Trail Angel

by Derek Catron

  As the wagons pulled out and headed toward Fort Laramie, Caleb stole a glance east. The sharp rays of the rising sun blinded him to what lay that way, but he didn’t need to see to know. They would come again.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Annabelle dismounted and followed Josey’s example in tying a loose tether to a picket pin so Paint could forage among the buffalo grass. Josey led her up a narrow game trail along a butte that overlooked the river, and she found the climb much easier in pants than a dress.

  After five weeks on the trail, the flat plains had given way to sandy bluffs and peaks. They rose majestically over the flatlands, though Josey told her they were but bumps in the road compared with the mountains they would see as they neared Fort Laramie and the land some people were calling Wyoming.

  The most impressive sight the previous day had been Chimney Rock, a towering spire rising from a mound of sandstone. The Colonel teased the ladies, hinting broadly that its Indian name referred to a particular part of elk anatomy. The English name seemed apt enough. To Annabelle, it resembled one of the burned-out farmhouses left by Sherman’s army, when only a brick chimney remained standing. She kept this observation to herself.

  The emigrants saw little of Josey in the days after the bandits’ attack. The Colonel explained he swept the trail behind them to ensure they weren’t followed, but Annabelle suspected that Josey needed to be away from people. She missed their rides but found the time away from him a relief. Watching him charge so heedlessly toward those riders scared her, though she wasn’t sure what frightened her more: what he had done or the risk he had taken.

  When Josey returned that afternoon with an invitation, Annabelle couldn’t resist. Reaching the heights, he led her to the south side of the butte, where she saw the river laid out before them, a wide expanse of badlands beyond that, and a breathtaking wall of sand and rock, much larger than anything they had yet seen, with a symmetry that made it look as if it had been sculpted.

  “Scotts Bluff,” he said.

  “It’s magnificent.”

  It rose several hundred feet, a fairy vision of high walls and battlements so big the juniper and pine trees that clung to the cliffs appeared as little shrubs. As she stared, Josey told the story of Hiram Scott, a fur trapper in a party of explorers who were lost and starving in the wilderness when he fell ill. Coming across tracks from another party, Scott’s companions abandoned him and were eventually saved. Some returned the next year and discovered bleached bones and a grinning skull near the bluffs.

  “They realized it must be Scott from scraps of clothing,” Josey said. “He managed more than fifty miles—some say a hundred—before he succumbed at the foot of those walls. His comrades felt so guilty they named the bluffs for him.”

  They stood silent, Annabelle breathing in the sweet pine on the breeze, counting time in the crawl of shadows stretching from the heights. “They look like the walls of an ancient fortress,” she said.

  “ ‘Three times they raced around the walls of Illium.’ ”

  “Homer?” He nodded. “How perfect. I could see you there, Hector guarding the gates.”

  Josey shook his head. “I would be Achilles.”

  She smiled, assuming he spoke from pride. “Of course, Achilles defeats Hector. But I liked Hector. He loved his wife. He loved his son and father. Achilles loves his friend Patroclus but not as much as he loves himself.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “Should it disturb me that you prefer such a man?”

  “I didn’t say I prefer him.” Josey took off his hat and wiped his face with a sleeve, exposing a funny pale line across his forehead where the hat shaded him. “Every time I read the poem, I wish for a different outcome. Hector could never win. Achilles was made for war.”

  “Hector fights for his city and home. He fights for love. Shouldn’t that make him stronger?”

  Josey replaced his hat. “It makes him weaker. Because he has so much to live for, Hector fears death.”

  “Any sensible man should.”

  “Achilles was not a sensible man.”

  Annabelle studied the man beside her. She could feel so close to Josey one moment and then see him as a stranger in the next. It’s like he’s two men. The thought reminded her of their first meeting, when she wondered if he were named for a dark angel or an angel of light. The answer is both.

  “It’s like that poem you recited,” she said, more to herself than aloud. “The best of dark and bright.”

  “That poem was about a woman.”

  “Was it?” She faced him. He had looked drained of emotion when she first saw him, and he still seemed that way at times. That didn’t mean he was without feelings, just that he hid them—or hid from them—like pulling dark curtains across a window.

  “More than a woman, a man needs both,” she said. “Hector was full of light. He didn’t have enough dark in him to kill Achilles.”

  Back in camp, Josey helped Annabelle unsaddle her pony. He was brushing down Gray when he noticed her staring. With the sun behind him, she squinted as she looked, moving so his head shielded her eyes against the brightness.

  “Do you not have to shave?” she asked.

  “I shave.”

  “Every day?”

  He moved to brush Gray’s other flank. “Not every day.” Sadness filled him as his mind drifted to another place, another woman. Josey swallowed it back.

  She came to him, extending a hand. “May I?” He held still, feeling like a horse submitting to being petted. She cupped his chin in her hand and stroked her thumb across the skin. He heard the roughness of whiskers against her finger even if she couldn’t see them. She laughed with surprise. “How long, if you didn’t shave, before we would see it?”

  “You would not like what you saw.” Josey returned to brushing the horse. Talking with Annabelle usually felt like two neighbors standing on either side of a fence. Without that barrier, he felt exposed, uncertain of his footing. He understood their time together meant more than riding lessons. But he avoided thinking on it too much, afraid that defining what was between them risked bringing it to an end, a dream that evaporates like dew with the sun’s rising.

  The flirtatious smile slipped from her face. “How many men have you killed?”

  There it is. She had to ask. “Don’t ask me that.”

  “A lot?”

  Don’t tell her. She will never look at you again the way she just did. “You don’t want to know.” It wasn’t just the number, even if he knew it. She would want to know how he felt when he pulled a trigger, what it meant to watch a man fall and know you were the cause of it; answers he could never share with her.

  Annabelle moved closer. “You can tell me, you know. I wouldn’t judge you. Not for that.” She stood so close they would touch if he leaned forward. She smelled of horse and sweat and pine. No flower had ever smelled so good to him. She looked at him expectantly. He saw himself reflected in her eyes and turned away, revolted by what he saw.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Reaching Fort Laramie meant the emigrants had traveled more than five hundred miles from Omaha. The others were giddy to view stately Laramie Peak to the west. Annabelle saw the mountains as a reminder that the second half of their journey would be more difficult. Eventually, they would reach Virginia City, and . . . then what?

  Annabelle avoided Josey after the night of their ride to Scotts Bluff. She had been certain he meant to kiss her, and then he turned away as if disgusted. She didn’t know why she should care what he chose to do after they reached Montana, yet she found herself wondering more and more. Surely, he can’t intend to wander the rest of his life?

  With no walled stockade as she had imagined, Fort Laramie looked more like a village in the wilderness than a military outpost. Around the field outside the sutler’s store stood real houses with siding painted white, even a stone church. The barracks and officers’ quarters might have passed for hotels if not for the lofty flagpole on the parade ground, where soldiers trai
ned with wheeled mountain howitzers.

  If she hadn’t known better, Annabelle would have thought Indians had the place under siege. The peace treaty had been signed at the end of June a couple of weeks earlier, and many of the Indians lingered near the fort to swap or beg from soldiers and travelers. On their way to the fort, Annabelle traded a pair of old, black, cotton dresses for new moccasins and buckskin leggings she thought ideal for riding. Her father told her she could negotiate a better deal, but she already felt like she took too much for her threadbare offerings.

  She found the Colonel enjoying a smoke in the shade of the porch that wrapped around the side of the store. She greeted him and took the chair beside his, swapping news of their activities at the fort. Annabelle’s curiosity about Josey felt like an itch that finally got the better of her, and she turned the conversation to the wayward scout. “Do you know much about Josey’s family?”

  The Colonel took out his pipe and looked at her, not bothering to hide his amusement at her question. “I’ve never met them, if that’s what you mean. Josey doesn’t talk much about them.”

  “He doesn’t talk much about anything.”

  “He’s a good listener.”

  “He told my mother he hasn’t seen his family since the war. They must think he’s dead.”The Colonel said nothing. “Doesn’t that make you sad?”

  “There are worse things.”

  Annabelle couldn’t know what the Colonel and Josey had endured, but she knew better than anyone what it was like to not know the fate of a family member.

  “My husband stopped writing to me long before I learned he’d been killed. People would tell me how hard it must be to mourn without a proper burial. I never told them the hard part was knowing I had lost him already. No widow should feel that way. No grieving mother, either, I expect.”

  Having said more than she intended, Annabelle wondered if the Colonel would abandon the conversation. He had been spending much of his time with the fort commander, discussing conditions on the trail. Instead of offering an excuse to leave, he cleared his throat. “It’s not my place to speak to another man’s motives, even a man I know as well as Josey.”

  Annabelle knew well enough when the Colonel warmed to a story, and she settled in as he told her about riding with a posse during their time in Montana. While in pursuit of a band of horse thieves, they caught a young man, almost still a boy.

  “He admitted to it, even before anyone tried to beat it out of him. After all that hard riding, more than a few looked forward to that rough brand of entertainment.”

  “Did he say why he took the horse?”

  “He wanted to go home. He was done panning for gold, I expect, and had run through whatever money he had. He just wanted to go home.”

  Annabelle shuddered to imagine the young man’s desperation. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. Neither did Josey. The other men we were with, this was their town. Their laws. They were determined to hang the boy, to set an example.”

  While the posse fixed the rope, the Colonel asked the boy if he wanted water or something to eat. He requested only pen and paper to write a letter to his father, explaining what had happened and asking his forgiveness. He finished the letter before the posse found a suitable tree.

  “I told him he had more time, but he handed over the letter and asked that it be sent to his father. ‘I’m ready,’ he said. Can you imagine?”

  Annabelle wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the rest. “You didn’t hang him, did you?”

  “It wasn’t my place to decide, I told you.” A hint of temper betrayed the rawness of the Colonel’s feelings. “I think if that boy had begged for his life, the posse would have banished him from the mining camp and he would have lived to ask for his father’s forgiveness in person.” The Colonel grunted at a new thought, breaking the tension in his voice. “I heard of one posse that banished a man so penitent they were moved to each contribute a few dollars to send him on his way. When I think of that boy now, I wish that’s what we had done.” He swallowed. “He never begged. Never asked for mercy. His expression never changed. We were all so dumbstruck it never occurred to anyone to do anything different. A minute later, he was dead.”

  “Did you see the letter?”

  The Colonel shook his head. “Never did. Those who did, well, I think we all felt bad enough. We buried him under the tree. Then we went back to camp. No one had the stomach to chase after the other men who had been with him.”

  Recalling the story began after a question about Josey, Annabelle asked, “Do you think his father found comfort in his letter?”

  “I can tell you for certain he did not.”

  “How would you know . . . ?”

  “Certain members of the posse believed it would be crueler to send the letter.”

  Annabelle sat up abruptly. “That’s terrible.”

  “Is it?” The Colonel faced her, his mustache drooping like a frown. “I won’t pretend to know that it was kinder to spare the father from the knowledge his son had become a horse thief. But that’s what Josey believed. I don’t recall all he said, but it convinced those men to leave the poor boy’s father in blissful ignorance.”

  Annabelle wanted to argue the point, but they were interrupted. A uniformed private offered an uncertain salute to the Colonel and handed over a written message from the fort’s commander. The Colonel looked more than a little grateful to break off their conversation as he stood and opened the letter, pacing as he read it. The private, a splotchy faced boy who didn’t look much older than Annabelle’s cousin Mark, stood waiting.

  Finishing the letter, the Colonel stopped in front of him. The drooping gray mustache always gave the impression of a frown, but on this occasion the rest of the Colonel’s features matched.

  “What’s wrong?” Annabelle asked.

  “We need to hurry, I’m afraid.” To the private he said, “Tell the commander I’ll be right there.” Then he turned to Annabelle. “It seems the peace treaty everyone’s talking about doesn’t mean as much as the government men from Washington have been letting on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean all these soldiers may soon find themselves at war— and if we don’t hurry, we may wind up in the middle of it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Josey led his gray pony to the river and left him to drink his fill. From his saddlebags he pulled out and unwrapped a parcel of purchases from Fort Laramie. The pants were stiff and smelled vaguely of medicine. Better that than the cowboy sweat that clung to his old clothes no matter how many times they were washed. The new flannel shirt smelled better and felt nicer, too.

  The days were still hot, but that wouldn’t last. The Powder River country they would soon enter stretched from the North Platte to the Yellowstone River, between the peaks of the Bighorns to the west and the Black Hills to the east. Even in summer, cold breezes slid down the snow-capped mountains. Within moments, a man who had been sweating in the thinnest of shirts would be grabbing for his coat.

  Josey carried the parcel toward the water, chiding himself for wondering what Annabelle might think of the shirt. He hadn’t seen much of her in the past week. He’d spent most of his time at the fort talking with soldiers about the peace treaty. Officially, the talks were declared a success. The Indians had signed, and the bureaucrats from Washington went home to bask in the success of guaranteed peace.

  From the soldiers, Josey learned that at the time the diplomats were negotiating, Colonel Henry Carrington and his regiment from the Eighteenth Infantry arrived at Fort Laramie on orders from the war department to build and fortify a trio of outposts along the Bozeman Trail between Fort Laramie and the Montana Territory.

  The inconsistency of these separate endeavors wasn’t lost on the outspoken Sioux chief Red Cloud. Following Carrington’s arrival, Red Cloud left Laramie. His final message to the peace commissioners made the rounds of the soldiers.

  “The Great White Father in W
ashington sends us presents and wants a new road through our country while at the same time the white chief goes with soldiers to steal the road before the Indian says yes or no.”

  The Indians who remained to sign the treaty were the same “Laramie Loafers” who had been living off handouts from the fort for months. It was akin to Grant accepting surrender at Appomattox from a gaggle of old men and widows while Lee rode on Washington.

  Following Red Cloud’s declaration, the Laramie commander sent word to the Colonel that he would be stopping wagon trains at the fort until they were sufficiently large to protect themselves. The Colonel persuaded him to permit their train to hurry ahead in hopes of catching a military transport that soon would leave Fort Reno, the first outpost along the trail. If the emigrants accompanied the soldiers through the disputed Powder River territory, they should have nothing to fear from Red Cloud.

  Josey saw no better alternative. Once they reached the disputed land, the emigrants would need to increase their nightly guard, and Josey planned to range farther ahead than usual to scout the safety of the route.

  Keeping busy enough to distract himself from thoughts of Annabelle seemed a good idea, but that didn’t make it simple. He had her in mind when he bought the clothes, wondering if she would like them. Josey longed to see her. Her smell filled his head when he recalled the night after their long ride. His body ached to imagine holding her. He had wanted to kiss her, but when he looked into her eyes he saw how it would end. How it must end. The big dog in the yard. She didn’t see it now because she needed him. Once she felt safe again, she wouldn’t want him around. He had survived the war but doubted he could live with that pain.

  He found a large, flat rock that provided a natural drop where the river ran deep. The snow-fed water would be cold. No sense drawing it out. It would have been a waste to put new clothes on a man who smelled more horse than human, so Josey looked around a final time to ensure he was alone, then quickly stripped and leaped in.