Bendigo Shafter (1979)

by L'amour, Louis

  Lower down and further back, our own place. Or I should say, Cain's place. The mill was ours. I had helped to build it and was a partner, and yet I had always thought of it as Cain's. He was the master here, and rightfully so. Yet the small cluster of original cabins sat well against the hill, and those built later were further down the small valley, closer to the road, the unpainted buildings weathered now and a little shabby.

  We rode up into the street, and the first person we saw was Colly Benson.

  Howdy, Ben. We missed you.

  We gripped hands. His was hard and strong. Everything's quiet, Ben. Just like you'd want it.

  Thanks, Colly.

  There's been a few people driftin' in, he said, and a few leavin'. I think more are leavin', Ben. More of the latecomers are just stoppin' by.

  See anything of Finnerly or Trotter?

  Well ... no. Only somebody took a shot at Neely awhile back, and a couple of days ago somebody tried to break into his mine. He'd rebuilt the door, set heavy timbers into the rock wall, and they made too much noise. But they got away before we could get to them.

  We rode on up the slope, Lorna, Dr. Fairchild, and I. We could hear the ring of Cain's hammer from the blacksmith shop and the whine of the saw in the mill.

  John Sampson came to the mill door and looked down the hill. We rode up to him, and a smile creased his weathered face. Time, which had used our town unkindly in some respects, had only laid a blessing upon John. His hair was as thick and white as ever, his eyes as clear and kindly, his face a little nobler. He made me think of Hawthorne's story about The Great Stone Face, and the man who came to resemble the face on the mountainside. Age, confidence, and growing knowledge and usefulness had worked a miracle with John ... or perhaps it had always been there, and we saw it only now. Yet I believe it began on the way across the plains, when for the first time men and women came to him for advice.

  We're home, John. And Lorna's brought a friend with her, Dr. Fairchild.

  How do you do, sir? Are you a medical doctor? Our town can use one. He turned his eyes to Lorna. Lorna ... you're a woman now, a beautiful woman.

  She blushed and laughed to cover it. I'm just a country girl, home from the city.

  Cain came out, then Helen, and the others. On the slope Ruth Macken was shading her eyes at us. I've some coffee, Helen said, and I've baked a cake.

  She's baked one every weekend since you left, Cain said, expecting you home.

  Webb's coming up the hill, Bendigo, Helen said. I'm afraid he's very lonely now.

  Now? What's happened?

  Foss is gone. His hand got better and he pulled out, rode east. Said he wanted to ride north with the Texas cattle. He left right after you did.

  Webb was gaunt, somber. He held out his hand. Hello, Ben. Seems like old times.

  It does. I've missed you, Webb. You know there was a time back east when I had a little difficulty with some men. I found myself looking around because when we had trouble you were always there.

  If I'd of known, I'd have been.

  Come in, Mr. Webb. We're going to set for coffee and cake.

  Well ...

  Come on. I started to put a hand on his shoulder, then stopped. Webb was not a man you touched. Always, there was that aloofness in him.

  We sat around inside and talked of things we knew, yet I felt myself a stranger here and looked across at Lorna. She looked wistful, and inquiring. I knew it was upon her, too, that strangeness of returning, for the secret is what Shakespeare said, that no traveler returns. He is always a little changed, a little different, and wistful and longing for what has been lost.

  There was the smell of the wood fire, the warmth of the room, and familiar faces. This was home. I suspected, somehow, that it was more of a home than any other place I would ever know.

  What about Ninon? Helen asked.

  I looked up at her, smiling a little, and embarrassed. She's coming out. We will meet in Denver.

  Good! She's a lovely girl, Bendigo. I'm happy for you.

  Slowly the pieces were falling into place, the picture that was my town began to assemble itself once more. I looked down at my boots and listened to their voices, talking, laughing, bantering a little, these people who had not gone away.

  The tie contract is filled, Ben. I've been cutting timbers for some mines. We've been asked to move the mill down to Rock Springs.

  Rock Springs?

  There's a town down there. Looks like it will grow. I shifted uneasily in my chair, a chair Cain had made with his hands. I looked at the puncheon floor we had hewn from logs and fitted ourselves, yet I was not thinking only of the floor or of the chair, nor was I thinking of the cabins and the mill. I was thinking of these people around me, who fitted as solidly into our picture. Here in this place I had become a man, and here John Sampson had found his stature and his place, Drake Morrell, Dad Jenn ... all of them had somehow staked their claims.

  Ruth Macken came down from the hill, holding out both hands to me. Bendigo! Why, you're handsome!

  I blushed, and she laughed at me. We sat together and talked and drank coffee. I mentioned Croft. They haven't told you? He's gone.

  I felt a queer emptiness within me. Tom? Gone?

  He had a felling out with Neely, and of course his wife had never really liked us. He sold his place, and they pulled out, headed for some place in Nevada ... Eureka, I think it is.

  Foss Webb, who had always been an outsider in a sense, but one of us still, was gone. And now Croft. Uneasily, I emptied my cup ... was this the beginning?

  Rock Springs was not for me. I knew the place ... the spring had been discovered in 1861 or about then by a pony express rider who was dodging Indians. Later, it was a stage stop, and some folks named Blair built in the neighborhood. In our country it never took much to start a town, and according to the last reports they'd found coal down there, and the railroad was interested in it as a source of fuel.

  Other towns were building along the tracks, and there was much talk of them around the fire that first evening. Others were leaving town, and I decided to buy whatever stock they did not want to take along.

  When we'd had supper I walked back up the hill with Ruth. Bud had been keeping store and he came out to meet me. He was nearly as tall as I was ... maybe I hadn't noticed before.

  We're not replacing our stock, Bendigo, Ruth said. Trade has slowed down, and we are doing much less business. I think when the stock is gone I will close up the store and move to California.

  I've known it would happen, but I hate to see it, I said slowly. I love the place.

  So do we, and we always shall.

  We talked of Ninon, of New York, of the hotels, the cafes, and the theater. I miss it, she said at last. And I want Bud to have a chance to go on to school. Drake has done well by him, and he's started the same books you read, but they'll have better schools out there, and I've done well with the store.

  Ethan was squatting by the fire when I came in. He looked up. Heard you was back. Stacy'll be around later.

  Have you seen Uruwishi, Ethan?

  Seen him? I reckon. He's waitin' for you, Ben. He talks of the long ride you're talon' with him, far up into the Big Horns. That's about the only thing he talks about except for the old days, and I expect if you hadn't told him that, he'd have died this past winter. He's livin' for that ride.

  We'll take it.

  Want some comp'ny? Me an' Stacy would like to ride along. You'll need somebody to keep the boogers off your back.

  I'd be honored.

  Mebbe you would. Ben, give it some thought. Come spring the Sioux will be out. They'll be huntin' hair, an' we'd be likely candidates for somebody's coup stick.

  Scared?

  Uh-huh, but scared never kep' me back so far. I'll be ridin' along. He looked up suddenly. It'll seem like old times, Ben, like old times.

  All right... if they don't need us here.

  The night was crisp and still. The Wind Rivers held their icy ridges agains
t the cold night sky, the stars were bright, and underfoot the remnants of the snow crunched and the frozen ridges of mud crumbled.

  There were more lights than I remembered, more houses, and they seemed scattered. In the distance the black streak of the road wound away down the valley. It was on that road I had found Drake Morrell, and down that road I had gone to find Ninon.

  A wolf howled, somewhere back up on the Beaver Rim, and I listened to the wild, lonely howl. Something within me stood still, hearing the weird and lovely sound, a sound that found strange echoes in my own being.

  If we left here would we ever find its like again? Not that this was the best of places. The growing season was too short, the winds blew too strong ... there were many better places, and yet this had been, for a brief period, ours.

  Would we ever again work together as we had here? Would we look to the mountains where there was no corruption? We had built with our hands and our hearts. We had tried to build homes, although in each of us there must have been the feeling that this was not forever.

  It is this seed we carry with us, we Americans, the feeling that this is not the end. It would be better, perhaps, if we built our homes deeply into the land, built to last, built homes not for ourselves alone but for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Yet far away and long ago, we moved.

  We moved ... we left all behind. With our courage or our foolishness or whatever it was, we moved. And there remains with us the feeling that we can move again, that there is always a better place somewhere out beyond the rim of the world.

  We are a people of the frontier, born to it, bred to it, looking always toward it. And when the frontiers of our own land are gone, when we have drawn them all into an ordered world, then we must seek other frontiers, the frontiers of the mind beyond which men have not gone, the frontiers that lie out beyond the stars, the frontiers that lie within our own selves, that hold us back from what we would do, what we would achieve.

  I had yet to find my own place in the world. I was not so fortunate as my brother Cain, who turned the iron in his hands and it became steel, a steel that yet carried with it the tenderness, the knowingness that a craftsman needs to bring beauty from the cold material. I think we must beware not to stray too far from the hands of the craftsmen, the hands that weave, the hands that sew, the hands that weld and mold, for I think whatever man makes must carry pride in its making or we have lost much, too much.

  The pride of a man who can stand back and look at what he has done, as I once had looked upon a floor, and say, Yes, it is good, it is well done. Turning from my way, I walked to the lodge of Uruwishi and spoke at the doorway, then entered. They were there, Uruwishi smoking by the fire, and Short Bull.

  The Old One waits for you, my friend.

  Uruwishi looked up and gestured to a place beside him on the buffalo robe.

  For a time he smoked in silence, and I sat beside him, watching the flames fingering the dry sticks that had once been trees, trees whose decaying roots and ashes would feed the earth where other trees would grow, other lions, other men.

  Short Bull warned me you might not come, Uruwishi said, but I told him we would ride together toward the place where the winds gather.

  We will ride.

  I am old ... old. My bones have felt many winters, and each winter they feel them more. It must be soon, my son.

  After two suns, I said, this morning there was a little green showing where there was no snow.

  It is good. When you were gone our hearts lay in the shadow. Now you are back, and we are young again. After two suns, then. We shall be ready.

  Chapter 43

  Lorna and I went up the hill to Ruth Macken's in the morning, walking with Drake Morrell. Drake looked thinner, I thought, and taller somehow. His clothes were neat, brushed carefully, and he was freshly shaved. Yet so it had ever been with Drake.

  How is the school, Drake?

  The best. I've some fine students, Ben, although I am afraid I have used your name in vain more than once. They admire you, so I've not let them forget you've never ceased from learning.

  I guess that's why I like it, Drake. A man who is in love with learning is a man who is never without a bride, for there is always more.

  I hear you're riding again?

  Yes, I'm going north with Uruwishi. I promised him, and then ... well, I've a wish to see the Medicine Wheel. We always speak of this as a new land, Drake, a young land. But sometimes when I am on the mountain, or up there under the trees, I feel something very ancient. It is an old, old land, Drake, and I think men walked these trails far, far earlier than is now believed. I think Uruwishi knows it, too. I think he wants me to feel something, to know something while there is time.

  You've probably felt it yourself, but places have an atmosphere, a feeling about them. Sometimes in the mountains I feel as if the mountains wished to share something with me.

  This was Indian land before the white man came, and now we share it with them as the Picts came to share Great Britain with the Celts, Angles, Saxons, and Danes. The Indians we know were not the first, for others walked the land before them, and still others before them.

  We hold the land only for a time, and when our time has run out others will come to live in our place.

  Buffalo roam the plains by the million, but as long as they are there no land can be farmed, no fences built, no crops planted. There can be no homes, schools, churches, or hospitals, for the buffalo demand too much and stop at no fence.

  My heart is with them, perhaps because I feel that I am one with the buffalo and the Indian, and perhaps my time to pass along will be their time. I do not know.

  Old Indians will tell you hairy elephants lived here. Their forefathers hunted them. They are gone. There were bears larger than the grizzly and cats with teeth like curving tusks. I once saw an Indian wearing such teeth, passed along from who knows what ancestor? Or found, possibly, in some cut bank or cave? All of these are gone, but we only weep for those we see passing, we blame ourselves for what was inevitable.

  Only one thing we know, that all things change. If we leave here in a few years nothing will remain. Our roofs will fall in, timbers will rot, cellars fill with dust, the grass will reclaim the land. We've scarred it, but the scars are trifles, and the earth has been scarred by the fiery hand of God. But always the grass returns, and the trees, and in a few years men will come and look about and they will see nothing, or maybe a few relics that will cause them to wonder.

  Then why build at all?

  The joy is in the building, I guess. And of course, some things last ... for a while. That is why I want to see the Wheel. It has lasted ... a thousand years? Two thousand? Ten thousand?

  Only the word can last longer. Uruwishi has songs, I think, that are older than that, and they were written on no paper, on no wall of stone, they were written only in the minds of men we call savages, and repeated, over and over.

  Ruth came to the door, her dark hair blowing a little in the wind. I have coffee on. It will seem like old times.

  Ethan was there, squatting against the wall. He already nursed a cup in his hands. He nodded briefly. She's got a gingerbread stashed away, boys. Don't let her fool you.

  He sipped his coffee. Stacy come in last night. The Sioux are making medicine.

  Well, we expected that, and if they want our hair they'll have to fight for it.

  They will. Ethan put his cup down on the floor. That ain't all. There's a Shoshone brave who's broke with his people. He's picked him up a bunch of wild Shoshones and some other bronco Indians, and they are on a warpath of their own.

  A Shoshone?

  Uh-huh. His name is Little Buffalo, and they say he's got his own blood feud with a white man.

  The same one?

  I figure so. Stacy heard tell a mighty lot about him. He's a big man now. He led a raid on a railroad work party two years ago, and wiped them out. He ambushed an army patrol, and only two men got away. He raided the stage station at Three C
rossings and drove off a dozen head of horses.

  But you saved his life, Ben! You brought him in when he was dying in the cold!

  He don't see it thataway, ma'am. He says his medicine was too strong for Ben, that Ben intended to kill him, but his medicine was just too strong.

  How many has he got with him?

  Eighteen to twenty ... I guess more or less, depending on the time and place. You know how Injuns are. They come and go. But he's made a name for himself, and them he's tied to are a bunch of wild, trouble-hunting bucks.

  The subject changed and we talked of newcomers, of the changing times, and after a moment I eased out of the conversation, and sitting back a little, let the words wash by my ears, not thinking of what was said, but just soaking in the good feeling of it, and of this place.

  I got the books you sent, Ruth said suddenly, and the papers. It seemed like old times ... in some ways.

  In some ways? I asked.

  I don't know, but somehow a lot of the things they bother about seem so unimportant out here. It seems to me that the more money one has the more one worries about little unimportant things.

  Them Indians, Ethan commented, mightn't be the only trouble that's shapin' up.

  Ollie Trotter. I picked up his sign a few days ago. I'd killed a deer and went down to skin it out and come on some tracks. Seemed like an odd place, down in a canyon thataway, so after I taken my meat, I scouted around.

  He drank a swallow of coffee and put the cup down. Found a cut bank behind a sandbar in the creek. Been three, four men camped there. Four?

  Maybe another one, too. Yep, anyway four men. The way it shaped up, the remains of fires, and the like of that, I figure they'd met there several times. There was some wood cut several weeks ago, some only a few days back. The tracks showed up to be both old and new.

  The same horses?

  Uh-huh, and like I say, a couple of extras. I couldn't make 'em out, but I know four men camped there and I think five.

  Finnerly, Trotter, Pappin, and who? Who else? That needed some thinking about, for there were a lot of strangers in our town and in the settlements close by.