by Steve Frazee
Beth was his own age. One afternoon when he was repairing a broken clevis she stood in the doorway of the shop watching with admiration.
“There’s something beautiful in the way you use your hands, Eddie.”
Eddie felt the heat rising in his neck and face. He hoped Beth would think it was from the forge.
“Do you like it way out here where there’s nothing to see or do?” she asked.
“Sure.” Eddie stiffened, feeling a need to defend the Hildreths and himself for being where they were, although he knew that a restlessness and curiosity to see a greater part of the world had developed in him during the summer; perhaps, he thought, an infection from the emigrants. This girl who looked so cool and self-possessed embodied a life that he had missed because illness and cowardice had combined to leave him a frightened boy alone at Gravelly Crossing.
She drove the sense of aloneness deeper into him. “But this land is so wild and useless. You could grow up and be like a hill-billy that doesn’t know anything beyond a few miles from home.”
“You people are darned glad to stop here.”
“Of course. We’re glad to find any place where there’s water and grass and a chance to rest and pretend to be human beings.”
“You mean no one is a human being if he lives here?” Eddie asked angrily.
“No, I don’t mean that. It’s just that — ” Beth couldn’t explain it against the anger she saw on Eddie’s face. “Of course, you were born here, so I guess that makes a difference.”
“Yes, I was born here! Now go on and let me work!”
He was sorry when Beth walked away. He didn’t understand his own anger. He tonged the clevis into the slack tub and then dumped it on the dirt floor and stood looking at his hands, big by inheritance, growing broad and powerful from work. There was nothing wrong with the girl’s asking questions.
Tomorrow the train was leaving, so tonight he would try to make up with Beth at the dance between the big fires. Maybe if she knew the circumstances that had brought him to Ruby Vallev she wouldn’t think he was such a clod. He became nervous at the thought of dancing with Beth, although he had danced with other girls from other trains.
That evening when the fiddler was tuning up and the caller was exercising his voice and the Hildreths, who never missed a chance to join in the fun, had already gone to the big fires, Eddie got into Hildreth’s whisky to brace his courage. He didn’t know how much to take from the jug so he took more than enough.
When he walked down to where the dancers were making great shadows in the firelight, his walk was steady and his face was solemn, but he was joyously drunk inside. He saw Beth dancing with a young man from one of the Kentucky wagons. She didn’t look at Eddie. He decided that she was pretending not to notice him.
The dance ended and he walked over to her, feeling a warm glow all through his body. He made a little bow and spoke words he had heard his father use, “May I have the honor of the next dance with you, Miss Clendenin?”
The moving light of the fire showed surprise and pleasure on Beth’s face. Her partner stared at Eddie. He was three or four years older than Eddie, tall and dark, with beard just beginning to show strongly on his chin.
Beth said, “Not the next dance, Eddie, but after a while — ”
“You’re drunk,” the Kentuckian said, sniffing and bending to peer into Eddie’s eyes. “You ain’t dancing with Beth. Go on back to the blacksmith shop, kid.”
It was not the name, or the charge of drunkenness, or even the older man’s arrogant superiority that enraged Eddie Cushman, but rather that he seemed to be making fun of the words Eddie had spoken, that he was attacking the memory of Eddie’s parents.
Eddie thought no farther than that He made no threats along conventional lines. He said nothing; he merely hit the tall Kentuckian as hard as he could. He had to reach and to lift the swing to make it carry.
The Kentuckian went down, unconscious, but Eddie didn’t know that. He piled on top of the man and tried to kill him. Hildreth was the first one to reach them. He hauled Eddie up and asked without anger, with even a trace of amusement in his tone, “What’s the matter here?” And then as he held Eddie, tense and staring down at the prostrate man, Hildreth smelled the whisky. “You trot on back to the house, Eddie. Real quick.”
Eddie wrenched away and stalked out of the crowd, going to the barn instead of the house. Jug and Pistol whined at him as he passed, but they were guarding the house and would not leave their posts. By the time Eddie reached the corner of the barn he was sick at his stomach, and even after he emptied it he was still feeling miserable.
He crawled into the meadow hay like a hurt animal.
When the dance was over he heard Hildreth coming to him. Hildreth came inside and stood there, his presence heavily felt although unseen; and it was like the night three years before when Eddie would not stay in the house with Captain Walworth.
“You ought to be forgetting some things by now,” Hildreth said.
He could not have known the real cause of the outburst tonight; he was guessing on the basis of what he knew of Eddie and he was as close to the truth as Eddie himself could understand it.
“She’s a real nice girl, Eddie, but that ain’t no way to get along with women, let me tell you.”
“I don’t want to get along with them.”
“A temper is a fine thing,” Hildreth said, “but you can’t let it run wild, without reason. You know something? We spent an hour bringing that man around, and he’s a big, tough fellow. It wasn’t funny.”
Hildreth went away and presently the dogs came in and bedded down in the hay. To hell with the Kentuckian. And if all Hildreth was going to do from now on was to give advice, Eddie didn’t need to stay and hear it.
Soon after daylight the train moved on. Eddie watched them form up and go. Beth came past on the seat of a strong Conestoga, driving while her mother held a crying child. The mother looked down and frowned darkly at Eddie. Beth’s expression was serious and disapproving too; but when the wagon had gone past, she turned suddenly and waved at Eddie, a tall, green-eyed girl going westward in the dust.
Something caught in Eddie’s throat and he was no longer angry at Beth, or even at the Kentuckian; but when he thought to wave at her, the dust had obscured the wagon. The train crawled out of the valley and out of sight, and out of Eddie Cushman’s life forever.
When he turned to go back to work, this place where he had lived three years was bleak and lonely. The old squaws who helped Mrs. Hildreth about the place were going to the creek for water, ugly, unhurried, hopeless like the land.
CHAPTER FOUR
WAR TALK was strong among the people in the last trains that stopped at the trading post in the summer of 1858. Sure as the world, war was going to pop between the North and the South and it would be a hell of a thing too, but the way some of those Southern Congressmen were acting, it looked as if things had gone too far to smooth over.
Eddie took no interest in the talk. He was against slavery because Rumsey Snelling had been for it, but that was as far as he cared to investigate the problem.
Fall closed out emigrant travel on the trail. Jeremy Flint, who freighted goods and supplies to isolated places like the post in Ruby Valley, was due back from California with a drive of mules he intended to sell or trade in the Mormon settlements; but after that there was no certainty that anyone would be along till the middle of spring.
Then Captain Walworth came past with six officers. He and the rest had been ordered to report to Washington, D.C., for new assignments. They were traveling at their own expense and cursing every minute of it.
But Walworth was enthusiastic about the promise of action if war broke out in the States. It turned out that he was an abolitionist. “We’ll ride with hell and the sword clean through the South! It’s time the slavery question was settled for good!”
“Happens I’m from Missouri,” Hildreth said mildly, “and my Pappy never owned no slaves to speak o
f, but I think I kind of understand the situation. It ain’t as bad as some of you fellows make out, and when it comes to riding through the South with hell and the sword, I ain’t sure you’ll ride too far at one whack.”
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” Captain Walworth said. He looked up the valley. “If it does head up like it’s threatening to, there won’t be many soldiers left out here, Sam. Sko-kup or some other ratty chief just might get it in his head to gobble up places like yours.”
Hildreth grinned. “I don’t hardly think so, but if it happens, it happens. Me and Eddie ain’t fretting none in advance.”
The officers left the next day, somewhat unsteady from being up half the night drinking Hildreth’s whisky.
“It’ll take a war for them to get any promotion,” Hildreth said. “Walworth’s been a captain for ten years. Let ’em have their war. I was with Doniphan when we stole Texas from the Mexicans, and I had all the marching and fighting I want for the rest of my life.” He grinned at the dust of the army men. “Let’s go hunting.”
High in the Ruby Mountains near a small lake, Eddie sat with Hildreth under a tree and looked on the country below and held in his mind the same perspective of the valley that the view gave: it was a small, unimportant place. The railroad that the old guide had talked about would never come here. Nothing would ever change in this place.
Eddie looked far into the distance, toward Gravelly Crossing, and all the loneliness that he could not shed came over him.
It was time for him to leave. He would go somewhere far away, where it would be possible to forget. For a long time he had been building up to it and now he wanted to tell Hildreth, who sat half drowsing with his rifle across his legs.
Hildreth liked the country. The trading post, although he ran it well, was only his excuse to be here and to stay here. He had found some kind of contentment that could never be for Eddie Cushman in this land.
It was hard to speak of the subject of leaving but Eddie knew that he was going to do so. He rose and stood with his rifle at his side, staring out on the hazy, endless space beyond the small valley.
He said, “Have you ever thought of leaving here, Sam, going on to California, or someplace?”
Hildreth looked up slowly from under his heavy brows. “I thought of it, yes. If Bess and me had kids, maybe we wouldn’t have stayed here. But now we’ve got everything we need, and all the peace you could ask for, so I guess we’ll stay.”
Until they got old and feeble, or until the Indians went sour and wiped them out. Eddie had learned that death could come quickly. People died and left nothing behind to mark their going.
“Where do you figure to go, Eddie?” Hildreth asked quietly.
Eddie was on the defensive immediately; he was always like that when anyone touched his thoughts before they were spoken. “I didn’t say I was going anywhere.”
“You’ve been coming to it for some time. It’s natural, I guess.” Hildreth ran his hand along the stock of his rifle. “There won’t be another train now until — ”
“I don’t want to go to California or any other place that people kill themselves trying to reach!”
“You’re a funny one, Eddie. You’re holding too much inside you yet.”
Eddie didn’t answer. He kept staring at space and the blue skies that ran to the end of the world.
“Jeremy Flint will be back one of these days,” Hildreth said. “You could go as far as the Mormon settlements with him this winter.”
“That’ll be a start.” Eddie had wanted to work into his announcement of leaving the fact that he was grateful for all the Hildreths had done for him, but now the thought was driven under a defensive layer because Hildreth had divined his intention of going away before Eddie mentioned it.
Hildreth got up slowly. “Not much use to hunt any more this time, I guess.”
It would be the last time for the two of them, Eddie knew. Suddenly he recognized the disparity in their ages. There were touches of gray in Hildreth’s beard, and his eyes held a sort of tired and distant expression. Eddie remembered some of the many things the man had done for him, his patience and understanding with the shocked boy of three years ago.
It was time to speak of that, but Eddie didn’t know how to go about it.
They gathered up their gear and started back to the valley.
Bess Hildreth heard the news of Eddie’s decision to leave when he and Hildreth came in long after dark. “That’s the way of boys, I suppose,” she said briskly, and turned to the fireplace where she was warming a pot of stew on a swinging hook. She knelt there with her back to Eddie and Hildreth for a long time, dipping into the stew with a long ladle. When she dished up the meat her face was quiet and composed, but Eddie saw Hildreth watching her intently, and saw the faint expression of pain that came to the older man’s face as he read his wife’s thoughts.
Over a period of several days Hildreth made certain gifts to Eddie. He gave him a tough pony and a saddle the first day.
“I’ll send the money back. How much?” Eddie asked.
Hildreth came close to losing his temper. “Don’t be a proud fool! Whatever I give you, you’ve more than earned.”
Eddie resolved that he would pay anyway, when he made the money; but he argued no more with Hildreth, who a day or two later gave him a rifle much better than the battered weapon Eddie had carried up the Humboldt. The next day Hildreth gave him a heavy Navy pistol. By degrees Sam Hildreth did his best to equip a young man going out into a wild country.
And then, knowing that material gifts would not solve the larger problem of Eddie Cushman, Hildreth gave advice. “Watch your damned pride and your temper. Remember, in spite of what happened to you a few years ago, there’s a lot of love in this world if you’re willing to make the exchange.” He stared at Eddie moodily and walked away.
The dust of Flint’s mule herd was in the valley before Hildreth gave Eddie some news. “When Captain Walworth was here the first time you saw him, I asked him to try to get word to your kin back in Illinois.”
“How’d you know where we lived back there?”
“Your folks stopped here three days, Eddie. I talked to your father and mother.” Hildreth paused. “It took a year for the message to get back there, but it finally did, and an answer came back. Your grandparents are both dead. They died last summer.”
It was old news, of something that had happened long ago. Eddie wondered why it should strike him so hard now, but he covered his feelings and asked, “When did you hear?”
“The first train that came through this summer. I thought the longer I waited the better it would be. Maybe I was wrong. Do you think so?”
“They were awful old when I saw them last.” Eddie was choked up. “It’s all right.” He was not the man he thought he was: he was a little boy again standing in the sun at Gravelly Crossing, with his arm around Kathy, and Mrs. Snelling was looking at them from under the wagon bow. He swallowed and looked at the dust of the mule drive.
Hildreth said nothing as they waited.
At last Eddie thought that his voice would be under control. He said, “Looks like Flint is short of help,” and his voice was all right.
“Yeah, it does,” Hildreth agreed.
“Let me talk to him, instead of you asking him if I can go with him.”
“Sure.”
Jeremy Flint was a swarthy, sun-scorched, ragged little man with a round black beard. There was a New England twang in his voice and a trader’s shrewdness in his heart. At critical bargaining points of a conversation he had a habit of opening his mouth as if to speak forcefully, then clamping his lips together, and striding away with a shake of his head; but he always returned.
He came into Ruby Valley with seventy head of big California mules, two Mexican riders who were scarcely more than boys, and an old rider named Sonoma. Hildreth asked him how the trip had been.
“Just fine,” Jeremy said. “Two lazy riders quit me on the Truckee, the Paiutes stuck arrows into
six of my best mules at Big Meadows, Sonoma is talking of quitting, and I probably won’t make a cent for all my grief by the time the Saints get through out-trading me. Yes, I’m having a fine trip.”
“I feel sorry for you,” Hildreth said. “Come and have a drink.”
“Free?”
“Anyway, the first one.”
“One’s all I ever take.”
Sonoma was going to quit, all right. Privately, he complained to Eddie about the cold, the distance, the drabness of the country. Sonoma had never been over the Sierras before.
“It’s worse east of here,” Eddie said.
“It couldn’t be,” Sonoma said, “but I don’t think I’ll find out. I should have quit on the Truckee with them others.”
Jeremy rested his mules for three days. On the day before he was to leave he came to Eddie and said, “Ever think about having some fun for yourself and making a few dollars?”
“Can’t say that I have. What kind of fun?”
“Helping me drive the mules to the Mormon settlements. I really don’t need another hand, but I thought it would be an interesting trip for you. Your pa says you can go if you want to.”
“How much?” Eddie asked.
“I figured I could give you a mule. You could trade it off and make yourself some real money.”
“You said you were going to lose money on the herd,” Eddie said.
“And I will, but you can’t lose because the mule ain’t costing you anything to start with.”
“Just a trip across the salt desert. I might consider it for five mules.”
Jeremy opened his mouth, closed it and walked away. It appeared that he was going to walk out of the valley but he came back after a time and said, “Two mules then, and that, by God, will ruin me!”
They settled on three mules. Jeremy was woefully short-handed, and knew it….
When Flint saw how quickly Eddie assembled his gear for the trip, the trader’s little eyes sparkled. “I been took. You figured to go with me all the time.”