• • •
She marked the days off in her mind. When they woke the morning of the nineteenth day out, it was sprinkling and Arabella Sours was gone. She had somehow managed in the night to untie her wrist from the wheel spoke. Her rag doll was gone, too.
Mary Bee said it was impossible, the girl hadn’t taken a step by herself since she was first carried to the wagon.
Briggs said it was probably a damn waste of time but he’d look for her. He told Mary Bee to feed the women, load the wagon, and leave the mules unpicketed to graze. He saddled his hammerhead horse and rode in a wide circle till he found the girl’s bootprints. These he followed away south.
The grass was wet, her prints deep. Rather than making a beeline, she had wandered around in the dark like a child, which she was, the little bitch, wasting his time, holding up the wagon. Even so, she could cover ground. He was by his guess a good two miles from the wagon when her prints stopped and bunched and were replaced by hoofprints, which turned straight south. Somebody had offered her a ride. She was up on a horse with somebody. Another mile and he made them out ahead through the sprinkle. He kept going and caught up, and they stopped and turned toward him.
The horse was a black-and-white calico gelding showing some rib. The man in the saddle was thirty or so and short, with a mane of oily hair, and wore a buckskin shirt and thigh-high Mexican boots. Behind him, one arm around him, the other holding her doll, was Arabella Sours.
“Morning,” said Briggs.
“Mornin’,” said the man.
“Where you from, friend?” Briggs asked.
“Off a freight train down south a bit.”
“Big one?”
“You bet. Thirty wagons, six yoke. Two weeks out of Falls City, headin’ for Salt Lake.”
“You a whacker?”
“That’s right. Huntin’ meat. You seen any? We eat one hell of a lot of meat.”
Briggs nodded. The freighter had a rifle in a scabbard. As he spoke, he eased open the front of his cowcoat. “Well,” he said, “I’m out looking for this young lady. She’s lost.”
“She ain’t now,” said the freighter.
“Well, let me tell you,” said Briggs. “I’ve got a frame wagon back there. Three weeks out of Loup on the way to the river. I’m carrying four crazy women. Taking them to Ioway to a church so’s they can go home, back east. This young lady’s one of ’em. Her name’s Sours. She’s married and had three little kids. They all took sick and died of the diphtheria in short order, and she lost her mind. She ran away from us last night. I’m her friend.”
“So’m I,” said the freighter. “Say, she’ll have a passel of friends I get ’er back to the train.”
Briggs frowned. “You wouldn’t want her. Not the way she is.”
The freighter grinned. “She can spread ’er legs, we ain’t particular.” He thumbed backward. “Whyn’t we leave it to her?” He turned his head slightly to address his passenger. “See here, you sweet thing—who’d you ruther go with, him or me?”
Arabella Sours rested her chin on his shoulder and stared over it at Briggs.
“There you be,” said the freighter. “She cottons to me already.”
Briggs regarded him soberly. He had a cast in one eye, which gave him a look of evil, but Briggs had no animus toward the man. On the contrary, he admired freighters. Many the train he and his dragoons had escorted west from Fort Kearney, riding in awe of what a bullwhacker could accomplish with a Wilson wagon and three tons of freight and six yoke of oxen and a fifteen-foot whip with a buckskin cracker. This one, now he had the girl, would be a hard cat to skin. To convince him to do what’s right and proper, Briggs thought, I might even have to kill the son of a bitch. With an elbow he eased open still further the front of his coat.
“Friend,” he said, “I’m taking her home.”
“Not likely. She’s mine now. Possession nine points of the law.”
“Sorry,” said Briggs. “I’ll just have to have her.”
With one scoop of his arm, down and up, the freighter had his rifle out of its scabbard and pointed at Briggs. Then his good eye narrowed, the reason being that Briggs had materialized a Navy Colt’s out of thin air and cocked it and pointed it at him. They recognized a standoff.
“Goddlemighty,” said the freighter.
Both men thought it over.
“Fight you for ’er,” offered the freighter. “Best man takes the prize—how’s that?”
“I’m agreeable,” said Briggs.
“All right, I say pitch and we pitch these guns—how’s that?”
“Anytime.”
“Pitch.”
Each man swung his arm, but neither let go of his weapon, with the result that rifle and revolver ended up in their original positions, pointed.
“Goddlemighty,” said the freighter.
“Say it again,” said Briggs.
“Pitch!”
Both men tossed guns this time. Briggs swung off his roan and was starting to free himself of his cowcoat when the freighter, unwilling to wait, vaulted out of the saddle and with a shout hurled himself at Briggs like a cannonball and bore him to the ground. It was rough-and-tumble fighting. They rolled around in rain and wet grass like a dog and a badger in a barrel. They cursed and spit blood and whistled air. They tried to bite ears, gouge eyes, crack skulls, break bones, knock teeth out of jaws, and knee stones. At one point Briggs rammed two fingers of one hand so far up the freighter’s nostrils that the man’s eyeballs bulged. But he was a bullwhacker, he had more muscle than Briggs, especially in his right arm, his whip arm. He had ten years on him, too, and Briggs was bothered by his coat, and in the end these told. Briggs’s heart banged like the bass drum in a dragoon band. On top of him, the freighter finally got a chokehold on Briggs’s neck, tight and tighter, and Briggs could not draw breath and was going limp and unconscious when suddenly there was a world-ending detonation, very like gunpowder going off in a dugout, and his neck was released and he sucked air and something warm and sticky flooded one side of his face. He opened an eye, only to look directly into another eye. It was sightless. Briggs lay under a dead man. He pushed the buckskin off and away from him and hauled himself up on an elbow.
What was on his face was brains. The whacker’s head had exploded.
Arabella Sours stood over them, Colt’s in one hand, doll in the other. She had put muzzle to the freighter’s temple, pulled trigger, and blown half of his face and head away, a good deal of it onto Briggs.
He sat up and flipped the bone and slop from his physiognomy and cleaned it with a coatsleeve. He struggled to his feet, dizzied, heaved a breath or two, moved to the girl, held out his hand, and she gave him the repeater. He stowed it under his belt and made an effort to smile at her. With her youth and flaxen hair and heart-shaped face, she was quite a looker.
“Missus Sours,” he said, “I am very much obliged. I thank you.”
“Goodbye,” she said.
He went through the freighter’s clothing, finding nothing of value except a double-edged bowie knife with a spear point. It was a wonder he, Briggs, hadn’t got it in his gizzard. He hung the knife in its sheath on his own belt. Then he mounted the girl up on the calico, which seemed to be a reasonable animal, took her reins, and started off trailing horse and girl but stopped beside the freighter.
“You dumb son of a bitch,” he said to the corpse. “I told you she was crazy.”
Halfway to the wagon he could have kicked himself. He had forgotten the freighter’s rifle, pitched into the grass. So be it.
To see as far over the prairie as possible, Cuddy stood on the wagon seat, shading her eyes against the morning sun. As far as he could see, she had failed to feed the women or load the wagon. When they came up she ran to Arabella Sours, helped her dismount, then flung her arms around the girl as though she were her own flesh and bl
ood.
“Thank God, thank God,” she said, and then to Briggs, “Did you have to take an eternity?”
He was dismounting. “Cuddy,” he said, “you’ve lost a horse. Here’s another one.”
She let go of the runaway and gave the black-and-white gelding a quick look-over. She made a face. “Where did you get this one?”
“Man let us have him.”
“I don’t believe you. Why?”
“He was dead. Missus Sours shot him.”
“I don’t believe you.”
• • •
“What can be done?”
“Why, put in new.”
Several nails had sprung from the sideboards of the wagon box. With hammer and nails Briggs had brought from her place, he replaced them, the work of a few minutes. She would never have thought to bring hammer and nails.
“What can we do?”
“Bind it and hope.”
This was another day, and he’d found a small crack in the night shaft of the wagon. If the shaft broke, they had no means of making a new. With the bowie knife he’d acquired, Briggs cut a long strip of the buffalo hide he’d taken from the Winnebago burial scaffold and bound the shaft as tightly as he could. She might have thought to try that. On the other hand, she might not. But then, she would not have had the buffalo hide.
“What happens if it comes off?”
“Wheel breaks up.”
“Mercy.”
“We need a blacksmith.”
“You can fix it.”
Briggs scowled at her. This was still another day, and the iron tire on the left rear wheel of the wagon had loosened. If it came off, and the wooden wheel disintegrated, they were helpless, high and dry. Buster Shaver would have wedged the tire or heated it red-hot and let it cool to a snug fit, but Briggs lacked a forge and tools. For the next hour he drove very slowly, sparing the tire and listening to it ring over stones, going out of his way to drive down into every draw.
“What’re we looking for?”
“Water.”
At length he located a stream wide and deep enough. When the wagon was unloaded and the women out, with the mules he backed it into the water so that a good portion of the rear wheels was underwater.
“What’ll that do?”
“Wood’s dried and shrunk away from the tire. Soak those fellows good and they’ll swell and we’ll have us a tight fit again.”
During the night he waked her, and she put a shoulder to the wagon with him until they pushed it far enough into the stream to soak another section of the wheel. She was sleepy and surly.
“This is ridiculous.”
“Ride or walk.”
In the morning, when the wagon was on dry land and they headed out again, tire and wheel fit perfectly, without a wobble. Briggs hummed “Money Musk” on the seat beside her, but Mary Bee was darned if she would thank or congratulate him. She might not have brought hammer and nails, she conceded that, and probably couldn’t have repaired the cracked shaft, but a tire, tightened to fit by whatever means, was scarcely one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
They edged into the eastern half of the Territory. The lay of the land was the same, flat as a tabletop for the most part, with now and again a ridge or a draw or wooded river bottom. Sod houses were more frequent, even a few log cabins, and fields that had been cultivated, and Briggs complained of the effort required to avoid them. Hunting was spotty, there was less game, and having used up the pork and potatoes, Mary Bee relied increasingly on the sacked provisions, the cornmeal and beans, which made for a monotonous diet. Then, for three days in a row, they headed into a careening wind of such force that the wagon swayed and Mary Bee believed she might be blown from the seat. It scoured the skin. It dried eyes. It blocked nostrils with dust. It made ears ache. It howled under the wagon at night and robbed sleep of rest. After three days the whole party was exhausted—save the mules. They set an example. Briggs said he was getting fifteen to twenty miles a day out of them, wind or no wind. They were troopers.
There were signs of travel, too, along their route now, boxes and farm implements and pieces of prized furniture left behind by emigrants to lighten their loads, and signs of tragedy as well. They passed several graves one day, weather-worn mounds of earth with handmade headboards or crosses. In the late afternoon they rolled within ten feet of another, but here the mound had been torn open. Mary Bee, who had the reins, stopped the wagon and asked Briggs why.
“Indians. For the clothes.”
She handed him the reins and climbed down and went to see more closely. Bones were scattered about the grave, small bones. She asked Briggs why.
“Wolves.”
She shuddered, and spied a headboard facedown in the grass. She turned it over and read the chiseled inscription:
CISSY HAHN 11 YRS 2 MOS 9 DAYS
GOD LOVED HER AND TOOK HER UNTO HIM
Mary Bee felt her eyes fill. Eleven years old. A fifth-grader? She picked up the headboard, took it to the wagon, showed the inscription to Briggs, and then, remembering, read it aloud. “Give me the shovel, please.”
“Why?”
“I want to tidy up this grave.”
He sat like a bump on a log.
“The shovel, please.”
“Getting late.”
“I don’t care.”
“Suit yourself. I’m going on. You’ll have to ride the gelding.”
He would not lift a finger. He let her haul down her saddle from the wagon top and cinch it on and tie the freighter’s horse to a bush before he rose and got the shovel from the seat compartment and handed it to her. No sooner done than he clucked to the mules and away they went, leaving her just as he had the afternoon she visited the emigrant train.
To tidy up the grave turned out to be a much longer and more arduous job than she had expected. She toiled in twilight, digging down into it until she struck something and what seemed an unholy stench sickened her. She collected the scattered bones and placed them in the earth and dug extra shovelsful of thawed ground from around the grave with which to rebuild the mound, higher and wider, invulnerable to animals. After smoothing it she set the headboard and hammered it into an end of the mound with the flat of the shovel, then stood for a minute in silence, sweating and saying a prayer for the soul of Cissy Hahn. When she opened her eyes it was dark.
The calico was snuffy. When she untied him, he backed off and stamped a two-step, describing a circle, tossing his head and tugging her around with him by the reins. She dropped the shovel and held on with both hands. Finally, after a last whuff and a sashay left, he stood, eyeing her with suspicion, and she came close and talked into his ear, softly, saying she would call him “Shaver” and they’d be friends because they both needed a friend. He attended her, but when she eased into the saddle he dashed off in a fast trot in what she was sure was the wrong direction, and not until she had almost bent the bit in his mouth did he have the courtesy to stop. She stood in the stirrups. The moonlight was meager. She couldn’t find a fire anywhere. He should have started a fire for her. As it sank in how alone she was, even her horse a stranger, and how lost, truly lost, she began to go void. Darkness was in her, a darkness deeper than the night, and she felt ice forming. She shivered, then with a shake of the reins wheeled the horse and set him trotting in the opposite direction. She gave him his head a mile one way, then a mile another, she wore out her eyes for a pinpoint of light somewhere, anywhere, on the prairie. Her self was solid fear, it blocked her breathing, her mind trotted this way and that in panic, and finally she threw away the reins and set the animal under her free to wander the world west of the Missouri. Whether she saw the groundstar first or Shaver did was immaterial. All at once they were speeding to light and into light and she was tumbling off the horse aware only of a man and women seated by a fire as she stumbled, sobbing for breath, up a step into
the wagon box and closed the doors behind her. There, sealed, safe, she struggled for breath with sounds that were like wails. The ice in her melted, streaming down her cheeks in the form of tears. After listening to her cry long enough, Briggs got up and approached a wagon window.
“What about supper?”
“Why didn’t—you light a fire for—me?”
“I did.”
He waited till she cried another quart. “Where’s the shovel?”
That brought her up short.
“You’re trying to—drive me—crazy, too!”
She was having one of her spells. Nothing he could do except not let her rile him. “Cuddy, the hell I am,” he said. “I’m trying to move a load to the river. As quick as I can. And draw that three hundred. That’s all there is, there ain’t no more.”
He walked back to the fire. He’d skin out in the early morning and get the damn shovel. He’d never come across such a flighty damn female as this one. Of course, she was an old maid, which accounted for the majority of it, and what she probably needed, to settle her down, was a good man and a good bedding and some brats. Still, he couldn’t shake what she’d said: that he was trying to drive her crazy, too. No such a thing. He didn’t have to. She was driving herself, and doing a first-rate job of it. Fits and tears and wheezes, snapping at him one time, the women another, till you wanted to take a stick to her. Briggs was hungry. Supper was going to be late if ever. He climbed up on the wagon, opened his bedroll, got out his jug, and had a snort. He could hear her boo-hooing in the box under him. As far as he was concerned, she could cry till the cows came home.
• • •
Hedda Petzke was taken sick just before a sunrise, shaking with cold and calling out. Mary Bee covered her with her own blankets and sat up with her till light and time to start the fire. When she could return to her, the poor woman was burning up with fever. It must be the ague, Mary Bee decided, because these were the symptoms, intermittent chills and fever, and she had along none of the proper specifics—Dr. Easterly’s Ague Killer or Dr. Christie’s Ague Balsam, both widely used and praised. Nor had she quinine or mustard for poultices or Jamaica Ginger for tea, the standard home remedies. She asked Briggs if they might stay the day there, or until Mrs. Petzke turned for the better, but he said no, they weren’t lollygagging around over somebody sick, she’d get well or she wouldn’t, so beds were rolled, wagon loaded, trailing horses tied, mules hitched, and off they rattled, Hedda Petzke on blankets on the floor of the wagon between the benches, Mary Bee in with her and the other women, using a wet rag in a bucket for cold compresses on her patient’s forehead.
The Homesman Page 15