I opened Mrs. Macken’s letter first, for she was the one who would tell me most about our town and the people in it, and I was hungry to know. It seemed I had been away for such a long, long time.
Dear Mr. Shafter:
You will wish to know what has happened, or is about to happen, but first let me say there is no sickness here. That all is well I would hesitate to say. Since you left there has been a great change, and not all of it for the better.
Neely Stuart has done well with his mining. I believe he exaggerates what he takes from his claim, but it is considerable. He has hired both Ollie Trotter and that Pappin man to work for him on his claim, and that gives him more time to stir trouble.
Moses Finnerly has taken to preaching. John was holding services in the school building so Neely built Finnerly a church of his own, which the Stuarts, the Crofts, and several new families attend. I gather he devotes most of his time to preaching against. Against Mormons, Indians, John Sampson, our school, Drake Morrell, and often veiled references to your brother or myself.
Ninon will tell you what she wishes in her letter, but she is discontented. Since you left she has been unhappy, continually wishing you were back, and fearing you will marry somebody while gone. She has been used to a more exciting life than we can offer here, and I know she yearns for the theater.
Moses Finnerly has several times stopped her and tried to get her to come to his church, to sing in his choir. He wants her to be a soloist. I am not sure his motives are what one would expect of a minister of the gospel, but our Ninon is not one to be misled. She is young, but much too wise in the way of the world to be fooled by anyone as clumsy as the Reverend.
Mr. Stuart has evidently been paying Pappin and Trotter very well, for both men spend more than any honest workman should. Mr. Webb still attends our church, and has taken a profound dislike to “that gospel shouter” and his cohorts.
We still do not have a marshal, although Mr. Trotter considers himself such. Mr. Stuart appointed him guard at the mine, and Trotter has taken to wearing a badge. Two weeks ago a stranger in town suddenly untied one of Mr. Webb’s horses and started to ride away. Webb came to the door and shouted at him to come back and when he kept going, Mr. Webb shot him. I saw it, and it was a very good shot. It was with a Dragoon Colt and the man was at least one hundred yards off. The man fell, hit the dirt and started to rise, and Mr. Webb shot him again.
Ollie Trotter was in the saloon (oh, yes, we have one of those!), and he stepped to the door with a gun in his hand and demanded who had shot, and Mr. Webb turned on him and said he had, and what did he propose to do about it?
Mr. Trotter looked down the street at the horse thief, then at Mr. Webb, and went back inside the saloon.
The saloon was opened by a huge man who calls himself Dad Jenn. I suspect that part of the money came from Mr. Stuart from the way Jenn defers to him and to no one else. There are several toughs hanging about there much of the time.
My store is open, and I have done well. On the day it opened a dozen Mormons appeared and bought supplies. The freighting is done by a young Irishman named Filleen who has a livery stable. At last count we had sixty-two people in our town and four business establishments. Bud is working for Mr. Filleen and conducts the store for him when Mr. Filleen is out of town, freighting.
There was a little more, but that was the gist of it, and I wondered at how much had happened in the short time since I had been gone. The other letters I saved until later.
We moved on to Meacham’s Blue Mountain Tavern, nooned there, where I mailed a brief reply to Mrs. Macken and a note to Cain. We drove on into the Blue Mountains with the Wallowas a purple haze off to the east. After crossing the divide we turned over into a mountain meadow and bedded down. The next day we drove to Brown Town and bedded down southeast of town. I needed more help—the old man wasn’t going to stand up to this night work, and there was also the question of supplies. We’d managed to keep eating, all right, shooting an occasional deer, elk, or big horn, but we needed coffee.
Leaving the Indians with the stock I took a packhorse and rode over to Brown Town.
A few years before, maybe two or three, a man named Ben Brown had come back up the country to establish a home on a bench above the Umatilla River. Later he opened a store in his house as Ruth Macken had done in a like situation. A couple of other places had sprung up nearby.
“Howdy,” Brown said as I came through the door. “Seen your cattle. Where you headed?”
“South Pass, and I need another hand. Close up your store and come along.”
Brown chuckled. “Now that’s an idea. Fact is, I’d like to. Always wanted to prowl around in them Wind Rivers. The mountains, I mean. Afraid I can’t help you thataway.”
He took the list of supplies I’d made out and glanced over it. “Well, I can’t come up with most of this stuff.” He indicated my herd. “See you got a couple of Injuns along.”
“Umatillas. The old man is Uruwishi. I hear he used to be a big man among them.”
“He still is.” Brown looked at me thoughtfully. “That Injun was a big warrior in his time and a great wanderer and hunter. How’d you get him to ride along with you?”
“His grandson is with me, too. He’s sung his deathsong, and says this is his last ride.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it. That old coot can ride forever and outlast most of the young bucks in his tribe. Get him to telling stories, sometime. He knows ’em.”
He filled my order while I stood there, smelling the good smells of freshly ground coffee, of canvas, new leather, dry goods, and the like. I ate a couple of crackers from the cracker barrel and cut myself a slice of cheese from the big cheese he had on the counter.
This man had a nice little business going for him and I did not blame him for not wanting to pull out. I’d said it just in idle talk, anyway, but looking around me made me think of my own future. By the time this ride was over I should have worked out some sort of a plan for myself. From what Ruth Macken had said our town was growing, and I wasn’t altogether sure I’d like what I’d find.
“Got some paper? I’ll take the time to write a letter.”
Brown shoved a box across the table at me. “Help yourself. The ink’s there. Only got a quill pen…make them ourselves. Hard to replace others, this far out.”
So I sat down there on a stool by the counter and wrote out a letter to Cain. I told him a lot of things, but nothing about the shootings. That I hoped would be forgotten, and that the story would never get to them at South Pass.
We have one hundred and twenty-two head of young stuff, I told Cain, and they are coming on fine. By the look of things we will have several calves before we get to South Pass. The grass has been fair so far, and old Uruwishi says he knows the good meadows along the way.
We have had good weather, but clouds are building, and it looks like rain.
The way it looks now we will drive down Baker Valley, cross the Snake above the mouth of the Boise, go up Indian Creek to its head, across Camas Prairie, then across Wood River, and on across the Lava Beds near the sinks of Lost River. We will cross the Snake again near Eagle Rock, then take the Lander Cutoff through the mountains.
All of this planning may have to be thrown out the window if grass is not there or if conditions change the situation.
Brown told me the country ahead was in good shape. “Union’s the next place you’ll reach…it’s an easy drive, and there’s good grass. Better drive on past before you bed ’em down, though, so’s you won’t have trouble. They’re good folks but they take notions against people comin’ along and eatin’ up all their grass.”
We started them up in the morning when the dew was fresh on the grass, and the trail we took was traveled, for it was the way of the rolling wagons. This was the way they had come, those people bound for Oregon, this was their trail. The ruts they cut in the grass were there and the names they carved on the trees. The graves they left at the trail side were ther
e, too, to mark the ones who did not finish the journey to the promised land.
Like them we had traveled on, stopping short of where we had planned to go, and suddenly when we topped out on the rise above the Grande Ronde, a wide bowl-like valley in the mountains, I knew this was the land where we had intended to come, to such a place as this. Yet we moved our cattle on, two calves to follow now.
We rolled down to the town of Union, scarcely begun yet, and bedded our cattle down beyond the fences that marked the land of Conrad Miller, the first settler there.
He came out to greet us, and to try to trade for our calves, but we would have none of it, for troublesome as they might be upon the trail, they would be the beginning of something at our destination.
At each place we stopped I asked for books. I was given some, and I bought some, and I traded for others. “You’re luckier than you know,” one trader said to me, “and you’re getting better books than you will five or ten years from now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Travel will be easier. People traveling west will not have to consider each ounce of weight. Now they only bring the best, the ones that can be read over and over with profit, so the books you trade for are the good ones. Later the trash will come.”
“I’d find something to learn in any of it,” I said, “for even a man who writes trash has to think, to select, to try to write as well as he can.”
“Maybe.” The man was doubtful.
“I am an ignorant man,” I said, and there was no modesty in me when I said it, for it was simply the truth. “The little I have learned only shows me how very much there is to learn.”
“You won’t read much tonight,” he said, “even with four new books in your duffel. Unless I’m mistaken that storm has caught up with us.”
Oh, he was right! Far righter than he knew, for the clouds moved on and hung low and the rain pelted down, and the cattle got up, their horns glistening in the lightning flashes, and we were busy to hold them. Thunder rumbled in the hills nearby, and the trees bent before the wind, leaves lashing under the whipping of rain and wind.
There was no rest that night, for we rode round and round. Old Uruwishi did his bit, and we held them there on the grass until the storm had gone. Then we returned to our beds, to find them soaked and wet, but we crawled in anyway and slept.
Short Bull turned me out a few hours later. “There’s men coming,” he said, “maybe they make trouble.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked out to meet them.
They pulled up, a half dozen hard cases if ever I saw them. The first one was a big man with wide, sloping shoulders and a shock of blond, long uncut hair. He had small, cruel eyes, and I knew him for a tough, dangerous man.
“You drivin’ this herd?” He spoke roughly.
Now the night before had been long. I was tired. I had slept all night in my clothes, I hadn’t had a shave, a wash, or coffee, and I was feeling it. Normally I am, I think, a cautious man, but there was no caution in me now.
“I am.”
“We’ve come to cut them,” he said, “you’ve pulled in some local brands.”
“What’s your brand?”
“That makes no difference. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“There are one hundred and twenty-four head here,” I said, “counting the two day-old calves. I started out of the Landing with one hundred and twenty-two head. There isn’t a brand in there but mine.”
“We’ll just have a look.”
“Like hell you will.”
He turned his eyes on me like he hadn’t seen me before, and he looked carefully.
“You’re asking for trouble,” he said.
“I’m ready for trouble, mister. I was born ready for trouble. I started from the Landing with this herd and we left three dead men on Washington grass, and a fourth who’ll carry the mark of that shooting his life long.
“Now I am in no mood for trifling. If you want to cut this herd you’re going to ride right over me to do it, so deal your hand and pick up your cards.”
They did not like it. They had thought to find some farmer or small rancher whom they could frighten into stealing half his cattle. I knew what they were and what they intended, and this morning I didn’t care. I was feeling mean and ornery as an old mossyhorn steer, and I’d called their hand.
Suddenly from back in the brush somebody jacked a shell into a Winchester, and they all heard the sound and knew what it meant. Somebody else was there, somebody they could not see but who could see them. It was no longer robbing some quiet farmer, some married man with responsibilities; it meant getting somebody killed for a few head of cattle.
“You walk a wide trail, stranger,” the big blond man said, “one day I’ll call your hand.”
“Do it now,” I said. “I’m here, you’re here.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. “I’ll wait until there’s nobody lyin’ up in the brush, ready to stretch my hide.”
“I don’t give a damn what you do, start shooting or start riding.”
He turned his horse. “All right,” he said, and then asked, “who’d you shoot up north?”
“We nailed three of them out of four,” I said, not bragging but hoping he’d accept the lesson and keep away. “And Norm Shelde won’t be shooting with that hand any more.”
“Shelde?” He looked thoughtful then. “I know a man who rode with him. Bud Sallero.”
“You knew him,” I said. “He cashed in his chips.”
The blond man looked me over again. “Maybe I’ll have to pay more attention,” he said. “Sallero was tough.”
“He wouldn’t make a pimple on a tough man’s neck,” I replied shortly.
They rode off then, walking their horses to show how they didn’t care. They’d simply pulled in their horns for the time being and were letting me know they’d come back.
I walked back to camp. I could see Short Bull with the cattle. Uruwishi was still in his blankets, unaware anything had happened.
Then who was that in the brush?
Suddenly there was a dry chuckle behind me. “Think you’re kinda salty, don’t you, kid?”
I knew that voice!
Turning sharply around I found myself staring at a man in dirty buckskins.
It was Stacy Follett.
He chuckled. “Growin’ some bark, ain’t you? You faced up to those renegades like you was three or four men.”
“I was in no mood for trouble.”
He chuckled. “I reckon.” He looked toward the campfire. “You got you some coffee?”
We walked over to the fire, and he dug a cup out of his possibles. I filled it, then my own. “You’ve a long road behind you,” I said. And then I looked at him over my cup. “Did you kill Drake Morrell?”
He chuckled again. “Decided agin it.” He sipped his coffee. “You know somethin’? After he started that there schoolteachin’ I figured I had him dead to rights. I laid out for him, waitin’ until he was out of school, and when he come out the door, I shaped up with my old Betsy girl here”—he slapped his rifle—“right on his belly. I had him where he couldn’t move. There was youngsters all around him, and he stood there lookin’ at me and never turned a hair. He had sand, that Morrell.”
“Had?”
“Has. He’s still around. You want to know what happened? I nigh got myself kilt. Five or six of them youngsters, weren’t but two of them upwards of twelve or thirteen, they outs with their six-shooters and had me covered.
“They told me he was their teacher and he was a mighty good one and if I shot him they’d fill my hide.”
He chuckled again. “An’ you know somethin’? They’d of done it, too.”
“What happened?”
“Nothin’. I pulled down my flag. Pulled her down right quick. I never seen so many youngsters with six-shooters.”
“That’s wild country. Some of them ride to school. A boy in that country needs a gun.”
“Well, they still got �
�em. I backed off and told him I was pullin’ out, he was too good a man to shoot.
“And here I am,” he added.
Chapter 25
HE SQUATTED ON his heels, sipping coffee. “Mighty good,” he said, at last. “I was plumb out of coffee an’ I set store by it.
“Meat’s no problem as long as I got the old shooter here”—he put a hand on the Spencer—“but grub ain’t grub without coffee.”
“We can let you have some,” I offered, “but why not ride along? I need an extra hand, and I’ll pay you.”
He made no reply, finally looking up at me. “What you plan to do with all them cows?”
“We’re building a town, and the game will move back into the Wind Rivers. We’ll need milk for the youngsters and beef for all of us. Besides, we’ve got to grow. We’ve got to make something of ourselves.”
“I don’t see that.” He waved a hand. “Lots of country. Move into it, live with it. A body don’t need no more. There’s grub out there for the takin’.”
“Except for coffee,” I said.
He grinned at me. “There’s ephedra tea, and there’s bidable beans that a body can use. Still,” he agreed, “it ain’t coffee. That N’Orleans coffee now, with chicory…that there’s coffee!”
He refilled his cup. “Been a passel o’ folks through this here country, an’ some of them ain’t made it all the way.”
“I’ve seen some graves.”
“Ain’t all been found. Nor buried.” He paused a moment. “You folks stack up purty good.” He chuckled suddenly. “I liked them boys back yonder, the ones who pulled iron on me to save Morrell’s hide.
“Sand…that’s what they had. Those boys will do to ride the river with. Youngsters with the bark on ’em. I favor any boy what’ll stand for his teacher, and they sure enough backed me down.
“You can reason with a man, mostly. You might skeer him some, but there wasn’t no skeer in those youngsters.”
He sipped more coffee. “Tell you something. There’s a valley over yonder”—he waved a hand eastward toward the mountains—“where there’s fifty, sixty head of cattle.”
Novel 1978 - Bendigo Shafter (v5.0) Page 18