Jim Saddler 5

by Gene Curry

  “Bless you, my children,” I said.

  Steiner said, “You wouldn’t want to come in as an active partner?”

  I hadn’t given the idea any thought. “Not unless you run a gaming parlor as well. Even then, I’m not much for staying long in cities.”

  “There will be no gambling,” Rita said firmly. “The rich men who come there will come to spend money, not to have it taken from them. Gambling would give the house—our house—a bad name. We have to create goodwill from the first day we open our doors.”

  “Nothing can stop us now,” Jake said, smiling at Rita. “I feel good enough to get married.”

  Steiner was just joking, but Rita took him up on it. “Why wait till Frisco? Claggett’s a minister, isn’t he?”

  I wasn’t sure how legal Claggett was. Legal enough, I guessed. Anyhow, maybe as wagon master he had the same marrying power as the captain of a seagoing ship.

  “Why don’t you go ask him?” I said.

  Steiner said, “I’ll do that. You’ll be the best man, of course.”

  “Be glad to.”

  Claggett was surprised when Jake approached him with the idea. He became angry when Jake asked him if the marriage would hold up in court.

  “I am an ordained minister of the Church of Redemption,” Claggett said. “I do not condone your ways, Mr. Steiner, but it is better to have you married than living in sin.

  “And best wishes to you, too!” Rita said, but she wasn’t mad. She was about to get a man of her own, one she loved and trusted. Not even Claggett’s sin-hating face could get her down.

  I don’t know that I ever attended a grimmer wedding. I’d been to funerals that had more cheer to them. The girl in Rita’s wagon agreed to be her bridesmaid, and then we got the wedding group together. After some preliminary bullshit, Claggett pronounced them man and wife. Both signed their names in a big, old, battered book that Claggett got from his wagon, his register of births, deaths and marriages. Until Steiner and Rita came along, there had been nothing but deaths filling the pages. Although I have no use for the institution myself, it cheered me to see these two people getting married.

  The only one who didn’t turn up to stare was Iversen. No doubt he stayed away out of a sense of delicacy. Maggie O’Hara was there and so was Flaxie. Maggie’s eyes were filled with scorn; I knew Steiner had made a real enemy of the good-looking, woman-loving jailbird. I thought Flaxie looked kind of wistful, as if thoughts of another kind of life were heavy on her mind. Reverend Claggett refrained from offering his best wishes. Then, as if to show his independence, Culligan came forward and shook Steiner’s hand.

  “The best of good fortune to you and your lady,” the slab-faced Irishman said. Then he went back to his work.

  A few of the women had the decency to offer their best wishes. Even Maggie O’Hara came forward and tried to kiss Rita. Rita pulled away before she could do it, and Maggie sneered, “You’re going to need all the good luck you can get.”

  For an instant, I felt like telling Maggie what she could do with her woman-loving kiss. I held back, though, because I didn’t want to start a gunfight at a wedding. It was too bad Maggie couldn’t be satisfied with Flaxie. I figured something had happened between them, or maybe Maggie was trying to use Rita to keep Flaxie in line. It seemed to me that Flaxie wanted to get away from Maggie but didn’t know how to do it. Something about her seemed to say that she wasn’t the same queer breed as her wagon mate. Besides, there had been that night with me. Of course, there are women who like to get it from men as well as from women. It was none of my business.

  Maggie had it in for me, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Since I had been warned away from Flaxie, there had been no other nights under my blankets in the moonlight. In the past, Flaxie had fucked many men, yet Maggie seemed to reserve all her hate for me. Maybe I summed up all men for her. She tensed up every time she saw me. The other men didn’t seem to have the same effect on her though. At no time had she ever displayed any interest in Iversen, even before he’d had his teeth knocked out. Now that Steiner had snagged Rita for himself, I expected Maggie to turn her anger on him. But that didn’t happen. She didn’t like him any better, but that was as far as it went.

  Maggie was what she was, and proud of it. I admitted that she excited me, the way a bronc-buster is excited by the meanest-spirited horse in the bunch. But I figured that here was one horse that couldn’t be ridden, no matter what. I was ready to bury the hatchet if she was, but Maggie’s attitude was that she’d like to bury it in my head.

  “Party’s over,” I said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It took a little more than two days to reach Fort Bridger. There was a long pull to the top of a shaly slope before we could see the fort in the early morning light. It had been weeks since we had seen humans other than ourselves. It would be good to see faces that hadn’t grown so familiar. The fort looked solid after life on the move, as if it had been there forever.

  A bugle brassed far below, disturbing the quiet of the morning, yet the sound was lost immediately in the vastness of plain and sky. It wasn’t summer yet. The sky on that morning was gray, dull, heavy and low, loaded with clouds. Rain began to fall, drumming on the canvas tops of the wagons, which leaked where poorly patched.

  The train went over the rise like a huge snake with a broken back. Wind-driven mist blew in our faces, blurring the outlines of the fort. But just to see it lifted the spirits of everyone; for a little while at least, we were back in what passed for civilization.

  We had started out before first light so as to catch the soldiers at assembly time. The sound of the bugle said we had timed it just right. The bugling stopped and we could hear shouting in the rain. The gate of the fort was closed and barred from the inside. In more settled areas, the gates of a fort are hardly ever closed. In back of the gate and to one side of it was a spindly-legged watchtower, from which the country could be scanned for miles. The watchtower had a little peaked roof. Up there only one man could stand watch at a time. There was a man there now, so they knew we were coming. He shouted down from the tower and, before we got all the way down, the gate opened and an officer and a squad of men came out. The men all carried rifles at the ready position; to my mind they didn’t look too friendly.

  I guessed they thought we were Mormons, because there were so many women in the train. The Mormons and the Army were forever at war; it had been going on for years, ever since the Saints packed up and moved clear off the maps. But civilization had caught up with them, and so had the Army.

  “Hold up, there!” the officer hollered, a young lieutenant, his holster flap unbuttoned. The lieutenant regarded Reverend Claggett with deep suspicion, a reasonable enough reaction to the gaunt, mad-eyed parson. The first time I had seen Claggett I knew he was bound to get me into trouble.

  “Hold up there!” he said again.

  Claggett was more accustomed to giving orders than to taking them. “Hold up for what?” he growled, impatient with everything that held up the Lord’s work. To the preacher, his work and the Lord’s were one and the same.

  “We want nothing more than we can buy at the sutler’s store,” Claggett said. “What do you think we are, a pack of beggars? I asked you a question, boy? Hold up for what?”

  The lieutenant knew the men were grinning behind his back, and being called boy in front of the squad didn’t make him love Claggett any.

  “I’ll ask the questions,” the lieutenant said roughly, though I could see he wasn’t a rough man. “You look like Mormons to me—are you?”

  He was wasting his time trying to intimidate Claggett. “Maybe we are, and maybe we aren’t,” he said. “If we are, what’s it to you?”

  I liked the way Claggett stood up to the jack-in-office lieutenant. But I would have liked it better at some other time. At the moment, I wanted to stay on the good side of the Army, for what it was worth. As it turned out, it wasn’t worth a goddamned thing.

  “Are you Mormons or n
ot?” the lieutenant repeated, unsure of how to deal with Claggett. “You people have been making trouble since you came out here.”

  “The Mormons were here before the Army, before everybody,” the preacher said, determined to have it out.

  “We’re not Mormons,” I said before it got worse. “We only look like it because of all the women. This here is the Reverend Josiah Claggett, and he’s taking the ladies to a new religious community in California.”

  The lieutenant wasn’t convinced. “Only the Mormons bring women across the Plains in such numbers. Women going west to find husbands go by boat.”

  “These women didn’t have a boat,” I said patiently. “What’s your name?” the lieutenant asked.

  I told him. I said I was a guide and hunter. “Mormons have been known to lie,” the lieutenant said. “They don’t consider it lying if it gets their God’s work done.”

  That was a new one on me. I didn’t know the Mormons had a God of their own. Maybe they did. “You know more about them than I do,” I said. “Believe me, sir, we are what we say we are.”

  But the lieutenant stood firm, at least for the moment. “I can’t be sure you’re telling the truth.”

  “Get a Bible, or we’ll use the Reverend’s. I’ll swear on it.”

  “The Mormons don’t believe in the Bible.”

  The lieutenant must have been studying up on the Saints on what they did and didn’t do. And he had grounds for his suspicion. For the most part, Mormons look like other humans. They don’t all wear chin beards, black suits, round-crowned hats and glum expressions.

  Suddenly, I thought of a way out. I called Culligan. “Fetch your bottle,” I called out. “Maybe the lieutenant is in need of a drink.”

  At that hour of the morning, Culligan was red-eyed and stinking of stale whiskey. You could just about smell him from where he was. He reached over the end gate of his wagon, opened a box and from it took a full quart of whiskey, a brand so cheap and bad it could’ve killed a mule.

  Culligan took his bottle and stood beside me in the rain. He blew his breath on the young officer and nearly knocked him over.

  “Are you a Mormon?” I asked the Irishman.

  “Lord, no,” Culligan said. “That’s worse than being a Protestant.”

  Then, so there wouldn’t be any more doubt, I called for Maggie O’Hara; the hard-eyed woman-lover came forward with a swagger. In her tight, striped pants, carrying a double-edged knife and holstered pistol, she didn’t look like any docile Mormon female.

  I think Maggie impressed the lieutenant more than Culligan did. She was enough to impress any man and maybe frighten a timid one. There was real menace in this good-looking woman.

  She knew what was expected of her; whatever else she was, she was buggy whip smart. “What the fuck did you call me for?” she asked. She didn’t have to fake the hostility. “Do we get into the fucking fort, or do we stand here all day in the fucking rain?”

  At that moment, the lieutenant decided that we couldn’t possibly be Mormons. He knew what Maggie was. A woman of her breed would have been driven from a Mormon wagon train with whip and club. And if she didn’t go, she’d be killed.

  I thought I finally had it settled, but Claggett started up again. “I still say you got no right interfering with other people’s religious beliefs. You know now we’re not Mormons. How about the Jews? We got one Jew in the train. You got any special rules for him, any questions you want to ask him? Can he come in, or does he have to stand outside the gate? Tell me, so I can tell him. I wouldn’t want to do anything against Army regulations.”

  Maybe the lieutenant thought he was telling the truth when he said, “We treat the Mormons the same as everybody else except when they break the law of the land. Polygamy is against the law. Congress has said so, but the Mormons say they have to father a lot of children in order to survive.”

  “Bullshit!” Claggett said. It was the first time I’d heard him use any rough language. He walked straight into the fort, and the lieutenant didn’t try to stop him.

  I had to try to get the United States Army back on our side, so much so that I was willing to do a little soft-soaping, a little ass-kissing. I had to be practical. As soon as Claggett was out of earshot I said, “My apologies, Lieutenant. Reverend Claggett is old and tired. For all his quick temper, he’s a good man. All his life he’s worked for the poor and needy.” Naturally, I didn’t mention the years when the preacher was robbing and killing.

  “Old men get cranky,” the lieutenant said.

  “That they do,” I said. “I’d like to talk to your commanding officer—or are you in command?” That last question was a little of the soft soap.

  The lieutenant liked the idea that I considered him fit to command a big post like Bridger. “No, sir, I’m not in command, and Captain Flack is only in temporary command.” The lieutenant said his own name was Wakely and we shook hands.

  “He’ll talk to you,” Wakely said, waving me toward the gate.

  It was plain that the lieutenant was bored and lonely. I was sure he wasn’t married. It was all right for the men to poke the fort washerwomen which was the name they used for the enlisted men’s whores, but an officer couldn’t stick his dick in the same hole. He looked with longing at all my women, especially at Flaxie, who was walking across the parade ground with Maggie.

  Wakely led me across the muddy parade ground. The men had just been dismissed and were headed for the mess hall. If the fort hadn’t been soaked with rain, the news of the fifty women would have set it on fire. As it was, there was many a backward glance as the men headed for breakfast. Fort Bridger was smack in the middle of nowhere, not a town for hundreds of miles. The few white women in Bridger would be officers’ and sergeants’ wives—corporals didn’t rate a wife—and God help the man who poked or tried to poke another man’s woman. To the enlisted men they were as untouchable as white plantation women would be to Negro slaves. The man who dipped his wick in the wrong oil could get killed, and sometimes was.

  We passed the women hurrying into the sutler’s store. Women love to buy things even in the middle of the wilderness. Certainly it would be a long time before they got another chance to stand in front of a counter. A sutler’s sold just about everything, and everything cost a lot more than back east, because it had to be carried so far. Some of the politicians were in cahoots with the ' office-holders who granted permits to the sutlers. A sutler on a big post could get rich in no time at all.

  I saw Culligan heading toward the store and knew he wasn’t going there to buy sarsaparilla. The Irishman had enough whiskey already to see him to California and back again, but a real drunk never takes a chance on being caught short.

  I followed Wakely to the captain’s office, and he was there, early though it was. He was old for a captain; in the peacetime Army promotion is slow. If we went to war with Canada or Mexico, he would be a colonel in months. No wonder peacetime officers longed for war. A soldier without a war is like a carpenter without a saw. Captain Flack was about fifty, with a belly, a red face and tufts of reddish hair in his ears and nose. Either he shaved without care or had a dull razor, because his face had powdered nicks in several places. One nick still oozed a little blood. He looked like a man who drank a lot, probably late at night in his quarters, drank and listened to the sounds of the fort, dreaming of the wars he’d never fight. The whiskey showed in his red-veined eyes and in the thick, shiny skin heavy drinkers develop as they get older.

  He was not glad to see me, or anyone else, though he was civil enough for a man with a hangover. After we shook hands, he showed me a chair and said with barely controlled impatience: “You should get off the Overland and go north on the Oregon. Then you can come back down through central California. It’s one long valley all the way south. No mountains to cross, no Indian trouble of any kind. That’s what I think you should do.”

  What he said made sense for any other wagon train except the one I was guiding. The captain had no way of kno
wing my problems. “We have to go the quickest way,” I said. “I was hoping you could give us a small escort for part of the way. I know you can’t escort us all the way to California, but the presence of even a small group of soldiers would make a difference. Even the worst band of wagon-raiders has more sense than to attack an Army escort.”

  “These raiders, who are they?”

  I told him about Kiowa Sam and the trouble with him at the start of our journey. I said I expected the next trouble to be a lot worse, maybe a massacre, if we didn’t get some protection. I said we didn’t have enough men to fight off a determined attack. “Maybe we can fight them off for a while. But that won’t stop them,” I said.

  Captain Flack said he had never heard of Kiowa Sam. “You can’t believe all these stories,” he said confidently, his big belly pressing against the desk, maybe thinking it was about time for a small drink, just to get his brain working again.

  “I think this story is real, Captain.”

  Flack said, “Some of these old-timers like to give themselves fearsome reputations. That’s supposed to make people afraid of them. Mostly it’s bluster.”

  “There’s good reason to fear this old man,” I said. “Old, bad men are the most dangerous of all. They know they’re going to die soon, so they don’t care what chances they take.”

  The captain’s impatience showed again. “Then take the Oregon Trail like I told you. We’ve cleared most of the raiders off that route. It’s been working fine.” Again, there was much truth in what the captain said. Raiders with sense tried to keep out of the way of the Army. There was no point getting hanged for the meager possessions to be found in the usual emigrant train. But my train was far from usual. It carried a cargo much more valuable than gold.