It was warm.
Lying there in my bed I could hear water dripping from the eaves. I went down the ladder to the window. Cain was sitting on the edge of the bed, listening. “What is it, Cain?”
“Sounds like rain, but it can’t be. Not at this time of the year.”
We opened the door and looked out. Water was dripping from the eaves, and where the night before there had been a solid field of snow there were now large patches of black where the snow was no longer. A warm wind touched our faces, and the snow was vanishing as if by magic.
“It’s what Ethan told us about,” Cain said, “it’s a chinook.”
By daylight there was little snow left, and the road to the falls was black with mud. The air felt wonderful, and I bathed my face and upper body in a tin washbasin outside the door.
For a few days we had fine weather and Cain and I turned to working on the tub mill we planned to build, marking out the ground and beginning the foundation. Croft had gone hunting with Neely Stuart, and all was quiet in the town.
We worked steadily, hauling rocks and building them into a wall, with smaller rocks for a chimney. Cain worked without effort, the largest boulder seeming nothing to him.
“You were with Morrell when he bought blankets?” he asked suddenly.
Straightening to get the kink out of my back I said, “He bought clothing as well. I think he means to stay.”
Cain was silent. After a while he took his pipe from his pocket and lighted it. “We can use another man. He’s an educated man, you say?”
“Yes.”
“He will be a companion then to Mrs. Macken. I do not doubt she has wished for somebody with education.”
Surprised, I glanced at him. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. They had nothing to say to each other.”
“Give them time. No doubt she misses educated talk. I heard her husband talk a few times, and he was a man of parts, very bright, and a fine speaker. Whatever he spoke had meaning.” And then he added, “I never had a gift for words.”
“What you say is to the point, and that’s important.”
He returned to work, but the conversation puzzled me. There had been a note of wistfulness, almost of uncertainty in his voice. He was always so calm, so sure. I think he made fewer false moves than any man I ever knew.
He had always seemed so complete a man that I never thought of him feeling any lack in himself, yet now I knew he did. The lack of education disturbed him, made him less sure. And there was something else there, too. Something that I could not, at the moment, put a finger to.
After a bit we left our work on the mill and went over to the places chosen and paced off the spots for a schoolhouse and a church. As we gathered tools at the day’s end, Cain said to me, “We are invited to Ruth Macken’s tonight. There’s to be a performance.”
“A what?”
“The little girl you brought to us. It seems she is an actress, as well. She is going to recite and sing.”
“An actress? Her?”
“They begin very young, sometimes. At least it will be a change.”
We walked to Cain’s cabin and he put down the tools under the overhang of the shed. “I hope Mrs. Stuart will cause no trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“She doesn’t believe in the child exhibiting herself, as she puts it, before a crowd of people. She was very outspoken.”
“It will probably do the child good,” I said. “She probably feels we have given her everything, and she has done nothing. As for Mrs. Stuart, if she doesn’t wish to come, she needn’t.”
The weather remained warm, and after chores we all walked up the hill to Mrs. Macken’s. Ethan, with Bud’s help, had placed some planks on chunks of wood to make benches where we could sit.
Neely Stuart and his wife were there, looking very prim and proper. Tom and Mary Croft were trying to look the same but not managing it as well. I don’t know what they expected or what I expected myself. Probably something like what you’d get at a church pageant or a social, or on visitor’s day at school when the children would each stand up and say a ‘piece.’
It was nothing like that.
She walked out very quickly and said, “I am Ninon Vauvert, of New Orleans and Boston, and now of your town.”
She did not seem at all a child but was perfectly poised and composed. She sang “The Old Oaken Bucket,” which was popular at the time, following it with a song from John Howard Payne’s opera, Clari…“Home, Sweet Home.”
She sang in a sweet, but a surprisingly strong, well-trained voice, and Morrell, seated beside me, whispered, “She is even better than her mother was…much better.”
She seemed nothing like the slight, shivering child I had held before me on that freezing twenty-mile ride from the Oregon Buttes.
She danced a clog, something amusing I had seen a Negro do in St. Louis, and recited a poem by a journalist of Philadelphia, who had died a few years before. His name was E.A. Poe, and the poem was called The Raven. None of us had heard it before but Morrell, who had known Poe through a mutual friend, another writer named George Lippard.
Nobody quite knew what to do when it was over, although we all applauded. Suddenly I felt very awkward toward her. Cain took her hand in his and said, “Miss, that was the most beautiful singing I ever heard!”
Mae Stuart ran to her. “Ninon, will you teach me to dance like that?”
Neely turned sharply around. “Mae! Don’t make a fool of yourself!”
When everybody had gone, Drake Morrell, Ruth Macken, Ninon, and I sat around just talking. Oddly, I had not known her name before.
She had been carried on the stage while still a baby, she played Cora’s child in Pizarro, and the child of Damon in Damon and Pythias, and from that time on had worked most of the time, playing in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Mobile, New Orleans, and San Francisco. After the closing of their show in San Francisco they had started for New York, and her mother had died in the mountains to the west of us, of pneumonia.
“You are welcome here as long as you wish to stay,” Ruth Macken told her. “We would love to have you.”
“She has family in New Orleans, Mrs. Macken,” Morrell said, “but she has no wish to go to them, and I have no wish to see her go.”
“Then don’t go,” I said bluntly, “we haven’t much, but I’ll do my share to see you have enough.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do.”
“There’s no hurry,” Ruth Macken said, “it is best to think about it and make up your mind without being hurried.”
We walked outside while Ninon got ready for bed. Standing under the stars, Morrell said, “Ninon comes of a very old and very good family, Mrs. Macken. The acting was on her father’s side of the family, but they were more than simply strolling players. One of her ancestors wrote some excellent chamber music, another was organist for a king.”
“Her family disapproved?”
“Very much so. They were aristocratic, very straitlaced, strong on tradition and all that.” He glanced at Ruth Macken. “I know exactly what she went through and how Paul Vauvert must have seemed when she met him. He was a handsome chap, a really fine musician, and an accomplished actor.
“She had always loved to sing, to dance, to perform. What she lacked in talent she more than made up for in vivacity and personality. Ninon is like her. She is like them both, with a strong touch of her grandfather, also. Ninon is intelligent, more than the usual.”
“I miss the theater,” Mrs. Macken said. “We never lived where there were more than a few companies of traveling players, but we visited Boston, New York, and Washington.”
“Ninon’s mother played in Lady of Lyons, The Duchess, and Our American Cousin. She also played both Juliet and Rosalind. Ninon knows most of the roles. She has a fantastic memory.”
We talked a little longer, of our town as well as of the eastern cities. Most of the time I listened, for there was much to learn, and I
knew nothing of such places.
After Mrs. Macken went back inside Morrell and I walked off down the hill. “You’re staying on?” I asked.
“I have been thinking of it. It is restful here.”
“We need you. I mean, there has been trouble, and we are expecting more in the spring, and if I leave, our town will need every gun it can get.”
“You’ll go alone?”
“We can’t spare anyone. Ethan Sackett knows the way, but he’s our best hunter.”
“You are better off alone.” Morrell bit the end from a cigar. “Begin to depend on no one but yourself. The fewer people whom you trust, the fewer on whom you rely, the better for you. Especially when traveling.
“If you know it is entirely up to you, you will be more careful. The greater the number of travelers, the greater the carelessness. Be wise, my friend, travel alone. You’ll ride faster and farther.”
“And when I bring the herd back?”
“Hire men as needed, get rid of them immediately if they cause you trouble, and don’t trust any of them. Most of them will be trustworthy, I have no doubt, so you will have lost nothing. Others will try to steal from you or kill you, but you will be on guard.”
We parted, and he walked on to his cabin, and I stood watching until he was within his door, thinking of what he had said. I did not entirely agree with him but his words stuck in my mind and would not leave me.
Softly, I opened the door. All within were asleep. Only the firelight played upon the simple, homely things about the room, and I felt a pang to know that soon I would be leaving all this, this place I was coming to love.
Adding fuel, I carefully banked the fire against the cold of the night and the morning’s rising.
For a moment then I sat alone beside the fire, remembering the clear, lovely tones of Ninon’s voice singing the words of “Home, Sweet Home.” I had never heard the words before, but they were to ride with me for many a mile. I knew it then.
I tiptoed in my sock feet, carrying my boots, and climbed to my bed under the eaves.
Hands clasped behind my head, I lay awake long, watching the flicker of the firelight on the roof beams until sleep came.
Drake Morrell’s telling of the love of Ninon’s parents remained in my thoughts. It was a fine thing, that. To find a girl who loved you and to go on together. Had it been that way with Ruth Macken and her husband? And what of Cain and Helen?
What of Cain and Helen?
Chapter 11
IT WAS NEELY Stuart who found gold. He found it on Rock Creek about six or eight miles from our town, and he brought the news like the Indians were coming.
Cain and I were hoisting a timber into place on the mill when we heard a horse running like mad. We put that timber down quickly, and both of us grabbed our rifles and dropped down behind the low stone wall we had already put together.
We saw Sampson break and run for his house, and John was past the years for running. Webb ducked into the door of his cabin, pushing Foss aside, and emerged with a rifle in his hand.
It was Neely, running the legs off his horse, and nothing behind him that we could see.
“Gold!” he yelled. “I found gold!”
“It’ll keep,” Cain said. “Where did you find it?”
Neely thrust out his hand dramatically, and truth to tell, there was a nugget in his palm. It was about as big as a bean, but a nice piece. Webb came over, and then Croft.
It worried me, us bunching like that, so excited though I was, I pulled off a few yards to keep a lookout. The way they were talking I could have heard them fifty yards off, and Neely was so excited he was yelling.
On Rock Creek, he was saying. He had decided to go over and run a few pans now that the ice was gone, temporarily, and he had come up with a show of color right off. The first pan netted him four or five colors and then the nugget.
Webb led out his horse and saddled up, leaving Foss to do the chores. Tom Croft went along, and I couldn’t hold off. If I could find a little gold I could buy cattle, a lot of cattle.
Yet to tell the truth I wasn’t happy at the discovery of gold, for it would bring in folks who had no desire to stay. I was young, and I wanted to hunt for gold, but I didn’t want it to happen to our town. When getting rich became the only incentive, folks didn’t care much about a place and left as soon as the chance was gone.
There were signs of mining. I left them panning and walked my horse along the creek. The first gold had been found there about 1842, and several times since men had tried mining only to be driven off by Indians.
I paused to take samples from the creek bottom, for all of us had gold pans. Young though I was and accustomed to looking on the bright side, I remembered folks who had come back to my home country full of big stories but with no gold to show for it. Standing in cold mountain streams or struggling over mountain passes from one strike to another is a quick way to get old.
The only man I personally knew who came back from the gold fields rich was one who had opened a store out there.
There would be gold hunters coming when the news got out, but I intended to be selling them beef. Whatever game there was would escape to the high country with increased hunting, but if we had cattle to sell we could get along fine.
Our town site had been well chosen, for it lay back under the Beaver Rim, free from much of the wind that blew along the levels or along the slopes of the mountains. From a high place I looked back. I’d climbed so high so quickly my friends looked no more than ants. The air was fresh and cool, so much so it was like drinking water from a spring just to breathe it.
“A good place from which to look,” I thought, but rode on toward the high, lonely places.
Yet the sun was leaning toward the west and I was an hour from my friends, nearly as much from our town. I was high on a shoulder of Limestone Mountain. I wanted to ride on, but had no blanket with me, and no food.
The shortest way home was along the rim of the mountain. Moreover, I might come upon an elk, and we were always in need of fresh meat. I turned southeast and skirted the edge of the trees, then started back.
As always I rode with caution. My senses were alive to what the wilderness could tell me; it never ceases to send out messages to those who will listen. Two hundred yards ahead of me a bird swooped in toward a bush, veered suddenly upward and away, and instantly, I swung my horse into the deeper shelter of the trees.
That bird had planned to land in the bush…what had changed its mind? Chasing an insect? Or fright at something hiding in the brush overlooking our town?
Had I been seen? I had no way of knowing. My left was sheltered by a thick growth of aspen, the right by a steep declivity on the mountain’s face. Easing myself from the saddle, I spoke warningly to my horse. The buckskin was as alert to danger as any wild thing. My rifle was in my hand, and on this day I wore moccasins.
Nothing about my horse was obvious. The buckskin and his gear faded easily into the aspen trunks and leaves. If he remained still, he would be invisible at only a few paces.
Creeping forward and lowering myself to one knee, I examined the approaches to the place from which the bird had flown. The position was well chosen, if it was occupied.
For several minutes I studied the place, seeing no sign of movement. I moved forward, hesitated in a hollow from which at some time a boulder had rolled, and almost at once moved to three low-growing trees. There I waited.
A glance at the sun told me my time was short. Soon the man I sought would be leaving his position, and might even have left already.
Then I glimpsed a game trail, a narrow, low tunnel among the leaves of brush and trunks of aspen, not three-feet high but almost that wide. I went into it, gained thirty yards or more, then worked my way along the slope.
I saw the place: a neat hollow where a split boulder offered a natural, easy view of our town. Around it were trees, some of them leaning above it, offering both shade and shelter.
Whoever had been there was gon
e. Yet the way the grass and leaves were pressed down indicated my quarry was human.
“Right cur’ous, ain’t you?”
My muscles stiffened, then slowly relaxed. The voice came from behind me, and if I turned quickly I would surely be killed.
For a moment I lay still, and then I said, “Wouldn’t you be curious?”
There was a dry chuckle. “I reckon. You’re a purty good Injun for a younker.”
Slowly, I turned around, keeping my grip on my rifle. The man who sat on the edge of the trees behind me was not disturbed. His rifle was centered on my chest, and there was no way he could miss, no way I could bring a gun to bear before a .56 caliber Spencer bullet had torn a hole in me big enough to put a fist through.
“I take it you’ve some reason for not coming down to the town,” I suggested. Gently I released my grip on the rifle. My pistol was inside my buckskin hunting shirt and thrust behind my waistband. Did he know that? Had he noticed that my hunting shirt was not the pull over kind, but laced halfway up the front?
“You make it right. Man down there I’m fixin’ to kill.”
“Well,” I said dryly, “if what they tell me about this country is true, you wait until spring and the Indians will do it for you.”
He chuckled again. “Cool one, ain’t you? Now mebbe I just better shoot you before you try somethin’.”
The fact that he had slipped up on me was irritating, and I’ll not deny I was itching to even the score. Besides, had he not said he intended to kill one of us?
“You shoot me, and everybody down there will know something is wrong. I am the only one out of the village, and you’d never get away with it. I’ve a friend down there who would track you down.”
“In that bunch of pilgrims? Ain’t one of you down there could find me on an alkali flat at high sun!”
“Ethan Sackett could.”
He gave me a sharp look from those foxy old eyes. He was a narrow, high-shouldered man, rail-thin yet wiry, and he wore a dirty buckskin hunting shirt and leggings with a bedraggled coonskin cap.
“Ethan down there? That do count. It surely do count. I never reckoned on him.”
Novel 1978 - Bendigo Shafter (v5.0) Page 10