‘It’s neither,’ Nephi said with a trace of disappointment. ‘It’s an army man.’
‘No doubt he’ll be able to tell us where to camp,’ Lucy Marriot said, and to Polly’s astonishment, Lydia Lyman said musingly:
‘I always think a man looks well in uniform.’
The one approaching them certainly did. Despite the snow his knee-high boots gleamed, his trousers tucked into them with none of the untidiness of Jared’s buck-skins. His dark blue jacket, lavishly embellished with gold braid, fitted perfectly across broad shoulders and he rode his black stallion with insolent ease.
‘Welcome!’ Nephi Spencer called out, reining-in his team as the horseman approached.
There was no sign of welcome on the dark, almost savage features of the rider as the horse wheeled in a flurry of snow.
‘Where the devil do you think you’re going?’ he snapped at Brother Spencer.
‘To Richardson Point,’ Brother Spencer said genially, well used to turning the other cheek.
‘The hell you are!’
‘We are Latter-day Saints, sir, and do not take kindly to oaths and bad language,’ Lucy Marriot remonstrated.
‘I don’t care if you’re angels from heaven! You’ll turn this team around immediately and return from whence you came.’
‘No sir. We will not be doing that,’ Brother Spencer replied composedly. ‘I wish you good day and am sorry for taking up your time.’
He urged his horses into movement, but the stranger leaned across and seized the reins from his grasp with a gauntletted hand.
‘You will go nowhere without my authority!’
Polly watched the altercation with interest. The stranger had a face so different from those she was accustomed to seeing that it was almost alien. For a start, his skin was much darker than that of any men she had previously seen, save Indians. It was swarthy, almost olive in tone. Beneath the broad-brimmed hat with its narrow circle of gold ribbon she could see that his hair was jet black and straight, worn longer than was normal among military men. Winged eyebrows met in a savage frown and beneath them Polly could see equally dark eyes slanting above high cheekbones. It was an interesting face. His mouth was drawn in a tight line of anger, but it was a well-shaped mouth and one that held her attention.
‘And what authority is that, sir?’ Nephi asked, blandly ignoring the Major’s insignia.
‘That of a Major in the United States Army,’ the stranger replied tersely. ‘Now get this rabble turned around. There’s nothing ahead of you but wilderness.’
Jared’s wagon had been in the rear, now he ran up to them, knee-deep in snow, his face furious.
‘Apologise at once for that remark!’ he shouted up at the seated horseman.
The Major, still with Nephi’s reins in his hands, turned and looked down at Jared. For a brief second Polly thought she saw amusement flicker in the depths of the black eyes, but then she knew she had been mistaken for he said in a voice that sent a shiver of fear down her spine.
‘Back to your wagon, boy.’
‘Why, you …’ Jared lunged furiously at him, but the Major caught his wrist, imprisoning him in a hold of steel.
‘If you want to make a fool of yourself in front of your womenfolk I’ll be only too happy to oblige, but it will be dark within minutes. Now turn your team around and I will accompany you back towards the Mississippi.’
Jared, face burning with anger, wrenched his wrist away but made no further attempt to unseat the arrogant stranger. To do so would only have been to make himself look ridiculous.
‘We crossed the Mississippi only yesterday morning,’ Nephi replied equably. ‘We have no intention of repeating the experience.’
The Major’s eyes flicked from one wagon to another. When they came to Polly’s they rested on her, studying her face and then moving slowly, admiringly downwards. Polly’s cheeks flushed at his impertinence as he turned once more to Nephi.
‘Where are your men?’
‘Brother Marriot has the fever,’ Lydia Lyman replied briskly. ‘Brother Cowley broke his arm in an accident late last evening. Brother Spencer and Jared Marriot you have already met. We are,’ she added unnecessarily, ‘a small party.’ She sat straight-backed and gazed defiantly at him.
It was at this moment that Serena began to cry again. The Major lost his fierce composure.
‘Good God! Are there children with you too?’
‘Five, and as Sister Marriot has pointed out, we do not approve of the Lord’s name being taken in vain.’
Polly could see comprehension dawn on the Major’s handsome dark face.
‘I might have known it,’ he said exasperatedly. ‘Mormons!’
‘Then you’ve met up with those ahead of us?’ Nephi asked eagerly as Susannah and his children crowded around his shoulders to stare at the stranger.
Polly thought she saw the Major flinch at the sight of the five pairs of large eyes fixed unblinkingly on him.
‘Tell him begone if he cannot be civil,’ Sister Fielding called from the inside of her wagon in a wavering, high-pitched voice.
Dark brows flew upwards.
‘An elderly sister,’ Lydia Lyman explained unnecessarily.
‘How elderly?’ The black eyes were suspicious.
Unfortunately lying did not accord with Sister Lyman’s faith. She tried to sound suitably vague. ‘Seventy or thereabouts.’
‘Seventy?’
Polly thought the Major would fall off his horse. The full force of his fury was directed at Nephi.
‘You bring a gaggle of babes and an old woman out into a wilderness twelve degrees below zero and expect me to treat you as a sane man?’
‘Two old women,’ Polly corrected, unable to keep silent any longer.
He swivelled to look at her and she wished she had kept silent. He looked distinctly forbidding.
‘Two?’ he asked through clenched teeth.
‘Sister Schulster is in her seventies as well,’ Polly explained, wishing she sounded as sure of herself as Sister Lyman had done and aware that beneath his piercing gaze an unwelcome blush was tingeing her cheeks.
‘Eighty-four!’ came a sprightly voice from inside the wagon and Nephi and Jared groaned simultaneously.
‘Of all the half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, irresponsible, senseless …’
‘You didn’t answer my question, sir,’ Nephi said with maddening politeness. ‘Have you met with those ahead of us?’
‘Yes, I have, and compared to you they’re on the borders of sanity!’
‘Praise the Lord!’ Nephi said joyously. ‘Do you hear that, Tom? The Saints are only a little way ahead of us. We’ll be with them soon.’
‘Not if I have anything to do with it,’ the Major said crushingly. ‘They are way ahead of you at Richardson Point. You stand no chance of catching them up. Also, come another few months, there won’t be many there to catch up with.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tom Marriot had dragged himself up beside Nephi, wrapped in a thick woollen blanket and shivering convulsively. ‘Is there sickness there?’
‘No, but the army wants the men to fight in the war against Mexico. I’m on my way to St Louis on leave, but on my return my orders are to raise a battalion. There isn’t much action yet, but there will be come the summer.’
‘We are travelling West to find a home in which to worship in peace, not to fight a war,’ Lydia Lyman said tartly.
‘Maybe, but if you’re loyal subjects of the United States you’ll have no objection to fighting in her cause, will you?’
‘I hope you’re not referring to me personally, Major,’ Lydia retorted with a flash in her eyes.
The Major threw back his head and roared with laughter, his whole countenance changing.
‘By God, you Mormons may be mad, but you breed remarkable women!’
Lydia Lyman tried to look affronted and failed. Polly wished his attention would return to her once more. She was the one who should have been making him laugh.
Not Lydia Lyman who had grey hair and was an old maid.
His laughter did not last long. Darkness had fallen while they had been talking.
He said with a return of his bad temper, ‘It’s too late now to go either forwards or back. We’ll have to camp here for the night.’
‘You’re staying with us, sir?’ Nephi asked with pleasure as Jared glowered.
‘I’m staying,’ the Major said, slipping agilely from his horse. ‘I’m staying because I’m going to personally escort the lot of you back across the Mississippi come daylight!’
Chapter Three
The presence of the Major sparked up everybody’s spirits but Jared’s. Despite his curtness and unaffability he had encountered their friends on the trail. That fact alone was enough to put fresh heart into them.
Tom Marriot’s fever had increased and he was unable to join them around the camp fire. Lucy tended him anxiously, surrounding him with stone jars filled with heated, melted snow and staying at his side, his hand in hers. Brother Cowley sat uncomfortably for a few minutes with them, but soon returned to his bed. His arm was paining him and the bitter cold only increased his discomfort.
Jared had turned as surly as the Major. While Polly cooked beans and tried to make the dried salt pork as palatable as possible, he remained silent and taciturn, the very opposite of his usual self. Polly knew why and sympathised. The Major had emasculated him by calling him a boy and Jared had been in no position to retaliate.
‘Were they well?’ Nephi asked, spooning beans into his mouth with relish.
The Major eyed Nephi silently for a few minutes and poked a rolling log on to the fire with the toe of his boot.
‘Some of them,’ he replied non-committally.
Polly found it very hard to take her eyes away from him. When she had served him with his plate of dinner, he had not looked up at her, but her arm had brushed his and she had been aware of an undercurrent of excitement she had never experienced before. There was nothing tame about Major Dart Richards. Nephi, with patient questioning, had finally elicited his name from him.
Dart. It was a strange name. Almost an Indian name, and it was one that suited him well.
Lydia Lyman’s eyes sharpened. ‘Only some of them, Major. What of the others?’
Polly noticed that beneath her heavy cloak a fichu of lace peeped at her throat. Sister Lyman had never been known for feminine fripperies. Polly wondered if it was the Major’s presence that had prompted her to unearth her finery.
She could well understand why, if it was so. He was a man who, with one brief glance, could make a woman feel wholly feminine.
The hard lines around his mouth had softened slightly as he ate and Polly found herself wondering what it would be like to be kissed by such a man. Certainly it would be a very different experience from being kissed by Jared or any other of the local boys. At the realisation of her thoughts she blushed scarlet and dropped her spoon in confusion. She was becoming as lewd as Letty Cummings, who had been disfellowshipped some months ago for behaviour that no one had satisfactorily explained to her.
Major Richards’ eyes held Sister Lyman’s unflinchingly. ‘Some have chills and fever, as the brother in the wagon has. Some have died of the cholera and all are suffering from lack of suitable nourishment.’
‘Cholera!’ Polly blanched.
His disturbing eyes rested on her and he said with an edge of sarcasm, ‘Why yes, Miss Kirkham, sickness will be a part of your great trek, or hadn’t you realised that when you so hare-brainedly set off on your idiotic venture?’
‘Sister Kirkham’s parents both died of the cholera,’ Nephi said quietly. ‘She is an orphan and has no one in the world but the Marriot’s who took pity on her and gave her a home.’
‘I am sorry.’ The sarcasm was gone. His eyes held hers and there was something in their depths that unnerved her even more than the accidental touching of his arm had done.
‘Have there been many deaths, sir?’ Susannah Spencer asked anxiously.
‘Enough. You would see the graves on the trailside if you were to continue.’
‘We are continuing, Major.’ Susannah Spencer’s voice was as authoritative as his.
Something like respect flashed in his eyes and disappeared.
‘You will not,’ he said abruptly, ‘for you have no comprehension of the hardships ahead of you. A small band such as yours would never survive. Even now two of your men are incapacitated and you are left with only …’
For a heart-stopping moment Polly thought he was going to say ‘One man and a boy’but instead he said, ‘Two fit men.’
‘We can overcome whatever hardships lie ahead of us,’ Lydia Lyman said firmly.
‘Hunger and cold, yes. But you cannot overcome the elements.’
They looked at him questioningly and he said irritably, as if he were addressing children, ‘Another week and the snow will melt and the rain will come.’
‘A little rain never hurt anybody,’ Susannah Spencer said defiantly.
‘A little rain?’ the Major expostulated. ‘Good God, woman! It rains in torrents out there on the plain!’
His anger was so intense that Susannah did not even remonstrate with him for taking the Lord’s name in vain.
‘It pours down as if from buckets! The ground is reduced to mud so deep that the wheels of your wagons will sink completely. Planks of timber will be needed to try and roll them from the quagmire. That sort of effort requires scores of strong, fit men. Not women and children. To save weight in the wagons you will have to walk ankle-deep and sometimes knee-deep in the mud and water. Then at night the mud will freeze and that will not end your troubles, for the track will become even more impassable. Wagons will overturn on the uneven surface, children will be crushed beneath the wheels.’
Polly gasped, her face paling.
‘Oh yes,’ he said harshly, turning to her once more. ‘Already one child has lost its life beneath the wheels of its family’s wagon.’
Even Nephi remained silent. Major Richards continued mercilessly, ‘The rain will flood the streams. Your way lies along the River Fox and it has many tributaries—the only way of fording them is to swim. Could your two elderly sisters and children swim the rushing, freezing currents of the Locust and Modkine Creeks?’
There was silence. Then Nephi said stubbornly: ‘We go on.’
‘God’s teeth!’ The Major sprang to his feet in a fury. ‘Never, in all my life, have I met such pig-headed, stubborn, intractable people as you!’
‘Never before have you met Mormons,’ Lydia Lyman retorted.
‘Never do I want to meet more! Your are the most unreasoning, eccentric …’
Lydia Lyman cut him short as she rose to her feet. ‘The prophet Joseph called us a peculiar people,’ she said as she nodded her goodnights.
‘Then prophet or not, I cannot but agree with him,’ Major Richards said, and marched off into the darkness. His fists were clenched, the set of his shoulders indicating that if he had stayed a moment longer his anger would have risen far above blasphemy.
‘Do you think what he says is true?,’ Susannah Spencer asked her husband anxiously as the Major’s forbidding figure disappeared in the darkness.
‘Aye, the man’s no liar. I’d stake my life on that.’
‘He is a blasphemer and a heathen!’ Jared said through clenched teeth. ‘The sooner we see the back of him the better.’
‘I’ve a feeling that will be no easy task,’ Nephi said drily.
‘But if there are floods …’ Susannah began.
Nephi took her hand in his. ‘The others survived, wife, why should not we? Come, let’s have a hymn before we go to bed. The Major may have given us much-needed information, but he has lowered our spirits and taken our mind from the Lord.’
They began to sing and from the nearby wagons, Sister Fielding and Sister Schulster, the Cowleys and Marriot’s, joined in with them. Fifty yards away in the darkness, Major Richards heard them and swore volubly. Th
ey were fanatics and as illogical as all fanatics. Despite all he had said there was no way he could force them to return East against their wishes, and the alternative was to allow them to continue to certain death. Even as they sang he heard the cry of a wolf. He swore again. They had spirit and courage, but no sense. One of them had something else too. Golden curls peeping from the hood of her cloak and eyes the colour of summer gentians. He grinned suddenly to himself in the darkness. Trust the first passable female he met in months of celibate soldiering to be a Mormon!
All single Mormon women were virgins, he had learnt that from bitter experience back at Richardson Point where the main party under their leader, Brigham Young, had established a temporary camp. If one wanted to live, one did not tamper with the chastity of a Mormon girl. Which was a pity, as the one who had sat opposite him across the camp fire had been uncommonly pretty. Beautiful even. He shrugged his broad shoulders. There would be women enough when he reached St Louis.
Nephi put more wood on the fire to keep it burning through the night and then they all retired, more sombre even than the previous evening. Major Richards’words had given them all a lot to think about.
Tom Marriot had fallen into an uneasy sleep and Polly helped Lucy to bed and then snuggled beneath her own blankets, removing only her cape. By the time they reached Richardson Point they would have fleas and lice to contend with, as well as cold. Washing, other than face and hands with melted snow, was an impossibility, and the sub-zero temperatures saw to it that not even the most fastidious removed more than damp cloaks when they retired. Lucy and Lydia’s thoughts were of the floods ahead of them. Polly’s were of Major Richards.
In the firelight his black hair had taken on a blue sheen and there had been a moment when he had spoken to her when his eyes had lingered on her mouth and she had felt a little pulse begin to beat in her throat. Then he had ignored her as if she no longer existed, and the rest of his attention had been given to the Spencers and Sister Lyman.
Jared had not spoken a word to him all night and the Major had not bothered to make amends for referring to him as a boy. Polly doubted if Major Richards made amends for anything. Jared’s fury was wasted where that gentleman was concerned.
A Many-Splendoured Thing Page 3