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 takin’ 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 against 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 wea
ring 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 Crossings 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 extries. 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.
“Maybe we should stake out Neely’s place. If they did leave something else, they’ll come back for it again.”
“Somethin’ else,” Ethan commented. “That outfit ain’t one to live out in the country. Trotter could do it, fair to middlin’, although he’s no woodsman when it comes to that, but not Finnerly. I think they’ve got themselves a place. Maybe over to South Pass City, maybe one of the other settlements around.”
Yet, if they were living elsewhere, what could be done? They had stalked me and tried to kill me. I knew what Colly Benson thought of that. Find them, call them out, shoot them. He had even offered to help. For that matter Drake Morrell felt much the same way. I knew that if I dropped a word to Stacy he would hunt them down and shoot them like so many varmints. Stacy Follett was nothing if not a realist. You had an enemy, you killed him before he killed you.
Yet I was not one to borrow trouble, and it was likely they had other things in mind, although knowing them I doubted if they would leave the country without one more try for the gold…which must be there.
Ruth had set up her trading post with a long counter and a wall of shelves. There was a potbellied stove, several chairs, and benches. The room was pleasantly warm when I went in from the living quarters and began studying the shelves for what I might want on our ride north.
Long ago I’d discovered half the things a man might think of taking are never used. We had to go prepared for snow, for we were headed to high country, and the season was early. I bought some new socks and a pair of boots more suitable for hiking than those I usually wore and found a fine pair of elk-hide moccasins that would fit. These Ruth had in trade from some Indian, Shoshone, by the look of them.
I browsed around alone, picking out the various items I would need, then trimming the list from those I thought I’d need to those I knew I’d need. Yet, was it only that? Or was I savoring these last moments in a place I had helped build and in which I had spent so many happy hours? Ruth Macken was important to me.
Not in any romantic sense, and not simply for the books she had loaned me or the casual way she had guided me in many of the social graces. Ruth Macken may never have given a thought to instructing me, but she had set a standard of womanhood against which every woman I later was to know would be unconsciously measured. She was quietly beautiful, moving with an easy grace and confidence. She was tolerant, understanding, and intelligent, a good listener ready with apt comment; she understood my shyness and my eagerness to learn and overlooked my occasional clumsiness.
She had style, but for that matter, so did Drake Morrell. He had a dash, a flair, that made every boy in his school wish to be like him and every girl to be worthy of his attention.
The children who studied with him were of the country, of the backwoods, perhaps, but no one who knew them in the years that followed would have believed it. He gave them pride of bearing and appearance as well as a love for knowledge…I shall not say “scholarship,” for that is often a different thing.
Soon I would be leaving this place, but as I idled there in the empty trading post, listening to the murmur of voices from the next room, I knew how fortunate I’d been to have known these people. To know Ruth Macken, John Sampson, Drake Morrell, and Cain.
Yes, and Webb.
He had prospered less than the rest of us, yet he had worked hard. Whatever else might be said of him, he possessed a quality of loyalty to comrade and principle given to very few. Whenever in the future my own stand would be put to the test, I
knew I would think of Webb. Often I wondered if he knew fear; I know he had no doubt when the chips were down. He revealed nothing of himself, but I knew wherever I went in the future I would be conscious of Webb at my shoulder and would be stronger for it.
Several boxes of shells, a new ground sheet small enough to handle easily, a couple of wool shirts.
Ruth came in. “Are you finding what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful, Bendigo. An Indian woman was in, she is here often and is very friendly, and she warned me the Blackfeet would be riding the war trail in the spring.”
“I know. Some other tribes as well, I expect, but we won’t be long.”
“I wish I could go with you. How many white men have seen the Wheel?”
“Not more than a dozen and probably only half that many. Ed Rose spent time in the Big Horn Basin as early as 1807, and there’s a rumor the Spanish sent an expedition as far north as the Yellowstone many years ago. Whether they were east or west of the Big Horns, I don’t know. The land didn’t have many names then, and a man has to guess where they actually were. But there are old diggings all over the country.
“We only have written history to go by, and there was so much that went unwritten…most of it, probably. So far as we know it was well over a hundred years after de Soto saw the Mississippi until it was seen by another white man.”
I stopped, my hands resting on the canteen I’d been checking. We would have small use for such a thing, for there was water everywhere…still, I was a cautious man.
“I want to go there, Mrs. Macken. I want to visit the Medicine Wheel…not just to see it. I’ve had it described and know about what it is and what it looks like, but what I want is to be there, to stand there…not for a minute or two, but to see the sun rise, the sunset, and the moon over it.
“I am tantalized by this country…there’s so much we don’t know. On the wagon train there was a man who lived in Ohio who told us about a great mound there, built by men. Maybe it was built by those we call Indians and maybe by somebody who came before them. I’ve heard of such mounds far to the south in Mississippi, and now I hear of this Wheel.”
Bendigo Shafter (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 33