by Steve Frazee
Cushman kept listening for noises up on the bank. He heard none. “What do you want?” he asked from the darkness. The man swung around with a gasp.
The fellow peered toward Cushman. “Where are you?”
“What do you want?”
“I’m Joe Kenton I’m looking for help. We got a wagon stuck upstream in the river.”
“When did you get stuck?”
“Just about sundown, up at the crossing below Trout Creek. She’s afraid the water will come up and — ”
“The water ain’t coming up for a while,” Cushman said. “How’d you find me?”
“I was riding for help at some ranch. I seen the tracks of your horses and thought there must be a house down here.”
“You’re alone?”
“Why, sure.” Kenton shifted around uneasily, trying to see from the moonlight into the dark by the rock where Cushman was.
Cushman said, “I’ll be coming up the river tomorrow,” neither giving nor withholding a promise of help.
“She wanted to get out of there tonight.”
Some outfit with ten kids, Cushman thought; and it was a full two months early for a wagon to be in this part of the mountains. He thought of the Snellings, letting everyone else pick up their mistakes for them. “I’ll be up that way tomorrow sometime,” he said.
“We can pay you for your trouble. It ain’t so awful far, and the moonlight makes it easy riding. If — ”
“I’m going nowhere tonight,” Cushman said. “Now get out of my camp and let me sleep.”
Kenton stood where he was. He said stubbornly, “If the river comes up in the meantime — ”
“It won’t raise an inch. Now get out.”
Kenton let his breath out with a heavy grunting sound. “How far is it to a ranch?”
“Four, five miles.” Cushman was tired of the man. First, he stuck a wagon at an easy crossing, and then he let a woman drive him out in the freezing night to put upon other people for help. Let him go on to a ranch, if he thought anyone was idiot enough to get out of bed in the middle of the night to help him.
Kenton turned away and started back up the gulch, walking with a heavy, pigeon-toed movement. His frozen pants legs rasped together as he went.
“In spite of the moonlight, you’re going to have a hard time finding a ranch house,” Cushman said. “They’re all tucked in pretty snug in the cottonwoods under the hills”
Kenton didn’t answer. Cushman heard him go on up the bank and mount. The man didn’t ride away immediately. His horse stamped restlessly and Kenton stayed on the bank, apparently trying to make up his mind.
After a few minutes he rode away.
Cushman walked up the gulch to make sure. Kenton was going up-river. It was bitterly cold. Cushman went back to his camp. He knew the crossing; it was easy. Some of these hopeless people should have seen the Missouri in full flood. He stood by the dead fire and old memories came out of the night.
They pursued him after he got back into his blankets. He remembered the crashing instant when he had last seen Billy Bodega. He had gone across the Rio Grande with Captain Dodd’s company to support the Union guns at Val Verde. Out of the dust and the quivering shouts there came the thunder of the first charge of Texan lancers.
Dodd’s company beat them back. Dodd’s company almost destroyed the lancers, but they kept coming. There was one stark moment when Cushman saw Bodega, leaning forward on his horse, his mouth wide open with shouting, bearing straight toward Cushman with his pistol raised.
In that tick of time they recognized each other. Bodega swerved off to the left. Cushman fired his rifle into the dust behind Bodega. It was one clear instant, and after that there was only confusion and shouting and dust around the guns. Captain McRae lost his battery and the Union men fell back across the river and Cushman never knew whether or not Bodega had come out of the charge alive.
When he least expected it, Cushman’s mind was suddenly taken with these flashing, disturbing memories of the past. There was no reason that he could understand why Kenton’s coming to the camp should have started the somber train of remembrance again, but it was so.
Before sunup Cushman was on the move. The hoofs of the steers clacked on the frozen ground as the animals went reluctantly into the icy edge of the northern wind. After an hour the wind died and the sun grew warm and there was a rising brownness all over the floor of the valley between the patches of coarse snow, but the sheer mountains ahead and on the left still held their eye-shattering whiteness.
By late afternoon the river might rise a little. If the wagon up ahead was not out by the time Cushman got to it, he supposed he would have to give the blundering fools a hand.
He turned with the river and saw the gentle run of hills where Trout Creek Pass came down. After a time he turned north once more, fording the river where it was wide and shallow. Two miles beyond, on the mesa, he came to the track of a wagon that had come off the pass the day before. It had gone angling toward the bloom of cottonwoods along the Arkansas. He stared down at the divided marks of oxen shoes. For a long time he had hated oxen.
Reluctantly he followed the wagon trail to the river. It had gone down an easy slope to the water, and on the other side there was a simple way up; but the driver had disregarded, or overlooked, tiny swirls that meant a bottom of jagged rocks. Although it was not even hub-deep in the stream, the wagon was badly hung up.
On the far bank Cushman saw smoke. He looked downstream for an easy crossing for the steers. It was there, a shallow riffle breaking over solid gravel, not a hundred yards from where the wagon was jammed. He eyed the conveyance sourly. It was bigger than it should have been, higher too, a top-heavy affair with a stovepipe sticking through a metal square in the canvas.
Some idiot was trying to travel in the mountains with all the comforts of home.
Cushman went down and crossed the steers below the grove of cottonwoods. He unsaddled the pack horse and took all the rope he had and went on into the grove.
Kenton and a woman were standing near a fire, soaked to the waists. Stacked around the grove were cases and boxes and gear they had carried from the wagon. Cushman knew that he had estimated Kenton accurately. The man was squat and powerfully built He was also slow and not very smart; the wagon itself was evidence of that.
The woman puzzled Cushman. She didn’t belong with Kenton. She was no girl by any means; Cushman estimated that she was in her mid-twenties, tall and strongly formed, with a set to her neck and back that spoke of pride and determination. Her hair was a rich brown color, tied at the back with a black grosgrain ribbon. It appeared that she had combed it back straight and hard this morning, with no regard for appearance, but now it had strayed back in a natural heavy waviness and some of it was straggling down one cheek. Her mouth was full and wide.
She looked steadily at Cushman and he received the impression of sharply upslanted eyebrows, but as he stared at her, he decided that it was the set of her eyes, rather than the brows, that gave the impression. In the conventional sense she could not be called beautiful, Cushman thought; there was too much of an air of strength and will about her for that. But she didn’t belong out here beside a wagon stuck in a river.
“Is this the man you talked to last night?” she asked Kenton.
Her voice was smoothly controlled. Cushman would have described it as carrying a tone of culture and breeding, of coming from a background of life strange to him. In a way it reminded him of Billy Bodega’s voice. Bodega the gambler, the son of an Eastern judge. Billy Bodega was not his name; he had picked it up because the sound pleased him. He had poked fun at his own background, but his voice had always been softly toned, superior, as if he were poking fun, too, at everyone else’s background.
This woman, standing beside a fire with her dress soaked and draped to the shape of her body, asked stupid-looking Joe Kenton a question that seemed designed to put Cushman in his place before he had a chance to speak.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Kenton said.
“I didn’t send my driver down the river for help from you or anyone else,” the woman said. “I mentioned that the river might rise, although I have no fear that it will before we’re out of it. Mr. Kenton became worried and rode away without my bidding.”
“All right.” Cushman didn’t like the imperiousness or the air of self-sufficiency about the woman. She acted as if she was in her own mansion back wherever she came from, explaining something to servants. He looked at the wagon. By taking off one rear wheel and lashing a heavy skid in its place, they probably could drag the heavy vehicle over the main rock that had it fouled, and after that it ought to come clear with the oxen and his two horses hauling away.
He rode to the edge of the river for a look. If they swung hard downstream right after clearing that one bad rock, it wouldn’t be bad. The thing of it was, you had to stagger around on slippery rocks, belly-deep in icy water, to remove one rear wheel and get a skid in place, all because this grand dame didn’t have brains enough to hire a driver with common sense.
Cushman watched the river breaking through the wheel spokes and rippling over the big rock. You wouldn’t have to lash the skid to the axle, as he’d first planned. You could use a small tree as a skid on which to drag the wagon up on the rock, then put the wheel back on. Hell, it wouldn’t be too bad, after all, except the cold soaking in the river.
He felt better, at least about the work involved. “What kind of a rig is that, anyway?” he asked.
“It’s a restaurant,” Kenton said proudly. “You haul it to one camp, stove and everything, and then if business ain’t — ”
“Never mind, Mr. Kenton,” the woman said. “I’m sure the gentleman is more interested in going on about his business than hearing of ours.”
“I am, for a fact,” Cushman said, “but I’ll help you get the wagon out.” He looked hard at the woman. She wasn’t going to get on very well in this country with an attitude like hers.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Her coolness irritated Cushman more than he would have admitted. “I was camped last night when your man showed up. There was no sense in getting out because there was nothing we could have done in the dark. That’s what’s sticking in your craw, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” the woman said. She looked at Cushman as if he were a child. “I quite agree that nothing could have been done last night, and I’ve already told you that I didn’t send Mr. Kenton for help.” She came to the edge of the river and looked at the wagon without alarm.
Her skin was smooth and faintly dusky from the sun. Her eyes were green and calm. For all her high airs, Cushman had to admire her composure. So she was going to run a restaurant in the wagon, moving from one camp to another if business didn’t suit her in any one location She had an idea, at that, and looked as if she had the courage to carry it out.
“How many oxen have you got?” Cushman asked.
“Six. And a good horse.” The woman inclined her head toward the cottonwoods. It was the first unladylike gesture Cushman had seen her make.
“That’s enough to get the wagon,” he said. “Where’s your ax? Let’s get started.”
“How much will you charge?”
“Look,” Cushman said “you’re stuck in the river. I’ll help you get clear. That’s all there is to it.”
“How much will you charge?”
“Nothing! Let’s get the job done and let me get on my way to Victory.”
“I’ll pay you ten dollars.”
Cushman had offered his help, grudgingly, to be sure. If there had been two men here, they could have gone to hell for all the help he would have given. Now, by insisting on paying him, the woman was making him feel his own attitude keenly. He didn’t like it.
“Do you want me to help you get the wagon out — for nothing?” he asked.
“No,” the woman said quietly, “I don’t. How much more do you want?”
Cushman walked to his horse and mounted. He expected the woman to say, “Wait a minute.” She didn’t even look at him.
Kenton, who had been standing with his head moving from side to side as he followed the conversation, was the one who protested. “Hold on, Miss Drago! I don’t think I can — ”
“You got it in there. I think you can get it out,” the woman said. “If not, you can go to a ranch down the valley and hire help.”
Cushman hesitated a moment longer. Kenton stared at him helplessly, and then the man’s expression changed to solid anger. “You dirty, selfish, backbiting — ” For all his clumsiness, Kenton was swift as he leaped toward a rifle leaning against a stack of cases.
“No, Mr. Kenton,” the woman said unhurriedly. “Let the gentleman go without further argument.”
Cushman rode away. He kept one eye on Kenton, but there was no need. Kenton’s motion, when his hand was almost on the rifle, was stopped as if by a wall. He turned slowly and put a murderous look on Cushman. Miss Drago glanced at neither man. She said, “Now, Mr. Kenton, let’s figure some way to get the wagon out before this warm day brings the water up.”
A few minutes before, Cushman would have interpreted her mention of rising water as an indirect appeal for help, and even now it could have been taken as a slap at his stubbornness; but he knew it was neither. Miss Drago simply had forgotten him and was stating a fact.
Cushman put the saddle and gear back on the pack horse. He rounded up his steers and drove them around the grove and on up to the next gravel bench. He held close to the high bank of the river where the swatches of snow were melting fast under the warm spring sun. From a quarter of a mile away he looked back and saw the wagon.
Kenton was leading a span of oxen out to it. The sun struck on the white water breaking around their legs. The animals were bellowing at the cold. Sheer force used to try to drag the wagon free would result in a broken wheel, tip that fancy stove over, and pry up hell in general.
Cushman stopped his horse, frowning as he looked back on the scene. Miss Drago came to the edge of the river, a small figure struggling with a cottonwood log dragged by one end.
Maybe she had the right idea about getting the wagon out. It would have to be her idea; Kenton didn’t have sense enough to pour sand from a boot with the directions on the heel. Cushman watched the woman wade out into the river, floating the log below her. She floundered about and almost fell. She pointed for Kenton to go back to the bank, and after a time he got the idea and took the span of oxen to the shore.
Cushman watched the two of them trying to block up the wagon so they could pull a wheel. He knew how numbing the flow of the Arkansas was against their bodies.
The steers drifted on ahead. They were three hundred yards away before Cushman noticed. He rode after them. Damn it, that was the way she wanted it. She was a proud, sure woman, taking nothing from her inferiors. She would have made a hired hand of him, Ed Cushman, who had learned independence the bitter way.
Once more he stopped. If they skidded the wagon too far and let the wheel-less axle drop over the rock, they were in for real trouble. Cushman couldn’t see the river now, but he kept looking back toward the bend of the mesa. Kenton might wreck the wagon, get the woman hurt. Cushman cursed the man. He sat for a time longer looking back at the muddy tracks of his passage, and then he turned his horse sharply and rode on to take care of his own affairs.
He knew men who would have laughed at her insistence on paying for help, men who would have extricated the wagon and then said, “Aw, hell, forget it.” There would have been no offense, no sensitiveness about being demeaned because the woman had offered to pay.
Cushman went on up the narrowing valley, plopping through the mud, driving his steers slowly. The great snow peaks threw dazzling white against him. He squinted hard as he rode. Muddy rivulets from the melting snow were running toward the river. By late afternoon or evening, if they didn’t have the wagon free, the Arkansas could very well take it on down the river.
Only a few times since leaving Ruby Vall
ey had Cushman gone out of his way to volunteer help to someone in a fix. He took care of himself and expected others to do the same. His rebuff at the wagon sat strangely troublesome in his mind.
By late afternoon he was as far north as the camp of Victory, off in the mountains to his left. The short way was a straight line, but he looked at the timbered ridges that lay between him and his destination and knew that the snow would be deep under the trees. There was no great hurry; the miners at Victory would be all the hungrier for beef two or three days from now. He went on up the river, so that he could swing around and come into the wide gulch that led to the camp on the western side of three great ridges interposed between the valley and the steep rise of the mountains proper. In the gulch the sun would have had a chance to do its work and he would not have to fight deep snow under the pines.
Cushman drove his steers along. Several times he was close enough to the river to look down into it. The clear water of this morning was growing roily from the runoff of the snow.
He wondered if the woman and Kenton had got the wagon out all right.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE CAMPED that night near a crude cabin on the Arkansas, where a lonely prospector welcomed him vociferously. The man was young, bearded to the chest. His clothes were patched with buckskin. Out in the river was a gravel bar where he had been sluicing all winter. Cushman asked him how he had done.
“No good at all.”
“Then why did you stay?”
The prospector cocked an eye at the river. “Spring floods will bring down the heavy gold. All I got so far is flour stuff, but I’ll be here when the heavy water washes the nuggets down. Couldn’t take a chance on having someone jump the claim.”
Spring floods would bring mud down, Cushman thought. He took care of his horses and set up a camp in a grove of cottonwoods.
The prospector wanted Cushman to share his cabin for the night, a miserable hovel without windows, and with a ridgepole so low that the owner, not a tall man, could not stand erect inside. The fireplace was crudely joined against the logs and smoke blew into the room with every shift of the wind.