Searching for Silverheels

by Jeannie Mobley

  I found the dining car two cars forward from ours. I took my time getting the soda pop and making my way back to our closed compartment. When I got back, the explosion had occurred. I could hear the shouting from the aisle, and I was glad that Russell had paid the extra for a compartment. Josie would have been impossible in a regular seat, surrounded by strangers.

  “I don’t care!” she was screaming as I approached the closed compartment. “I still say you had no right!”

  “And you have no sense!” Russell countered. “And there’s no way I was going to sit by and let you get yourself thrown into jail when there was something I could do about it. So I did it. You ought to thank me!”

  “Thank you? Thank you for undermining all my hard work? Thank you for treating me like a child? Like a possession? What exactly am I supposed to thank you for?”

  “For loving you for twenty years no matter how stubborn and selfish you can be sometimes,” Russell said. “Lord knows why I do!”

  “You don’t own me, Russell McDonald! And don’t think a sappy speech like that will get you back in my good graces, either. It’s over between us!”

  “I figured it would be. I knew I ran that risk when I made my deal with the judge. But I couldn’t let you go to jail, Jo. Not when there was something I could do—even if it meant losing you.”

  “You had no right!” Josie said again, but she wasn’t shouting now. Good thing, too, since folks on either side of our compartment were sticking their heads out into the hall to see what was going on.

  “I didn’t ask for your help, and I certainly didn’t need it! I had the situation under control—I had them by the throat.”

  “Someday, Josie, I hope you’ll come to realize that everybody needs help at some time or other, and there ain’t nothing wrong with accepting it when that time comes.”

  I felt foolish standing in the hallway with three bottles of Coca-Cola and all those people staring, so I slid open the compartment door. I nearly collided with Russell coming out.

  “Sorry, Pearl,” he said. He took the bottle I held out to him without looking at it. “I’ll be in the dining car if you need me. Or if you just need to be somewhere else too.” With that, he squeezed out past me and I was alone with Josie. She plopped down on the seat and glared out the window. I sat down in the seat opposite her and looked out as well. Anyone glancing in on us at that moment would have thought the flatland farms around Denver were the most interesting things in the world from the way the two of us were studying them. I was the one who eventually broke the silence.

  “I think I’ve found the truth about Silverheels,” I said. “I think I can finally prove it.”

  Josie looked at me, then back out the window. “Planning to take that victory away too, are you?”

  “I just think there’s more to the story. A lot more that needs telling.” She said nothing, so I continued. “Sefa was deeply hurt by Silverheels leaving, but more than that, she was hurt by the miners who gave Silverheels all the credit and none to her. She was tired and heartsick and alone, and little more than a child herself. What they did was wrong, but she was too miserable to say so.

  “Still, she didn’t give up hope. She hoped for her mother and little brothers to return, and she hoped for a good man of the town to notice her and love her for all she had done.

  “So, refusing to let despair overtake her, the brave Sefa joined the miners who searched the mountains for the missing dancer. But she was caught by the cruel weather and the toes on her left foot froze and had to be cut off. She recovered from the injury, but her broken heart would not heal. And when winter turned to spring and spring to summer, and her mother did not return to Buckskin Joe, she began to listen to the cruel rumors folks were whispering. That a no-good Indian wife wasn’t the type to come back. That Sefa was unwanted, unloved, and unlovable. And then and there, Sefa vowed she’d never love again, or let anyone love her. Am I getting this right?”

  Josie glanced at me, then turned back to the window. “I thought you said you wanted to tell Silverheels’s story. I don’t know why you’re so interested in Sefa.”

  “I want to know what happened to her. I know she stayed on for a time, probably working Eli Weldon’s claim. I doubt she would have accepted charity from the townsfolk, so she must have had some way to make a living.”

  “I don’t see as it matters—the story was over by then, already making its way into that sappy legend you feed the tourists.”

  “It matters to me,” I said. I took out the photo and handed it to Josie. She took it reluctantly and looked down at it. Her expression was unreadable, but she looked for a long time.

  “So she stayed in Buckskin Joe until she was grown up,” I said. “She worked as the schoolmarm when the teacher left and they couldn’t get another. But then she left Buckskin Joe and Park County altogether.”

  “Did Mr. Lee tell you that?”

  “Eliza Carlisle did,” I said. “Mae Nelson gave us the picture.”

  A little smile pulled at the corner of Josie’s mouth. “Eliza was one of the few pupils who ever paid much attention to her teacher.”

  “Except she called you Josephine Weldon. But you told me you’d never married.”

  “I never did.”

  “Then how did you get the name Gilbert?”

  “Gilbert has always been my name, from my real father, the French fur-trader who gambled away my mother and me in a card game,” she said. She pronounced it Geel-bear, and now I could see it was French, though I had never thought about it. “I never knew him, but my mother liked the name, so she remembered it. She said the bear was strong medicine.”

  “Why do you think she didn’t come back?” I asked.

  “She was dead. She only made it as far as Fairplay before the smallpox caught up to her. Indians have no immunity to it, you know. She died before anyone knew who she was or where she’d come from. The townsfolk shipped her boys off to the Indian School in Pennsylvania. I don’t know what became of them.”

  “Oh, Josie, I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged. “It was a long time ago. They are all gone now, even Sefa. All just lost in the legend.”

  “Please tell me. I want to know.”

  Josie looked back out the window. “Sefa taught the school, read the teacher’s old books, gained a taste for knowledge. She discovered that learning, not just beauty, could get you what you needed. So, she scraped together her savings and the last little bit of gold she could squeeze from Eli’s claim and left Colorado. Went back east and applied to the new Wellesley College for Women in Massachusetts. Graduated top of her class, but still, being an ugly old boot, and not quite white, she found no work. The good jobs were all reserved for men, and the secretarial positions were given to the pretty girls.”

  “But the women’s suffrage movement saved her?” I guessed. “Took her in, gave her a job and a cause to believe in?”

  “You’re a smart girl, Pearl, and pretty enough. You could go far if you’d just get your head out of those silly daydreams and start standing up for yourself. If you weren’t always hiding behind your polite ‘yes, ma’ams’ and ‘no, ma’ams’ and daydreaming about romantic cockamamie like Silverheels.”

  We sat a moment in silence before I spoke. “I’ve ended things with George Crawford,” I said. “And while I was standing up for you, I sort of knocked him down.”

  Josie’s eyes darted away from the window to my face at that, and I might have seen a trace of a smile on her lips. “Did you, now?”

  “But I don’t think the story is cockamamie,” I said.

  Josie snorted and turned back to the window. “Just when I thought you were showing some backbone. Even now that you know I was there, and you’ve heard the story from my own lips, you still prefer to believe in your pretty little Silverheels?”

  “It’s something else Mrs. Carlisle said, something about her daughters. Jealousy blinds a girl, she said. Both her daughters think the other had it better. They can’t both
be right, can they? I think Sefa was jealous of Silverheels and couldn’t see the truth.”

  “Silverheels took everything I had when she left town! When she killed Buck!” Even all these years later her words were sharp with bitterness and anger.

  “You don’t know that she killed him—you weren’t there. And you were just a kid. Buck Wilson was a grown man. I can’t see that he was ever yours, except in daydreams. I don’t blame you for seeing Silverheels as a thief, but I think in the end, you robbed yourself by deciding to never love again, or to let anyone love you.”

  “Love!” Josie spat out the word as if it tasted bad. “Women in love throw their lives away for men—look at that fool sister of Frank’s. I suppose you think she’s a romantic heroine too. Love is what makes us the weaker sex.”

  “No! You’re wrong!” I said, surprising myself with my sudden anger and certainty. “Don’t you see? Love makes our sex strong! Not the love men give us, but the other way around. Our ability to love others.” Josie rolled her eyes, but I continued. “It was love that made my mother strong enough to face down that drunk with nothing but a spoon, and love that gave her the strength to feed all those soldiers. It’s love gets her up at four o’clock in the morning to fix the food that brings together our whole town, no matter how tired she is. It’s the love of all these mothers and wives and sisters that keeps the country strong while the men are away fighting the war.”

  She sneered and opened her mouth. I cut her off.

  “And if you were really so strong, Josie Gilbert, you’d be brave enough to let Russell love you! You’re just a big coward when it comes to love. You’re not strong enough to face it!”

  There was an icy silence after that in which she glared at me, and I realized how badly I was behaving, talking to my elder like this. I took a long, deep breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  “Your mother is a good woman, and a strong one, and I’ll say nothing against her. But I’ll thank you to keep your pert little nose out of my business, Perline Rose Barnell,” Josie said.

  With that, we both went back to staring out the window in silence. After a long while Russell came back with sandwiches, and sometime after that we all slept. No more than a dozen words passed between us the rest of the trip.

  The next morning we rolled into Como at last. Russell and I headed straight for the Silverheels Café to let everyone know we were home. Josie stormed off to her newspaper office, without a word to anyone.

  CHAPTER 29

  I dreaded stepping into the café. I hadn’t thought about the Crawfords’ threat while I was in Denver, but now that I was home, I feared that I would find the café shut down, or worse yet, taken over by the Crawfords. Stepping through the door, everything was as usual, except Willie was serving the customers in my place, and sloshing coffee everywhere as he did. I rushed through to the kitchen to see Mother.

  She was getting pies into the oven, but stopped to welcome me home with a hug.

  “What’s happened while I was away? Has there been an investigation?” I asked.

  Mother laughed. “All is well, Pearl, but it’s too much to tell now. Let’s just say I don’t think the Crawfords have as many friends as they used to. After lunch, I want to hear all about your trip!”

  I went to my room to change my clothes and clean up, then I served the customers off the noon train. By the time the train pulled away again, word had spread that we were back, and about half the town gathered to hear what had happened in Denver. Of course, I was more interested in hearing what had happened in Como, so I told only what I had to—that Josie had only had to pay a fine, and that Frank sent his greetings. Beyond that, there was little I wanted to make public. My feelings for Frank and Russell’s for Josie seemed best left unspoken.

  When I had finished my tale, I asked again about the investigation. At once, my question was greeted by laughter and cheerful expressions all around.

  “Oh, there’s an investigation, all right,” Orv said. “The governor sent the county sheriff up from Fairplay to find out why that busybody Mrs. Crawford insisted on writing him daily.”

  “What did the sheriff do?” I asked.

  “He no sooner got off his horse than Mrs. Crawford accosted him in the street and demanded that he shut down the café and the butcher shop. Seems she had done some reading and found out the government can seize the property of traitors, and that other folks can buy that property from the government.”

  “Oh no! They aren’t going to seize the café are they?”

  “You have nothing to worry about,” Mrs. Engel said kindly. “When folks heard that the sheriff was here to take the café from your mother, the whole town showed up to protest. There’s not a one of us here who hasn’t felt Maggie’s kindness, and we weren’t going to let anything happen to her. When we started explaining everything to the sheriff, it started coming out what we had all put toward the Liberty Bonds. Phoebe Crawford would have been better off not calling in the sheriff.”

  Several people in the café laughed, and most everybody looked pleased.

  “Turns out, we’d all been turning in money toward our pledges, but the Crawfords had been putting most of it toward their own pledges, in their names,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

  “So it looked like they were the only ones giving?” I asked.

  “And so they would be the ones to collect the dividends once the war is over,” Mrs. Engel said.

  “Which is fraud and theft,” Orv finished. He leaned back in his chair, a satisfied grin on his face. “So you see, Pearl, there will be an investigation. But I don’t think you or your mother need to worry.”

  “Mrs. Crawford will be the county’s guest down in Fairplay for a spell, until they get it cleared up, I reckon. And Mr. Crawford and George have gone down there too. I’m sorry you didn’t get to say good-bye to George, Pearl. I hope you won’t be too lonely without him,” Harry said.

  I laughed with relief, but Mother hushed me, reminding me of the golden rule. She said if the Crawfords repaid the money or put it toward the bonds in the correct names, no real harm was done, and that we should hope it could be cleared up without them being ruined themselves. I nodded, but secretly I hoped it would take a good long while to settle things, at least long enough to keep George out of Como for the rest of the summer.

  Willie hung back on the edge of the crowd, looking nervous. After most folks had gone home, he asked if I wanted to walk down to the creek with him, and I agreed. I could see he had something on his mind and needed space to tell me. When we were alone, he finally spoke.

  “Imogene stopped by the café yesterday.”

  “What did she want?”

  He fidgeted for a moment. “She came to tell me she didn’t think things would work out for us. Her and me.”

  “Oh, Willie,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “She’s a nice kid and all, but I’d rather go fishing. But the thing is, Pearl . . .” He paused again, kicking at the stones on the edge of the creek.

  “What?”

  “George Crawford asked her to the barn dance down in Fairplay, and she’s accepted.”

  He finally ventured a glance up at my face to see how I would take this news. I stared at him for a long moment before I burst out laughing. His eyebrows popped up.

  “You mean, you’re not heartbroke? I know he’s the handsomest fellow in the county.”

  “Handsome isn’t enough for me,” I said. “If it’s enough for Imogene, she’s welcome to him.”

  Willie nodded, then got a knowing grin on his face. “Because of Frank, right?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. “I like Frank,” I admitted. “But Denver’s awfully far away.”

  “But you can write him. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, folks say.”

  I didn’t know if that was true. Love somehow seemed a lot more complicated than I had ever before imagined it. Or maybe it was people who were more complicated. I intended to keep up the
correspondence with Frank and just see where it took me.

  Willie flopped down beside the creek and tossed a pebble into the water. “Would you want to leave here, Pearl? Would you want to be a city girl some place like Denver now that you’ve seen it?”

  I shrugged. If I had learned one thing in my search for Silverheels, it was that none of us could say where life would take us. Why, Josie had even gone to college, all the way out in Massachusetts! There seemed to be a whole range of possibilities I had never thought of before. The world was an open book—and no mere dime novel or penny dreadful, either. I was ready for whatever was in its pages.

  Willie leaned back and looked up at the sky. “I don’t ever want to leave here, where we can go camping and fishing anytime. We’ve got it nice and easy here,” he said.

  I just smiled and hoped that would always be true for him.

  * * *

  I couldn’t wait to write to Frank and tell him all that had happened in Como. I tried to tell him how much his kiss had meant to me too, but that part wasn’t so easy to put into words. Frank wrote back right away, sweet letters full of news and telling me how much he missed me. I savored every letter over and over, and hoped he’d come back to Como. He had wanted to come for a job cutting hay in August, but that was not to be.

  Though Robert’s battalion had not yet been in battle, there had been an accident in the boiler room of his ship. He was badly burned, and word was he had lost a leg in the explosion. Robert was due to be shipped back home within a month, and Frank would stay in Denver to help Annie. She would have her hands full with the invalid for some time.

  “I think Annie has had second thoughts about her marriage since the incident in Como,” Frank wrote, “but this seems to give her a new resolve to work everything out. That’s the thing about Annie. She never gives up hope, so I know she’ll get Robert through this, no matter how bad it is. But, oh, Pearl! I wish it were different for her!”