There were six wagons with families and couples. Travis thought the people taking along small children foolish as sin, for the way was long and dangerous, but you couldn’t stop people when they got the look of gold in their eyes. There were four Rangers coming along without wagons, carrying rolled tarps and riding their own horses the same as Travis. The lawmen should have provided security, except for the fact they were old, every one of them fifty or older, and too worn out to chase banditos any longer. They wanted gold to keep them warm in their old age, but Travis wondered if they’d even survive the trip.
And then there was Maisy, the gypsy, and he and Rose. They would no doubt pick up other wagons going west as they traveled across Texas. The more who joined the better all their chances.
Except for the old Rangers and mountain man, Travis suspected no one else knew much about surviving in the wild. He didn’t know how many of men could handle a weapon.
After Maisy left and supper was over, Travis kicked sand over the campfire. He turned, suddenly nervous, and said, “Well, time for bed if we’re to get up early to leave.”
“You go in first,” she said, indicating the tent.
He shrugged and pulled his suspenders down over his arms before crawling inside. He wasn’t going to jump on her, if that’s what had her worried. But it was going to be blame uncomfortable to lie in the dark with her so nearby. Well, he’d turn on his side and face the wall, that’s what he’d do. He’d never taken a woman didn’t want to be taken. He’d not start now with his pretty little Mrs. Caldwell.
* * *
Rose hugged her arms around her body as she stood staring into the dark. She could smell the sea even at this distance from the shore. Galveston was a rough town with rutted streets and board sidewalks along the storefronts, but it was a beautiful place all the same. The island was overrun with vibrant orange and yellow lantana, tall green palms, wild morning glories with blooms as wide as a man’s hand, and fragrant oleander. The night was balmy with only a hint of damp chill from the ocean. All around fires were being doused or covered over as families settled in for the long night in their wagons and tents. Children whimpered, a baby cried softly, and murmurs were lost on the breeze.
She had to go inside soon. Would Travis try to bother her? She’d scratch out his eyes!
She smiled to herself at her own sudden vehemence. She knew nothing about the love act so it scared her, but she didn’t really think Travis Caldwell would approach her anyway. They weren’t married and even if they were, it would have been a sham, they wouldn’t have been real man and wife. She was not about to save her reputation publicly and then ruin it privately. He’d keep his distance or he’d be sorry.
Then a warmer feeling invaded her and she smiled into the dark thinking what a good and brave thing he had done to rescue her from the burned cabin. She thought about how he’d brought water on the trail for her to bathe, how he offered her the best piece of jerky or salt pork. And the nicest thing he had done was buy the gingham dress she wore. It had been wrapped in tissue paper. He thrust it out before him with a large smile plastered on his face. He was a good man, vowing to see her safe with her aunt and uncle, using his own money to supply them and even going along with her plan of a pretend marriage. She was a lucky girl to have fallen into his hands. She would make certain she found a way to repay him. She considered her Uncle Douglas a well-off man, if not wealthy. He would certainly pay Travis back anything he had to spend on her.
She was an extremely lucky Mrs. Caldwell.
She giggled a little before finally sobering and making for the tent. Her life was not over as she had first thought. She missed her parents terribly and could not think of the raid or the fire without falling into a sad state. But they would want her to be resilient and make her way in the world. They would be proud of what she was doing. She could almost hear her mother’s voice whispering, “Go to your family, my daughter. Go where there’s safety and make a life for yourself.”
She lifted the flap of the tent and went to her knees to crawl inside. There were barely inches of height so she went to her belly and scooted onto the folded blanket he had spread on the ground. His back was to her, with his face to the wall and that made Rose relax further. She snuggled beneath her own blanket and curled into a ball for warmth, careful not to let her knees touch his back. Closing her eyes she dreamed of California, a land of gold and plenty, of family and home, of milk and of honey.
CHAPTER FIVE
Broken Bear killed a white boy just because he could.
It was the middle of the night and a sound brought Broken Bear straight up from sleep and into a sitting position. He had his knife out and in his hand in a wink. As his vision adjusted to the darkness he saw the source of the noise. It was a boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, a great shock of long hair falling over his forehead. He was stumbling in the darkness near Broken Bear’s camp. He smelled strong of spirits and reeked of sweat and offal. He was a nasty boy and drunk. He never should have wandered this far from the group of whites settled around the shore for the night. He must have come to do his bowel function and to vomit, for that is what scents wafted from him, causing Broken Bear’s nose to wrinkle in disgust.
Broken Bear came to his knees and crept through the grass. He was on the boy in seconds, knocking him to the ground and burying the blade in his back. The boy let out a stunned grunt and then a huff of air as if his lungs were compressed. He lay still.
Broken Bear sat on the boy’s back, knees to each side of him, and swiftly withdrew the knife. He sat like that for some time, his face raised to the moon and stars overhead.
This boy deserved death. He was too stupid to live. Even here near the ferry crossing he should have known better than to wander far from camp alone and weaponless. A panther could have taken him down, or a rattler could have struck him. Drink had made the boy incautious, had robbed him of good sense.
Broken Bear hated hard liquor almost as much as he hated the white man. The fiery liquid had felled many of his own people, causing them to flee their tribes as outcasts and run to the white men’s cities to be their slaves. It was just one more evil the invader had brought with him. If he couldn’t decimate the nations with guns and disease, he could trade them liquor to steal their minds and souls until the nations were too weak to do anything other than surrender.
The body beneath Broken Bear’s thighs cooled. He would have to be buried in a shallow grave so the settlers couldn’t find him so easily. It might be days before Travis and the Red Hair came back from the island.
Leaping from the dead boy, Broken Bear began to haul the body deeper into the brush and away from the camp. It would take him the rest of the night to scratch out a grave with his knife and to obliterate the boy’s tracks. By morning no one would ever know he had come this way. It would be as if the evildoer had never existed.
* * *
The ferry lunged and rolled through the waves as it crossed from Galveston Island to Bolivar Peninsula. The entire wagon train was aboard and the cacophony of horses whinnying, goats bawling, and excited people chattering was nearly deafening.
Travis saw that Rose stayed close to his side. He secretly worried the ship would flounder from the weight of wagons and horseflesh, and they would be thrown into the wave-tossed bay, but he didn’t say this to Rose. She stood with her face pointed in the direction of the wind, her dress pressed against the outline of her legs. She seemed to be seeing past the bay, the far shore, and the long grassland of Bolivar. He wondered if she were dreaming of California. He shook his head slightly. If she had any fault at all it was an optimism that must spring eternal. Orphaned and alone, without even a horse, she would have died had he not come upon her at the ruined cabin. Yet she seemed to grasp any small fortunate event as if it portended a happy future. Was it just because she trusted in him so completely to get her to where she was going? Or was she innately fixed with a surety of good luck, no matter the odds?
She wore the pants today, but
no one seemed to think it strange, as only admiring glances found their way to the girl. If any of the men ever discovered they weren’t really man and wife, Rose would be quite vulnerable. He put his arm around her shoulder as he thought a husband might do, and sent a warning glance to his side where two of the old Rangers had been eyeing Rose. They immediately turned their glances aside.
“Have you ever been outside Texas?” Rose asked. She didn’t seem to mind his arm on her shoulder.
“Nope. Well, not very far west anyway. I’ve been north and east.”
“Maisey said this morning she had heard reports back from gold miners who had returned with bags of gold, enough to build whole cities, or buy whole territories.
She’s going to start an entertainment parlor in Sacramento with her gold find. She tells fortunes, you know.”
“I doubt that’s true. About how much miners brought back.” Travis was a skeptic. Until he had hard proof in his hands, he rarely believed anything. Cowboys, homesteaders, and trappers were easy liars, some of them so good at it they believed their own lies.
“Why would Maisey lie?”
“Not that she’d lie exactly, but maybe the stories she heard might have been exaggerated.”
“What would you do with bags of gold?” Rose asked.
Buy you a mansion on a hill, he thought, surprised at how instantly that idea came to him. He was falling hard. Blame if he wasn’t. He said, “Oh, I don’t know. Set up a trading store? No…I don’t know a thing about trading. I guess I don’t know what I’d do if it got rich.”
She nodded, accepting his confusion.
“What would you buy?” He asked.
She replied quickly. “A great huge farm. Cattle to graze it and a big farmhouse to live in. Fences all around, even to the very edges so I wouldn’t worry about the herd wandering off. A pair of black horses and a stable to keep them.”
Typical, he thought. Her parents were trying to set up a home and scratch out a farm from the surrounding woods. A big farm was as far as her dreams could reach.
“Maybe you’ll get it,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “They say the land out there is awful rich and pretty.”
The ferry docked hard, causing Rose to stumble and Travis to hold her even tighter to his chest. She blushed and pushed away.
Once the crowd dispersed to shore, Captain Allen, the wagon master, climbed onto a barrel and spoke to them. He called out their names and told them how to line up their wagons and to follow his lead. He admonished the greener travelers among them to stay in position and not lag back or hold up the train. He mentioned Indians, especially the murdering Apache, but emphasized other dangers. Getting lost was paramount on that list. “We won’t come back looking for you,” he yelled. “A damn fool that can’t keep up is gonna be left behind.”
He warned them of snakes, alligators, bears, poison berries, bad water, ruts, mountains, storms, river crossings, and wildcat. Travis knew about these things, but he saw a couple of young men with families and wagons shift on their feet and glance at their wives nervously. It seemed to Travis they really had no business taking this awesome trek. They were risking not only their own lives for the wild rumor of gold, but the lives of their families too.
By afternoon they had covered fifteen miles and the sea was far behind them. The March sun beat down mercilessly and there was not even a breeze to cool them. It was almost April and soon the summer would be upon them.
Much of the time Rose rode while Travis walked. He had used some of his fur money to buy a second horse, but he knew he’d be doing a lot of walking on this trip. It kept him in shape and when he tired he rode. Difficult walking was no real hardship.
They camped and by twilight had made fires and were cooking dinners. Once Travis glanced up from his own fire where he stirred a pot of beans and looked out over the flat land covered with brush and thick forest. Soon they would hit central Texas where the trees petered out and a forbidding, hot landscape awaited.
But the forest wasn’t what had drawn Travis’ attention. He thought he’d detected a movement from the corner of his eye. He felt the muscles in his back tighten.
“Watch this pot,” he told Rose. “I’ll be back.”
He took up his rifle and strode toward the shadows of the trees. There he paused, just at the edge of the tree line, peering into the tangled undergrowth. Nothing could be in there that was human. It was thick and full of briars. Maybe it had been an animal, a big cat sniffing after their meals cooking on the fires.
After a few more seconds, Travis returned to the camp and sat with Rose. But he kept the rifle across his knees and his back to the wagon train so he could watch the dark and forbidding forest.
* * *
Broken Bear stopped breathing when Travis rose from his fire and came toward the trees. Briars were embedded in Broken Bear’s arms and legs. Little trickles of blood slipped down his skin, feeling like the crawling of spiders. He hoped the trapper couldn’t smell his blood. There was but a small amount of it, but a good enough brave could have detected the new copper scent.
Evidently Travis was not as good as a good brave for he stayed only a few seconds before turning and leaving again. Broken Bear breathed out. He was in a fury. He had no idea the trapper would take Red Hair and join a white caravan. It made them both much harder to attack. They now had the protection of others, many white men with weapons stronger than the bow and arrow.
He had hoped they would come back from the island, so when he’d seen them on the ferry in the distance, recognizing the girl with the bright red hair, he was elated. But once on shore they joined a group of people who had wagons and supply horses. A short ugly white man stood over them, talking rapidly and gesturing with his hands. It was obvious the trapper and Red Hair had joined the group and they were going on a long journey.
It made Broken Bear so angry once the group halted at dark, he crawled through the briars despite their toothy fire raking his skin. He watched the Red Hair go about setting up camp, making fire, and preparing food. The thought of a cooked meal made Broken Bear’s stomach rumble and that made him angrier. He still had to find game, kill it, and eat it raw since he was too close to the caravan to risk a fire. He was scratched, hungry, and now the object of his desire had more than one man to watch over her. He should have risked a one-on-one fight with the trapper before they ever got to the shore. His mistake made his anger boil, for anger against himself was the hottest of all.
Though mesmerized at the sight of the girl moving around the fire, firelight sparkling off her red hair, he slowly crawled backwards through the tunnel of briars into freedom. He could only see the glow from their fires now, though he could not see his prize.
He went into a steady lope through the forest, his spear at the ready in search of small game. His footfalls on the forest floor were as silent as his anger, since anger only hampered a hunter in search of prey. He felt nothing now but the hunger riding his stomach, as if it filled the world. It was a giant maw he must fill.
Minutes later he crouched over his kill, a small rabbit doe. He skinned it swiftly and expertly. He cut a chunk of meat from the thick, putty-colored chest and tucked it into his mouth to chew. He thought not of the bloody wild taste or the cold stringiness of the meat, but only of strength, endurance, and how sustenance would take him onward in his quest. It was not the first, nor would it be the last, raw meat he must eat. It was not nearly so bad as starvation.
CHAPTER SIX
The days it took to cross Texas were merely a taste of how difficult the trip would be. Travis held up well, of course, as he had crossed the territory more than once and knew the obstacles. The other members of the wagon train, except for the master and the Rangers, were already complaining. The sun was too hot. The days were too long. The lack of water to be found was worrisome. Shade was nonexistent and relief was nowhere to be found. Everywhere they looked the vista was monochrome in tan and ecru. Dry bluffs, dry wallows, and a dusty trail became the sam
e monotonous view day after day. Cacti and sagebrush dotted the landscape. Once they’d passed the sparsely treed hill country near the central part of the territory, it was as if they had been dropped onto an alien planet.
Rose did not comment on the hardships. He saw that she kept her lips tightly closed and her eyes squinted against the sun. She walked alongside him less now, riding the horse and slumping in the saddle throughout the empty hours. She was too exhausted and hot to hold a conversation. Despite this, Travis thought her a real trooper. Some of the other women had taken to the bunks inside the wagons, covering their faces with wet cloth. The gypsy Maisey drove her own team of horses that pulled a small wood-paneled wagon with painted sides in red and blue. Out of the entire wagon train, her wagon was the one that could be easily seen from the distance like a bright flaming star dancing on the wavy horizon.
To supplement their diet Travis caught a prairie hen one day and skinned two rattlers another. He surreptitiously skinned the snakes away from the camp, hacking off chunks of the fresh meat. If Rose knew what kind of meat she was eating with such relish he expected she might have refused it. But they had to vary their diet when they could. Salt pork and beans could only sustain their strength for so long.
Together with some of the other men a hunting trip was taken one afternoon after making camp. It was a good hunt providing the company with two wild antelope. That night a man got out a fiddle and an impromptu dance was held. Rose even joined in, color in her cheeks from the succulent meat she’d eaten. She had taken to wearing the boy’s pants with one of his shirts in order to save her nice gingham dress. On this night of celebration, however, she washed off down in a narrow draw near the camp, asking Travis to wait for her. When she came over the slope in her dress with the firelight reflecting from her red hair, Travis was held in awe. He stood with his big hands dangling at his sides, his mouth slightly open. She was a beautiful girl, there was no doubt about it. She was so young and fresh-faced. Her bodice was deliciously filled out and her waist narrow enough he thought he could circle it with his hands.
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