Chance's Bluff

by Catherine McGreevy

  Richard shouted and dropped the axe, jumping up and down and waving his arms in the air. Seeing his exhilaration thrilled Annabelle as much as dropping the tree had. She threw her arms around him. “You did it, Richard! You did it!”

  He grinned back at her.

  Getting out the pot of salve, she applied a thick layer to Richard’s raw hands and wrapped his hands in clean cloth, then took care of her own blisters. They spent the rest of the day shucking off the branches, which proved as time-consuming as cutting the tree down, and finally dragged the trunk next to the spot where they planned to raise the cabin. It was a start.

  As they lay under their blankets that night, Annabelle reviewed the events of the past months. By the time next winter rolled around, they would have enough logs to construct a real cabin, she thought. A home.

  Annabelle fell asleep still smiling.

  A month later, Annabelle studied the half-built cabin with concern. Any self-respecting mason would have jeered at the structure: logs rested against each other, leaving gaps like the legs of a drunken seaman, and the size was hardly bigger than that of the wagon bed, but the finished shelter would be sturdier than the “beaver dam” in which she and Richard had spent the previous winter. That is, if they could finish it.

  Felling trees had been as laborious a process as she’d feared, but gradually they had accumulated a pile of logs sufficient for a small house. Hoisting the logs into place, however, threatened to dash their plans. Finally they gave up, the walls only waist high. Now, for the thousandth time, Annabelle wished their father had taught them something more useful than history and mathematics. Such as, say, carpentry.

  At least Mother had foreseen that the little family would have to be self-sufficient and taught Annabelle a few practical skills. To learn those skills herself, Caroline had swallowed her pride and asked more experienced women in the wagon train for help. The other emigrants were mostly farmwives who were surprised by the elegant lady from Philadelphia. They found it hard to believe that in her household, even the servants did not perform such lowly work as making soap from ashes or using sourdough to make bread. Caroline did her best to learn and performed her duties uncomplainingly alongside the others.

  As for Papa, he had spent the weeks while their wagon was being prepared helping Richard and Annabelle brush up on schoolwork, such as Latin, geography, and fractions. “We can’t civilize the wilderness without education, children,” he said cheerfully, and, whenever he wasn’t supervising the cartwright’s progress, corrected their lessons.

  Building shelter, foraging in the wilderness for food … those were skills no one had thought to teach the children. Those were tasks for full-grown men and women. Yet she and Richard had made it through the winter, hadn’t they? Things could only get easier from now on, or so Annabelle hoped. Unfortunately, once more they had hit a dead end.

  Richard leaned against a stump and looked at her. “I once read a book about ancient Egyptians,” he said.

  “That’s nice.” She had no idea sometimes why her brother said the things he did.

  “Their slaves built the pyramids by pulling big blocks of stone up ramps.”

  “Oh?” She wiped her nose with her sleeve. No one who mattered was around to see. “Well, we don’t have armies of slaves, do we? And we don’t have stone for ramps either.”

  “No, but we could lean boards against the wall and roll the logs up. It would be easier than trying to lift them ourselves.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “Wouldn’t the logs roll right back down again and crush us to death?”

  “We could steady the logs with ropes. I bet that’s how Papa would have done it.”

  Annabelle wanted to ridicule the idea—except it made sense. He had been right so many times before. She studied him with grudging respect. “The boards from the wagon bed might be strong enough.”

  Once she saw how demanding the task would be, Annabelle’s confidence waned. More than once, she was certain that one of the heavy logs would grind them both to powder before they leveraged the logs into the carved notches. Somehow, however, the tactic worked. At last, all the logs fit together like an oversized jigsaw puzzle. The youngsters covered the top of the new cabin with canvas from the wagon, until they could put on a proper roof. It was already an improvement over the drafty beaver lodge.

  One of the most perplexing tasks was figuring out how to make a real door. At first they used the same heavy rug that covered the opening of their first shelter, but at night they heard the occasional howl of a coyote or other wild animals, and, only last week, Annabelle had heard a warning rattle under a pile of rocks as she had been returning from picking berries. What if a bear intruded on them or got into their scarce food stores? So far they had been lucky, but a strong door was a necessity.

  As they rummaged through the shrinking pile of supplies, Richard found a bonanza: a pair of shiny brass hinges her father must have brought along for just such a purpose. With a handsaw, she cut boards from what was left of the wagon’s body, and screwed on the hinges. The door did not hang straight, but it opened and shut freely. She added a hook and eye to the frame from Papa’s tool kit so the cabin could be locked from inside.

  Annabelle was pleased with their accomplishment, but she knew that the cabin was incomplete. They could build a fire in the corner and leave a hole in the roof for the smoke, as they had done in the lodge, but a house—a real house—must have a chimney, and she was determined to have one. But how? She suspected that the difficulty of raising the cabin’s four walls had been nothing compared with the engineering complexity of such a project, but—Annabelle told herself—what was a chimney, but a tall pile of rocks with a hole in the center?

  “We’ll gather stones from the river,” she decided, sounding considerably more confident than she felt. “Then we’ll use that sticky mud from the banks to hold them together. If we let each layer dry long enough before adding more stones, the chimney should stand.”

  Richard nodded silently. Annabelle had to admit that her brother was no complainer, but she still wished he would talk more. The quiet of the valley, leavened only by the occasional sighing of wind and the quiet gurgling of the nearby creek, nearly drove her to distraction. Often she found herself humming tunelessly while going about her tasks, just to hear a voice outside her own head. Richard had always been a quiet boy, but it had not bothered her in the old days, when she’d had other friends and neighbors to talk to.

  Now, Annabelle thought, looking at him objectively, he looked less like a child. He was painfully thin, as if he had been stretched on a rack. Ankles and wrists protruded from his clothes like the sticks of a scarecrow. Although she still thought of him as her “little” brother, the truth was he was her height, and in a year or two would be taller.

  Under their mother’s care, his hair used to be neatly brushed and his clothing clean and tidy. Now his gray eyes looked huge in his hollow face, his sun-bleached hair was overgrown, and his tanned skin tight over prominent cheekbones. Annabelle felt guilty for having forgotten to insist that he wear his hat outdoors. Her mother would never have omitted such an important detail, but then, there was so much Annabelle had neglected. There had been too many other, urgent things to attend to while spending all her time and energy trying to keep them alive. Well, she had succeeded, hadn’t she? Now they even had a real house. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t been able to keep up all those other civilizing touches.

  She realized that Richard was waiting. “Well,” Annabelle said briskly,“let’s get rocks for the chimney.”

  They trekked to the creek, taking off their boots and socks before wading into the icy water. They chose small boulders, rounded from countless years of running water. Together, they managed to pile them in a heap next to the cabin, ready for use. Then began the slow process of caulking. They carried buckets of wet clay from the borders of the stream, and day by day, the column grew higher until at last the chimney cleared the roofline.


  Using the wagon as a ladder, with Richard steadying it from the bottom, she crowned the chimney with a row of decorative small stones. Standing back to admire her handiwork, she thought it didn’t look half bad. Now if it only worked … ! Miraculously, it did. The air in the room turned acrid when she lit the fire, but the flue sucked up enough smoke that they could breathe. To celebrate, Annabelle baked a batch of biscuits over the coals, carefully measuring out the baking powder. When it was gone, she would use the pot of sourdough starter for their bread.

  As they ate inside their new home, Richard perched on the seat of the wagon, only slightly blackened on one side, which served as a bench. Annabelle balanced on the remains of the rocking chair. One armrest had snapped off when the thieves had thrown it on the ground, but otherwise it worked fine, a comforting reminder of their former life.

  Biting into the crumbling, hot biscuit, she looked around with pride, noting the bed along one wall, with its accompanying trundle tucked underneath. Richard had whittled the poles from saplings, and she had stuck them into the walls to create a frame, as she had seen in other cabins they had stayed in along the way. During the winter, Annabelle had woven a base of heavy twine on which to place the tick. Although her parents’ feather bed had burned in the fire, she’d sewn together two sheets and stuffed them with dried grass from the meadow. The result gave off a pleasant, sweet fragrance when she lay on it. Satisfied with a job well done, Annabelle gave a sigh of contentment. They had come this far. Things could only get better.

  Then she remembered the Indians they had seen heading across the valley the previous winter. Now that it was spring, would they return, leading their horses to better pasturage? She had persuaded herself that they had not noticed the “beaver dam” plastered against the cliff wall, but there was no way the newly built cabin could escape the Indians’ notice.

  She thrust the thought from her mind. This valley belonged to her and Richard. They had earned it with their labor and their parents’ blood. If the Indians had wanted it, she told herself firmly, they’d not have abandoned it in the first place. Now, no one could make her and Richard leave.

  Her brother seemed to love the valley as much as she did. Sometimes, she caught him standing and looking up at the mountain peaks with a look of awed wonder on his face, an expression that she had never seen him wear in the citified bustle of Philadelphia. Despite the tragedy they’d lived through, he had adapted quickly to their new home and was growing more skilled at trapping and hunting. He never mentioned their previous life, or what had brought him there. It occurred to her with surprise that in spite of their hardships, the daily struggle to survive, Richard seemed almost happy these days.

  Yes, Annabelle thought, finishing her biscuit and watching her brother reach for another one, they had been right to stay in the mountains.

  It was only when those increasing moments of loneliness caught up with her that Annabelle questioned whether they had made the right decision after all.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ben

  Iowa

  Spring, 1865

  Despite Chance’s disapproval, Ben Marlowe was fascinated by the Indian who joined their camp. Other natives had hung around towns they’d passed through, dressed in cast-off clothing and begging for whiskey, but this one was a true Indian, practically unspoiled by contact with Whites despite having picked up a few words of English.

  Ben couldn’t help trying to learn about the Indian, like a scientist studying a rare breed of bird. Where was the newcomer from? What were his tribe’s customs? What was the meaning of the odd-looking leather bag the Indian wore on a thong around his throat?

  The Indian grunted that he was a Sioux, but showed more interest in food than in conversation, ignoring Ben’s questions like a horse swishing away flies. As his belly filled, however, the newcomer revealed that his name was Yellow Wolf. Ten years earlier, a roving band of Crow had enslaved him after catching him in the act of liberating a few of their choicest mules. They in turn sold him to a band of Creek Indians.

  Ben already knew that the so-called Five Civilized Tribes— Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—owned black and Indian slaves, and that those tribes had supported the Confederacy during the war. In broken English, Yellow Wolf informed Ben that when Lincoln freed the slaves, the Indians’ slaves were freed as well. Furthermore, to punish the five tribes for backing the rebels, the federal government forced the five tribes to give up a large chunk of their reservation lands as well.

  Seeming unworried about those tribes’ troubles, the Sioux pulled out a pipe and began smoking a mixture of tobacco and aromatic herbs. After a while, he set the pipe aside and looked up. “Where you go?” he asked Ben.

  “Me? Where am I going?” Ben found he had no answer to the simple question. “I’m not sure. Somewhere out there.” He gestured into the darkness.

  The Indian looked unsurprised, nodding. “You look for wyakin.”

  “Wyakin? What is that?”

  The Indian’s hand touched the rawhide bundle hanging at his neck. “Something in nature. A spirit. Help you. Everyone has wyakin, but must find it. Could be thunder, bear, bird. Anything.”

  Ben was intrigued. “How does a person find a wyakin?”

  Yellow Wolf shrugged. “Search. Leave your village with no food, no water. Go away, alone, until find it.”

  “How do you know when you have found what it is?”

  The Indian shrugged again. “You know.”

  “Do you have a wyakin?”

  Yellow Wolf didn’t answer, but Ben’s eyes went to the small medicine bundle around the Indian’s neck. He wondered if it contained symbols of the Indian’s own wyakin, too sacred to share. He found himself thinking about Yellow Wolf’s words. Ben was searching for something, although he didn’t know what it was yet. How did the Indian know?

  His companion spoke again. “You should live like Indian. Better than white man’s ways.” He wrinkled his nose as if smelling an offensive odor.

  Ben felt defensive. “That’s not true.” He pictured the bustling streets of New York, the gracious buildings and fine tables set with delectable foods. How could the Indian think his own ways were better?

  Yellow Wolf’s lip curled. “White men do what they are told, like women. When I with my tribe, no one tell me what to do. I want hunt, I hunt. I want sleep, I sleep.”

  “But surely your people obey your chiefs, just as we obey our own leaders.”

  His guest shook his head. “We listen. Show respect. But chief not make us do anything. They counsel peace, but if braves want war, they fight. Someone break Indian law, chiefs do not whip or hang.” A look of contempt crossed his face. “Except reservation Indians. They same as white men.”

  Feeling uncomfortable, Ben changed the subject. “And you? Where are you going?”

  Using words and gestures, Yellow Wolf explained that he wanted to find his own people on the plains of the Dakotas to resume the old life of following buffalo on their migrations.

  Ben was startled. “You’re traveling all that way alone? Surely that is dangerous.” He had heard that the US army tracked down Indians suspected of escaping from reservations, and it was well known that Indians were as cruel to others of enemy tribes as they were to white men. Sometimes more so.

  “Dangerous, yes.” The Indian looked at him shrewdly. “Two safer than one.”

  Ben felt his pulse begin to quicken. Now he understood that it was an oblique invitation. Soon they would arrive at Baker’s Crossing, where he planned to bid goodbye to Chance McInnes. After that, why not travel to the new territories with the Indian? It would be the kind of adventure he was seeking.

  He studied the stranger more closely. Chance McInnes might think it foolish to trust the man, but Ben was certain the scrawny former Indian slave meant no harm. What adventures might he experience by following Yellow Wolf into Indian lands? The uncertainty made the prospect all the more compelling.

  The Indian sat cross-legged,
hooded eyes half shut, and smoked his pipe again. Finally, he rolled up in his blanket and went to sleep. Ben took the first watch, gazing into the fire and ruminating over his choices.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of the remaining biscuits, he announced his decision.

  As Ben expected, Chance was furious. The farmer thought Ben was cracked to go looking for a Sioux village with the stranger and told him so. All the rest of the day, he tried to dissuade Ben, while shooting angry looks at the impassive Indian.

  Ben reassured Chance he wouldn’t stay with Yellow Wolf’s band long. He’d travel with the Indian as far as the Bitterroot Mountains, then maybe work for a while in one of those new mines in Idaho Territory.

  “Then what?” Chance demanded.

  Ben shrugged. “I’m not sure. Don’t you see? That’s the whole point.”

  “Heck, a man oughta know what he wants,” Chance said with disgust. He darted a dark look at the Indian, who was busying himself with his pony, and lowered his voice. “Besides, you can’t trust those redskins. My aunt’s family was slaughtered in Iowa, every last one of them. Even the baby. Scalped and their carcasses left to rot in the dirt.”

  “Not all Indians are that way,” Ben said quietly. “From what I’ve heard, I’d say there has been plenty of wrong done on both sides.”

  Chance glared over his shoulder at the Indian. “I still think you’re crazy. If you run into trouble, try to send me a message if you can. A man saves another man’s life, they’re brothers forever, right?”

  Ben clasped Chance’s offered hand, then reached into his pocket. “Take this to remember me by. I’d like you to have it.”

  Chance looked down at the small book of poetry and pushed it back. “Thanks, but you’d best keep it. The truth is, I can’t read the words.”

  Ben laughed. “‘Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? Those curves, angles, dots?’” he quoted. “‘No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea, They are in the air, they are in you.’”