“You seem pretty certain of that. But there are a lot of dedicated, determined people on the train I came here with.”
Otis laughed again, scornfully this time. “Hard work ain’t gonna have a whole lot to do with it,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out. You just come over and join us. We’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have a beau, I hope?”
“I’m engaged to be married.”
Otis turned around to look at her, as if judging the truth of her statement. He had a hard-planed face and domineering, wide-spaced wolf’s eyes. The whites of those eyes were exceptionally large. He had a hard stare to meet but Emmalee met it.
“Who you gonna marry? I know him?”
“I don’t know. Randy Clay is his name.”
“Big blond boy?”
“Yes.”
“Farmer, of course. Tough luck for you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I know what’s gonna happen in this territory.”
“If you tell me, we’ll both know.”
“And ruin the surprise?” Otis guffawed.
Emmalee knew that he was not about to tell her anything of consequence, but, even so, she already knew about the stakes and she guessed that Burt Pennington had afoot a scheme more intricate than Horace Torquist would be likely to imagine.
“There’s an awful lot of land out here,” she tried, as they rode easily along the river. “It seems enough to satisfy all of us.”
“And here I thought you was smart. Don’t you know that one hungry longhorn needs at least ten acres of grazing land per season? A lot more than that if there ain’t a lot of rain. Can’t make money ranching cattle less’n you have a lot of longhorns, roamin’ free an’ eatin’ to their hearts’ content. Then here come you farmers with your dinky little crops an’ your fat, stupid milkin’ cows an’ them damn fences to cut apart an’ chop up God’s free earth. An’ this here barbwire, that cuts the hell out of grazin’ cattle.” He was getting angry now, thinking of barbwire. “Tell you what, if I ever see me a stretch of barbwire fence in these here parts. I’m gonna loop a length of it around the neck of the nearest fanner, so he can get his throat slit and strangle at the same time.”
“Well, I hope I’m not that nearest farmer,” said Emmalee.
“Hey. You don’t have to worry. You just do like I say an’ come on over with us.”
In spite of his crude frankness, or maybe because of it, Emmalee found that she did not dislike Otis. He was hard and unlettered but not malicious; she did not think he would actually attack a fellow human being without provocation…although she had to admit that she did not know the many things Otis might regard as provoking, barbwire excepted.
“There’s a nice girl in your train,” she suggested. “Lottie. You could ask her to be your girl.”
“Hah! The boss’s daughter.” He sounded as if he were talking about farmers again. “She’d suck a man dry in ten minutes an’ leave him dyin’ in a ditch. Besides, she’s taken.”
“She is?”
“Yeah. By that scout the boss canned back in St. Joe. Landar. Lottie goes into town one day an’ she comes back on Landar’s horse. He gave it to her. She’s his girl now, looks like.”
Emmalee sat there behind Otis, jouncing along as the roan neared little Arcady. One part of her treated Otis’s news quite matter-of-factly. After all, she had already seen Lottie upon Garn’s stallion. Emmalee felt confused, because she felt that something of hers had been taken away. Yet how could that be, because Garn was not hers and she didn’t even want him? She was engaged to marry another man.
But then she figured things out and understood: She felt as she did because she was simply reacting to Lottie Pennington’s spite. That was all.
“Here we are,” Emmalee said, as they rode into Arcady. She bounded down from the horse in front of the general store. “Thanks for the ride.”
“My pleasure,” said Otis. “Now, come callin’ any time you want, hear? But don’t come snoopin’ around. Folks is pretty antsy an’ you never know…”
Otis touched his hatbrim, wheeled the horse around, and spurred away. Emmalee watched him go, then turned to find Myrtle and Hester Brine watching her from the store’s entrance.
“Where’ve you been?” Myrtle asked.
“Quick,” said Emmalee. “Are the men back yet?”
“Nope. What’s up?”
“We’ve got to get started right away.”
“Started on what?”
Emmalee explained about the stakes. “We’re way behind. Pennington has hundreds of markers cut already.”
“Slow down, girl,” said Hester. “The job’ll get done.”
“That’s right,” Myrtle agreed. “Don’t go gettin’ yuhself all agitated.”
“Don’t go getting myself all…? Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“What!” Myrtle snapped.
Emmalee faced the old woman down. “A lot of things are funny around here!”
“That’s true, an’ right now you’re one of ’em. Instead of standin’ there, get goin’ and round everybody up. If they’ll listen to you. I seen people watchin’ you ride in on Otis’s horse. How you think that looks, huh?”
“I thought of that myself, believe me. Come with me. Myrtle. Please. They’ll listen to you.”
“I’ll be around if you need me, but whyn’t you give it a try on your own? You never know. One day a whole lot might depend on whether the folks listen to you or not. Try your wings now.”
Most of the women were at the chuckwagon helping prepare fire and food for the evening meal. They’d observed Emmalee returning on Otis’s horse and they scrutinized her warily as she approached.
“Listen, everybody,” she began. “There’s something very important that we have to do.”
“Says you!” Alma Bent, Festus’s wife, grinned. “We been workin’ our fingers nigh on to the bone while you been bouncin’ yo’ bottom…on a rancher’s horse, anyways.”
Elvira Waters, Florence Buttlesworth, and Stella Strep, along with quite a few others, thought this was very funny. They laughed and laughed.
“No, really, this is important,” Emmalee persisted. “Downriver, Pennington’s women…the women, mind you! They’re getting the name stakes ready for the rush. They have hundreds already. We haven’t even begun.”
“Why should we listen to you?” inquired Elvira Waters. “Mr. Horace Torquist is the boss of this here train. If he figures we ought to be cuttin’ stakes, he’ll tell us.”
“Right,” agreed the others, more or less in unison. “We’ll wait an’ do what Mr. Torquist says.”
Emmalee realized two things: One, they weren’t about to listen to her; two, they would never believe that Torquist was capable of wrong. She excused them their first lapse; it was the second that was truly frightening.
Myrtle intercepted Emmalee, who was on her way to the river.
“How’d it go?”
“They didn’t listen to me.”
“It ain’t surprising. I’ll have a little chat with ’em. Where you going?”
“To cut some stakes of my own. I don’t need to wait for Horace Torquist to tell me what to do.”
Randy and the other men came straggling back into camp at nightfall, subdued but tense. Emmalee showed him the stakes she had fashioned, with their names, ALDEN and CLAY, carved into the wood and accentuated with bootblack so they would be easily discernible. He was delighted. They went over to the campfire, where Emmalee got him a tin mug full of coffee and a plate of cornbread and beans. Emmalee sensed in the men who had returned, including Torquist, a kind of edgy, bitter resolve. Randy did not want to discuss it.
“What you women don’t know won’t hurt you, Mr. Torquist said.”
“Forget Horace Torquist for a moment. I’m going to be your wife! If there’s danger, we’re in it together. That’s how things are.”
> Randy thought it over and reckoned that she had a point. “You know those wagons Pennington has positioned upriver? Mr. Torquist has decided to challenge the men in those wagons for water rights north of town. Pennington’s already got a tremendous advantage south of Arcady. But even he hasn’t enough people to get a monopoly upriver.”
“What do you mean, ‘challenge’ them,” asked Emmalee.
Randy glanced around and lowered his voice.
“We’ll fight if we have to,” he said.
“Fight?”
“Shhh. Lower your voice. The women are not to know.”
With difficulty, Emmalee stayed calm. “Not to know? Not to know? This group has always prided itself, perhaps unduly, on being peaceable. Now we’ve just arrived in Olympia, where Mr. Torquist wanted to found a peaceable community, and on the very first day he’s planning violence…”
“That’s not the way it is,” Randy tried to protest.
“And he doesn’t want us women to know? What if something is going to happen to you? Don’t you think I have a right to know about that?”
“Shhh! Em, please be quiet. Nothing is going to happen. Mr. Torquist feels that if we fight them right away, this once, over the water rights north of town, well, then we’ll never have to fight again. If you show that you’re strong, your enemies will want peace. That’s the way good Christians have always conducted themselves. And Em, when we claim land, all you women are going to be back here in camp.”
“This woman will not be.”
“Em…”
“No.”
They stopped talking and looked at each other, self-consciously aware that they were quarreling.
“I’ve found us two good plots on a creek near the river,” Randy said quietly. “I’ll claim them both for us. If I can. It’s one of the sites that Pennington’s men have their eyes on.”
“So you think there’ll be a fight over it?”
“Likely.”
“Then I’m going to be there.”
Randy did not quite know what to make of this obduracy. “Mr. Torquist,” he pronounced, “is going to order all of you to remain in Arcady on the day of the rush.” In his voice was a note of unchallengeable finality.
“It’s just possible that not everyone will obey him,” Emmalee said.
Randy frowned but said no more about it, especially when Torquist arrived to speak to his people and, in passing, praised Emmalee by name for sounding the warning about preparation of the name stakes.
Emmalee was staying at the Bents’ wagon again, until such time as Torquist should have opportunity to contemplate her immediate fate, and Randy walked her there with his good arm around her waist. Their little spat was all but forgotten now—he expected that she would have the good sense to remain in Arcady; she was determined to claim her own land—and when he pulled her close to him in the soft shadow of a whispering cottonwood, their kiss was full-hearted. Lost in the kiss, conscious of the fire building in their bodies, Emmalee had a fleeting sensation of the speed with which time was passing. Events of long ago mingled and melded with this very night, one kiss recalled ail kisses, and the hungry, voluptuous warmth spreading throughout her body in slow, spasmodic waves suggested past pleasures of a dangerous kind. Randy’s hand caressed her breast through the calico. His mouth was ravenous, kissing her…
Suddenly he pulled away. “This isn’t right, Em. We oughtn’t to do this yet. But you make me forget…”
She heard herself panting, gasping. His kiss had left an emptiness that was greater than his kiss could have filled, a fact that she knew to be true even as she understood that it did not seem to make sense.
“Hey! Who’s that smoochin’ underneath that tree? Get out into the moonlight so’s I can see you better.”
“It’s Ebenezer.” Emmalee giggled.
“Caught in the act.” Randy said.
“Just who I been lookin’ for.” Ebenezer cackled as Emmalee and Randy stepped out of the shadow. He reached into his trouser pocket—he no longer affected the big, slotted belt—and withdrew a piece of paper. Emmalee couldn’t see it clearly but she knew what it was as soon as Ebenezer said, “Em, Garn Landar said for me to give you this. Said he found it an’ it’s yours.”
The one-hundred-dollar bill. Garn must have picked it up that night behind the boulders in Denver.
Randy misunderstood. “I told that bastard I didn’t want anything from him,” he cried, grabbing furiously at the money.
Emmalee, fearful lest he destroy it, clutched at the note too.
There was a clean, dry, ripping sound as they tore the bill in half.
“J-just as well,” faltered Randy, as he squinted at the note in the moonlight and perceived its denomination.
“That there is Em’s money,” said Ebenezer. “I paid it to her for taking care of Bernice. It just got lost an’ got found, is all.”
“It’s still tainted. It passed through Landar’s hands,” Randy said, thinking of seed corn, cows, chickens, and farm implements, thinking of Emmalee’s freedom from Torquist. “Nothing good can come of tainted money.”
“It ain’t tainted,” protested Ebenezer. “That was all I had left of my past, after the Yankees got through with me. An’ it’s still good. The two parts are clear and identifiable. You can read the serial number. Give it to me if you don’t want it.”
Gently, but firmly, Emmalee took Randy’s half of the bill. “I’ll keep it for now. We’ll spend it on what we need most. That can’t hurt.”
“I don’t like it,” Randy maintained. “Everything Landar touches turns bad. He was going to get us to Denver before Pennington. He didn’t. Now he’s in Olympia, corrupting this land with his presence, just as he dirtied the money with his touch. I tell you, everything he gets his hands on turns bad.”
Randy had, in his anger at Garn, let his tongue get away from him. Now, realizing what he’d said, he ceased talking and stared at Emmalee in anguished and apologetic horror. She was looking at him with hurt in her eyes, as if he’d struck her. The fact was there between them: Garn Landar’s touch had also been on Emmalee, on the most secret and sacred places of her body, those Randy himself had not yet touched or seen.
The twin fragments of the tom piece of money seemed almost to represent Randy and Emmalee themselves, distanced by Garn Landar’s effect on both of them.
Rush
Emmalee awoke very early on the day of the land rush, rolled up her bedding, gathered towel, soap, and brush, and walked down to the river. She’d finished washing and was slowly brushing her long hair, sun-bleached now from months on the trail, when Hester Brine appeared. The orange-haired woman nodded in a friendly, matter-of-fact way, set a hairbrush and small covered container down on the riverbank, and began her ablutions. In bearing and manner, Hester reminded Emmalee of Myrtle, except that Myrtle did not use artificial hair coloring, which Hester began to rub vigorously into her scalp from the little container.
Emmalee realized that she was staring.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Hester said, grinning with her false teeth. “A little vanity never hurt anybody. Your turn’ll come some day. Sure, you’re a stunner now. Got a fine man who wants to marry you and another one who’d have you if he could…”
Otis! thought Emmalee. Some man gave you a ride on his horse and half the world had you pegged as lovers.
“Are you from Olympia, Hester?” she asked, changing the subject as she folded her towel.
“Naw. Casper, Wyoming. You?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Honey, that is so far east I can’t hardly imagine it exists. Vestor Tell’s from there.”
“From Pennsylvania? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. He’s always sendin’ or gettin’ telegrams from Philadelphia. That’s where he’s gettin’ money, I figure. Money to loan the settlers.”
“Is he allowed to do that? He’s the claims agent. It’s a government job.”
“He’s also the chief—and only—law enfor
cement officer in this part of the territory. If settlers need money, you think they’re gonna care who they get it from? By the way,” she added, “you don’t have to be proud. I been down and out in my day, too, so if you want a loan, see me quick. I don’t have all that much, but I can help you out. I like you, girl.”
“Thank you, but Randy and I will manage.”
Hester shook her head, began combing out her orange hair. “You remind me of me when I was your age. Hope you don’t have to do the things I did to make ends meet. Good luck to you today, and just remember, I offered.”
Vestor Tell rode down the line on an Arabian gelding that could have cost more than any ten of Torquist’s Conestogas combined. Watching him, Emmalee was reminded of something out of its element, an entity superficially superior to its immediate surroundings, yet unsatisfied. Tell was subtle and keen. He would betray neither edginess nor anxiety, because he did not suffer from either of these. But he was very lean, in form and visage, and hunger he could not conceal.
But hunger for what?
“I’ll fire the starting pistol shot at nine A.M.,” Tell told everyone, “and if you don’t know what to do then, neither God nor Andy Johnson can help you.”
Mention of hapless President Andrew Johnson brought laughter from both fanners and ranchers, no matter that they would soon be locked in struggle to see who grabbed the choicest land Abe Lincoln’s successor had narrowly escaped impeachment. The forthcoming presidential election, however, did not directly affect the pioneers. As citizens of a mere territory, such as Olympia was, they were not permitted to vote. But in time Olympia would become a state, and every man present on the day of this great western land rush knew that immeasurable amounts of future power might be won by the judicious choice of land today. Upriver? Downriver? Close to the mountains or farther away? Land was the future and land was money, but which was the wisest choice of land and where did the greatest power lie?
Torquist, Emmalee recalled, had spoken of Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the land and in the goodness of the people who lived on it. Perhaps this would always be so. Sitting next to Randy on his dapple-gray, waiting for Vestor Tell to fire the pistol that could begin the land rush, she wanted only for future generations to remember this day. At one time, she thought, her eyes tearing a little, at one time on the face of this earth it was possible for someone like me, who had lost everything, who had nothing, to gamble life and time against fate and fortune and let the chips fall!
The Passionate and the Proud Page 19