff’s battered desk. Beyond the office she saw two iron cages, and she knew this man had the power to cage them if he chose, and her fear deepened. Maybe this man would decide they were thieves, and put her and her son inside one of those cages.
It did take time, and the afternoon began to wither away when she saw the big man in the cream suit leading her mare, and another man leading her buckskin with the packs on it. They tied these horses to a hitching post out front.
“Mistah Skye, it seems the city constable outstretched himself, and I’ve recovered your nags and your packs. Barnswallow’s not my man; he’s the city’s hire, so there’s not much I could do except tell him I’ll pound the crap out of him if he stops me, or you.”
“Thank you, Sheriff,” her son said. “I have a small request. We have no proof of ownership anymore, and—”
“I’ll fix it.”
The sheriff dipped the nib of a pen into an inkwell and scratched out a document, and blotted it up. He read it slowly.
“‘To whom it may concern: this bay mare and buckskin gelding belong to Mrs. Barnaby Skye, known as Mary. I certify it. Amos Boggs, Sheriff, Pettis County, State of Missouri.’”
Mary marveled.
“We’ll be going then. Thank you, Sheriff,” her son said.
“Oh, you’re mighty welcome … and by the way. You just set there a moment longer whiles I talk with this hostler.”
He barged outside. The hostler listened, nodded, and hastened off.
“Seems to me the city ought to make amends, so I’m adding a sack of oats to your gear. I told the liveryman to bill the city.”
In minutes the liveryman returned, shouldering a heavy bag of oats. He laid these before North Star. “I reckon these are yours,” he said.
The sheriff had ignited a new cheroot and watched while North Star rebalanced the loads in the panniers to accommodate the oats.
“My old dad, he trapped some, working for the Bents. I think maybe I’ve heard the name of Skye once or twice,” the sheriff said.
“Then he will remember your father, and will thank you,” North Star said.
They escaped town and headed west again, this time with enough food t
o last a long time. The oats would boil into a tasty gruel. Mary chose to ride, but her son walked ahead, leading the packhorse. She eyed him contemplatively. Had he lived among her people, he would probably be a young warrior now, unless his spirit helpers led him toward something else. He had a warrior’s body, lithe and strong, still filling out. But now it was encased in white men’s pants and shirt and shoes, the very clothing he wore as a student sitting in quiet rooms all day.
He had not fought the white man who tried to steal the horses. Instead, he had made good use of what he knew about how the headmen ruled, and talked to the man named Boggs, and it had all worked out. If he hadn’t been schooled in St. Louis, how would he know such a thing? Just how the whites governed themselves was beyond her. There were too many parts: fathers who ruled over all, and fathers who ruled over smaller parts, and on and on, down to that constable. She gazed at her boy with a new insight: what he knew, locked inside his head, might rescue her people from constant trouble with these white conquerors. For the first time, her bitterness toward Skye softened. He had ripped her boy from her. But now her boy possessed mysterious powers unknown to any other Shoshone. Was that good? It was hard for her to say, but she was proud of North Star, and rejoiced inside of herself.
They walked through Independence and Kansas City virtually unremarked, perhaps because the residents of both of those towns were familiar with plains Indians and thought little of their presence. After that they followed the Kansas River northwest, on the Big Road once again. And soon they were in open country, where the hand of the white men could no longer be seen, and that lifted her heart.
The trip to the mountains proved peaceable enough. They reached Fort Kearny, but no one was counting wagons anymore. They proceeded along the south bank of the Platte River, often without seeing any travelers for an entire day. Now and then the railroad tracks came close, and then they heard the mournful whistles and the clatter of trains. Other times the rails went somewhere else but in the stillness of the nights a distant moan of a whistle reached their ears. The white men went by rail as much as they could, at least those who could afford it.
It was high summer, and the bottoms of the Platte offered her berries and roots in addition to the gruel made of oats, and they got along well enough. Such people as were heading west on the Big Road had passed by in the spring, as always, when the grasses were up and the trail was dry. As always, they started their trip with overburdened wagons, and soon were discarding the heavy items to spare their oxen. She scavenged all she could, acquiring skirts and dresses and shawls and blouses and one pair of brown shoes that fit her, a welcome find after wearing out her moccasins. Several times they discovered worn or wounded livestock, oxen, horses, loose in the bottoms, but these were skittish and hard to catch, and she and North Star had no luck with them. Then one day she found a lamed ewe, abandoned by her herder. It had a broken leg and was wasting away. She slit its throat, and she and North Star gorged on the first meat they had enjoyed in a long time, and kept eating until the meat turned bad. She skinned the pelt and began working on moccasins from it during the evenings.
The air lost its moisture and became more comfortable, in spite of furnace heat each afternoon. Her heart lifted. This was air she knew, air from the great reaches of the High Plains, and the mountains.
They passed immigrant families, and discovered that these white people spoke no English and came from places she didn’t know. They were a little different somehow.
“Those were from Sicily,” North Star said. “And the ones we passed earlier were from Hungary.”
She marveled that he knew these things.
It was only when they were approaching Fort Laramie that he opened the topics that had remained a barrier between them these many days and nights.
“Are you and Father separated?” he asked one afternoon, when she was least expecting it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She told him what had been intended. Victoria, Skye’s sits-beside-him wife, had directed her to go to the Wind River Reservation and wait for Skye and Victoria. But Blue Dawn had been drawn east by some spirit guide, drawn east in some way beyond her own willpower to resist, as if the wise and frightening owl had compelled her to go.
“I’m not sure where they are now. I think with my people on the Wind River. We will look for them there, because that is where we were to meet.”
Then, realizing how little North Star knew of recent times, she narrated the recent past.
“He hurts now, and it is hard for him to lie on a robe and sleep. It is hard for him to get up off the ground, and sometimes he wishes he had a chair, one of those rocking chairs. The cold comes through the robes on a winter’s night and makes him stiff, and then he hurts all the more. Last spring, even before the snows melted, he said he wanted to build a house and have a stove in it and beds and chairs and a fireplace, and the place that would lift his spirits the most would be the great bend of the Yellowstone. He rode away one day, leaving Victoria and me with her people, because he said he wanted to choose the right place. But he didn’t return, so Victoria went to get him, sent me away, and more than that I don’t know.”
“Will he turn his back on me?”
In truth, Mary was not sure of that. “He is torn, Dirk,” she said, using that other name for him. “All the while you were gone, he could not talk to me, or Victoria, about you. But you were there in his mind, every moment, every winter, and I think he believed you would need to make your own decision when you left school. To come back, or live there with the white men.” She paused. “He knew you could help the Shoshones the most if you learned all the secrets of the white men. But it would be your decision.”
“I’ve already made it,” North Star said.
thirty-one
Skye ignored the distant white man with the rakish hat perched jauntily on his head. He patiently hoed a row of potato plants, breaking the soil and chopping away weeds. Each strike of the hoe hurt, but he didn’t mind. He was helping raise food for Mary’s brothers, and that made him feel useful. There at Fort Washakie, the Shoshones were slowly adapting to white men’s ways and raising crops.
But progress in that direction had not been easy. The Shoshone men considered it women’s work and refused to labor in the fields. Male Shoshones hunted, made war, and gambled. Women toiled. But there would be potatoes this season, Skye thought. The rains had come and the frosts had held off, and no hail had destroyed the tender plants. Potatoes might not be as satisfying as a haunch of buffalo, but these people had little choice. The Yank government was decreeing how they must live.
So he chopped and weeded and felt a thin sweat dampen his hatband and his shirt, and he counted the time well spent. And maybe the sight of a white man patiently growing food might inspire the younger Shoshone boys to at least try the new life.
The white stranger stared around, looking for something in that pleasant Wind River Valley, and finally strode toward Skye, who imagined it would be another Indian Bureau functionary with new commands or restrictions or rebukes. But this gent was too gaudy and looked more like some dandy from the nearest saloon than a government man. He wore a black waistcoat with a gold fob stretched across it. Gold-plated fob, at any rate. The man studied Skye, made up his mind, and headed down a row of potatoes toward his quarry. The man sported muttonchops and a mustache, and peered at Skye from watery blue eyes that flanked a veined nose that suggested a long acquaintance with spirits.
Skye straightened up slowly to ease the pain in his back and rested on his worn hoe.
“Ah, there you are, Skye!”
“Mister Skye, sir.”
“So I’ve heard. I know more about you than you may think.”
“Then you have the advantage of me, sir.”
“Buntline here. Ned Buntline at your service.” The man seemed to be waiting for something, perhaps recognition, but Skye had never heard of the man.
Skye lifted his hat and let the dry breezes evaporate t
he sweat on his brow. “A good name, Mister Buntline. I knew that term when I was a boy,” he said. “Buntline’s the rope along the base of a square sail.”
“Ah, we have it in common!” Buntline said. “I was a sailor, and now I’m a scribbler.”
“A reporter, maybe?”
“No, no, I spin yarns of the great West, true stories, carefully documented, about the towering border men who opened these lands. I’m going to do a story about Cody, called King of the Border Men, and I want to do you too.”
“Do me?”
“You’re the one who became king of the mountain men, aren’t you? Then king of the guides? Then king of the Indian wars?”
Skye stared, at a loss. “You have the wrong man,” he said, and took up his hoeing once again, the strokes of the blade rhythmically opening the soil and vanquishing a creeping vine.
“Ah, a modest man. But I think you’re wrong, Mister Skye. There’s no man in all the West more honored than you.”
“I really need to hoe these potatoes before the weeds take over, sir.”
“You’re the man, all right. You have not one but two wives, sharing the very same lodge. You’ve taken scientists and preachers and doctors into the wilderness and got them out safely. You’ve fought the Blackfeet and Comanches, the deadliest of all tribes, and survived. You’ve taken white men into forbidden valleys. There’s nothing you haven’t done. Your name is known from St. Louis to the Pacific. They all say Skye’s the man, Mister Skye. Write about him.”
Skye leaned heavily upon his hoe. This was heavy work, and his bum leg was rebelling.
“Mister Buntline, how can I say this? I would rather have my privacy. There’s nothing I did that dozens of others couldn’t do. You want to write about a remarkable man, you just corral Jim Bridger and take down his story.”
“Oh, Mister Skye, I don’t take down stories, I invent them, always based on truth, of course. I don’t really need to know your secrets. The name is enough. Trust me, within a few months yours will be the most celebrated name in every nook and cranny of the Republic.”
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