by Steve Frazee
“A couple, three weeks ago there was two wagons here, one with a passel of boys,” Mrs. Hildreth said. “Are you one of them?”
“No!” The sight of his food was revolting to Eddie. Already, what he had eaten was tormenting his stomach. He wasn’t one of the dirty, lousy Snellings, and he wished the woman would stop talking.
“The other wagon — the good one — had a boy — ” The woman’s eyes narrowed as she glanced from Eddie to her husband — “and that beautiful little girl with golden hair.”
“She’s dead!” Eddie said. Suddenly he was violently sick. He got up and rushed out of the house.
“Damn it, Bess,” Hildreth said, “I told you to leave him alone!”
“I was only trying to find out — ”
“I know, I know.” Hildreth went out to where Eddie was standing at the end of a building. The two dogs were there in the shade near him. “Never saw old Jug and Pistol take to anyone as easy as they have to you, Eddie. I’ve trained them not to cotton up to people so as not to have them go off with one of these trains. They sure as hell don’t like Indians, you can bet on that.”
Hildreth went on talking, about the Indians that came to the post, about their legends of demon birds and fish far back in the mountains. It was obvious to Eddie what the man was trying to do, but still his slow, easy speech began to veer Eddie’s mind from its frozen channel.
After a time Hildreth said he had to go to the corral to see about a newborn colt and wondered if Eddie wanted to see it. They walked along together. The dogs sniffed at Eddie’s legs in a friendly manner but Hildreth said not to pet them.
In the same easy conversational tone Hildreth asked, “It wasn’t Indians, was it?”
“No.”
“Sickness?”
Eddie nodded.
“I had to know, you understand, because a train just left here. If it was Indians, we’d have to warn them. That would be the right thing to do, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure.”
They looked at the newborn colt, all legs and shakiness and ears. Hildreth asked no more questions about Eddie’s experience and Eddie stayed away from the house the rest of the day. He helped Hildreth milk two cows that evening. They drank some of the warm milk from the buckets and the foam left a long white streak on Hildreth’s great brown beard. Eddie wanted to laugh at the sight but something inside him held him silent.
“Bess won’t pester you any more with questions, Eddie. It was just a woman’s way, wanting to know what happened so she could give you sympathy.”
“I don’t need any.”
“Sure,” Hildreth said softly, but he looked troubled.
Eddie slept that night on a feather mattress in the warm shelter of the house. When he went to sleep he drifted away with a feeling of security, hearing the low voices of the Hildreths in the kitchen. But in the night he had bad dreams. The demon bird of Indian legend that Hildreth had mentioned so briefly was swooping down to tear Kathy from Eddie’s arms as he stumbled through the night toward a campfire where his parents waited.
Sometimes he had a gun and he tried to shoot the great, white-winged bird as it came striking, but the trigger would never pull, although he strained and pressed and cried out. He woke up sweating and threshing, with Hildreth standing over him, and behind the big figure, Mrs. Hildreth with a candle.
“You’re all right, Eddie. You’re all right now,” Hildreth said. “You’re not out in the night any more.”
Mrs. Hildreth straightened the covers. She was careful not to touch Eddie and her talk was gruff and matter-of-fact as she moved about the bed; but when she picked up the candle again and turned to go away with her husband, Eddie saw tears on her cheeks.
The Hildreths sat in the kitchen until Eddie went to sleep again. He slept soundly the rest of the night, but when he woke up the dream still bothered him.
CHAPTER THREE
EDDIE had been in Ruby Valley a week when an Army captain rode in with part of a troop of cavalry on their way to the Mormon settlements east of the salt desert. The captain was a graying, hard-shaved man, as brown as coffee under the layers of dust on him.
“We’ll stay overnight with you and drink up some of your good water, Sam, if you don’t mind,” the captain said to Hildreth. “What’s been going on?”
“Same old thing,” Hildreth said. He put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Trains are starting to peter out for the summer. The Indians will be drifting in to get their usual robbing before long.”
The captain grinned. “Robbing, indeed.” He put a sharp look on Eddie. “Where’d you get the new helper?”
“His uncle dropped him off here last week. They weren’t getting along and Eddie thought he’d like to stay.”
Eddie learned the value of a casual lie. The captain looked him over, said, “So?” and forgot about him. “There’s a burned wagon at Gravelly Grossing, Sam.”
Hildreth glanced toward the kitchen doorway, where his wife was listening. “It was abandoned, Walworth. Some Shoshones burned it.”
“How do you know?”
“A couple of Wahno’s bucks went past here a few days ago. They told me.”
Captain Walworth worked dust from his lips and spat. He nodded without interest. “We noticed one wheel seemed to be missing. We found three people, a man, a woman and a little girl. They’d been buried but the coyotes had dragged them out.” He slapped dust from his thigh and shook his head. “These damned emigrants will keep coming, with no idea of what they’re up against.”
Eddie was filled with an inarticulate rage. He felt Hildreth’s grip tightening on his shoulder, but he wanted to break free and strike the captain, to smash him down and make him understand that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You buried them again, of course?” Hildreth said.
“We did what we could. What can you do without wasting half a day?” Walworth brushed at his sleeves. “Have you got a drink of that decent whisky left, Sam, or are you going to keep me here in the sun the rest of the day?”
“There’s some left.” Hildreth gave Eddie a little push. “See if the red cow is trying to shove down the corral fence again, will you, Eddie?”
The captain and Hildreth went toward the house as Eddie walked away. He looked at the cavalrymen preparing to camp near the creek. His anger at the captain’s curt dismissal of what he had seen at Gravelly Crossing settled away to a bleakness, leaving the hard knowledge that nobody much gave a damn what happened to an individual in this world. You took care of yourself, like the miserable Snelling tribe.
But Eddie resolved that he wouldn’t be like the Snellings. He would be hard and strong, asking nothing from anyone, giving nothing either, taking care of himself.
That night he wouldn’t sleep in the house because Captain Walworth was there, his dark face showing a tint of red from Hildreth’s whisky. Eddie went to the barn. Mrs. Hildreth fretted about it and didn’t understand, but her husband did. He came out and said, “These army people get pretty hard, seeing everything they do along this part of the trail, Eddie. If Walworth had known who you were — ”
“Why’d you lie to him?”
“I thought that’s what you wanted. He would have questioned the very devil out of you. I knew you didn’t want that, did you?”
“No.”
“That’s why I lied to him. There wasn’t anything he could do but ask questions. If you don’t want to stay here, I can tell him the truth. He can take you as far east as the Mormon settlements and then maybe he can arrange to have soldiers going on to the States take you back with them. I think you know you’re welcome to stay here but I won’t beg you.”
“I’ll stay. I’ve got to do something.”
Hildreth was quiet for several moments. “Something about the people in the other wagon, Eddie?”
“No. I hope they all die in the mountains.”
Eddie could hear Hildreth’s slow breathing in the gloomy barn, and then Hildreth said, “Do you want
to tell me about what happened?”
“No.” The whole story was getting entangled deeper in Eddie’s determination not to talk about it. When he first came into the yard, when he saw the strength and kindness in Hildreth’s eyes, he had been on the verge of blurting it all out; and then Mrs. Hildreth’s sympathy had become too strong; she had touched him, and driven his feelings back in upon themselves.
“You suit yourself,” Hildreth said. He paused. “I guess I know what the something is you have to do. Don’t you worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
Jug and Pistol padded to the door when Hildreth left. They watched him walk back to the house and then they came over and lay down beside Eddie When he woke in the early morning there was a blanket over him. The cavalrymen were up before dawn. Eddie heard them yawning and cursing as they complained about their way of life. From the doorway of the barn he watched them ride away.
There was another rider already far ahead of them, a man with a pack horse. At first Eddie thought it must be a scout for the soldiers, but the man went toward the down flow of the Humboldt and the cavalrymen went eastward in the hazy light. Then Eddie knew who the lone rider was and where he was going.
At breakfast Mrs. Hildreth asked Eddie if he thought there was any way the corral could be fixed to keep the red cow from causing trouble. Eddie had heard Hildreth talking about it and knew what had to be done. He said, “I think so.” He worked hard and steadily during the several days Hildreth was gone, digging holes and setting posts that Hildreth had lacked time to put in place.
When Hildreth came riding back, his brown beard drenched with gray dust, with the pack horse carrying a pick and shovel and heavy bar, he looked at the work Eddie had done and nodded. “We’ve both done a good job in the last few days, boy.”
Eddie wanted to ask questions but he couldn’t bring himself to it. He began to unload the pack horse.
“I used rocks and the iron from the wagon,” Hildreth said. “The place is well marked, in case you ever go past there.”
“Thanks.” Eddie felt tears on his cheeks. He kept his face away from Hildreth.
Hildreth began to unsaddle. “That wasn’t your wagon. I could tell that much from the condition of the tires. It was the no-good one that was here with you.”
“Yeah.”
Hildreth said no more while they were taking care of the horses. When he spoke again, in a soft voice, Eddie recognized the deep anger of a quiet man. “Was it your choice not to go with them, or did they — Was there some other reason?”
Eddie did not answer.
“I want to know!” It was the only straight, hard demand Hildreth ever made of Eddie. Eddie knew he had to answer.
“I went after two oxen that ran away. I was gone two days and nights. That’s when they left.” Eddie didn’t want to talk about Kathy, to relive with words the experience of those two days and nights.
The anger began to leave Hildreth. “That’s a little different then, but not much.” He thought about it and the nature of a reasonable, even-tempered man asserted itself. “It was a worthless outfit, if ever I saw one, to begin with. After two nights they must have thought the Paiutes had got you and they were probably too scared to go look for you. That must have been it. They figured something bad had happened to you and so they just shifted wagons and lit out. You’ve got to overlook a lot in people like that, Eddie.”
There was too much to overlook. It might not have been two nights that the Snellings had waited. They might have left the morning after Kathy and Eddie went away to look for the oxen. Hildreth could make excuses for the Snellings but Eddie couldn’t justify their running away, not even on the grounds of utter worthlessness.
“The thing to do,” Hildreth said, “is to forget all about them and look ahead.”
“Yeah.”
“Before long old Sko-kup will be visiting us with his tribe. Now that’s a sight to see. You’ll have to keep an eye on Pistol and Jug or those Indians will eat them right on our doorsteps.” Hildreth slapped Eddie lightly on the shoulder. “Speaking of eating, Bess promised me a dried apple pie when I left the other day. Let’s go up to the house and see if she’s as good as her word.”
“Fine,” Eddie said, but as he walked along with Hildreth he was thinking of the Snellings. There was too much that Hildreth didn’t know, of Eddie stumbling into the dead camp with Kathy in his arms, of his waiting through the night; and Hildreth didn’t know about the broken-backed shovel that had wobbled and slipped and refused to cut the tough sod.
• • •
Eddie Cushman stayed three years with the Hildreths in Ruby Valley. He came to know Sko-kup and the Indians of the valley, a bedraggled looking lot who suffered by comparison with the Sioux Eddie had seen on the Great Plains. He came to understand that Indians were merely men of a darker color than his own. Their ways were strange but they were not to be despised because of that. What impressed Eddie most of all about them was their unquestioning acceptance of their own way of life, their lack of bitterness toward the tough, inhospitable land of their birth.
The winters were cold months of cloudless skies when travelers on the trail were few. Isolation might have overcome some white men, but Hildreth was a man of energy and curiosity. Eddie rode with him when they explored the mountains. They saw the ghostly rising of dawns from high camps. They visited the Indians.
Eddie learned to handle a rifle and a pistol. Hildreth was an expert with both, although he had no great interest in firearms. Before he took the westward trails Hildreth had been a blacksmith. He was a good one. Slowly and with great care he taught Eddie the trade, holding back none of his own special twists. In three years Eddie could not become a master of the trade but he learned well, and after that it would be a matter of experience.
Most of all Eddie took satisfaction in the welding of hot metal. He practiced with old wagon tires, hammering the glowing iron together with quick strokes, gauging the heat by the color, sensing when it was no longer right to strike, and at last he achieved the skill to make a fusion that was strong, with no well defined line of joining.
Work brought a general dulling of his memories of Gravelly Crossing, but still there were times when he remembered sharply and bitterly. Sometimes the iron that he hammered made him recall the use to which Hildreth had put the iron from the burned Snelling wagon, and then the whole remembrance came back so strongly that he would leave the shop and turn to something else.
In the summers the wagon trains came through. Sometimes they had guides, mainly hard-bitten older men who seemed to hold themselves apart from the emigrants. One of the guides, a stringy old man with far-seeing eyes and a general air of bitterness, spent his time in the blacksmith shop where Eddie was helping Hildreth cut down tires for shrunken wagon wheels.
“You’ve got a good boy there, Hildreth.”
Eddie hoisted a cut tire from the forge with a rope that ran through a pulley on the blackened ridge log high overhead, easing off as Hildreth swung the tire so that the ends to be welded came down on the anvil without a second wasted from the fire. “Yep!” Hildreth said between hammer blows.
“Kids don’t want to work any more,” the guide said. “Everybody wants to go to California and get rich. With all the crooked work going on out there, it ain’t no place for an honest man.”
“Yep!” Hildreth said.
“Wagon travel is slowing down, thank God, but now they’re talking of building a railroad clean through.” The guide spat with contempt. “Ain’t no steam cars ever going to run over the Sierras, no matter what Johnny Fremont or nobody else says.”
Hildreth finished welding the tire and squinted at it critically. Soot from the forge hung in his brown beard. “You may be right, mister,” he said.
• • •
The States seemed far away to Eddie now. Sheer distance had washed away memories that would have been kept alive if his family had lived. No longer had he any wish to go back to his grandparents in Illinois. He did have a
feeling of guilt that he had not tried to send a message back to Grandpa Duncan, telling him what had happened. But Grandpa Duncan had been very old when Eddie last saw him. It might be best for him to go on believing that his daughter and grandchildren had reached California.
If Eddie’s memories of the States were dulling, those of the emigrants were not. They talked more of where they had come from than of where they were going, and they carried the troubles of the nation with them. They argued about slavery and the Compromise as if slavery existed out here; and once Eddie saw two bullwhackers freighting with an emigrant train tear bloody gashes in each other in a whip fight caused by a North-South argument.
Rumsey Snelling, Eddie remembered, had been a pro-slaver, orating loudly about the superiority of white people whenever anyone would listen to him. Maybe he was still shooting off his mouth out in California. Because of him Eddie had long ago taken the other side of the issue without knowing anything about either side.
There was no one like the Snellings in any of the wagons Eddie saw during his summer in Ruby Valley.
The people were all tired when they reached the trading post, and some of their oxen were fit only for shooting; but after a few days of rest there was a remarkable change. As soon as they knew they were going to stay a while, the women prettied up and exposed small luxuries they had hidden from their husbands. The men recovered a willingness to dance and from the big Conestogas they sometimes produced their supplies of finer wines and whisky.
Mixed with a partly hidden fear of the rest of the long haul down the Humboldt, the Forty Mile, and the Sierras, was a gabble of things back home, of politics, of gossip.
Sometimes Eddie felt himself warming toward the emigrants, but each time a dull bitterness came between him and them, for in some way their restlessness and urge to risk their lives were responsible for the tragedy at Gravelly Crossing.
A slender, green-eyed girl in one train became interested in him and seemed to appear wherever he was doing his chores. Her name was Beth Clendenin, and Eddie was to remember her name and her face although he saw her only during three days.