Bride's Flight from Virginia City, Montana (11 page)

Think of hot things,
he said to himself,
think of the Utah desert in summer or a dry August wind in Wyoming or the hot springs at Yellowstone melting back the snow and ice. Think of thick woolen blankets and heated bricks at the foot of your bed and patchwork quilts as heavy as iron ore. Warm spiced milk. Hot coffee. Apple pie and raisin pie just pulled out of the oven. A wood fire and venison roasting on it.

Marble snorted and reared. Zeph’s right foot went into nothing. He began to fall and grasped desperately at the horse’s traces. Marble didn’t fight his grip or panic, but pulled slowly, snorting the whole time, and dragged Zeph back over the edge. Zeph got to his feet, head spinning, and embraced the horse, who permitted it. He had a final apple and gave it to the large sorrel with a whispered, “Thank you.”

They moved forward again, except that Zeph swung left to avoid the drop-off, and the team swung with him. Snow that had gone up his sleeves, down his neck, and into his loose pants chilled him until it melted and dried against his skin. Marble began to walk more briskly, and Zeph half-ran for ten minutes to get his blood pumping. His eyelashes started to collect ice, and he had to rub his gloved hands over them to keep his eyes from freezing shut. He touched a gloved hand to his mouth and came away with spots of blood—his lips were chapped and torn.
One foot in front of the other,
he said to himself. The wind shrieked and bit.

He stumbled. Hung on to Marble’s traces. Felt an arm go through his. Caught a scent that made him think of oranges and cinnamon and chocolate.

“Fremont?” he asked through chapped lips. “Why that for my name?”

“Fremont’s Peak,” Charlotte answered.

They walked together and the team kept pace.

“Conner?”

“Fort Conner.”

“I know Fort Conner. Guess I should be happy you didn’t take all your names from Yellowstone Park: Elephant Back, Fire Hole, Lower Geyser Basin.”

“How about Stinking Fork?”

“If you knew Charlotte Spence’s wicked sense of humor, you’d thank the Lord for small mercies.”

He glanced over and saw her laugh to herself at that. The snow was already thick on her clothing.

“What’s this about a hundred horses?” she teased.

“If I have a good spring there’ll be eleven. I guess a hundred sounded better.”

“Are there any apples left in my travel bag?”

“Not sure about that.”

“I thought you were having trouble tying your shoes in the stage. I didn’t know you were helping yourself to apples from my luggage.”

“I
was
having trouble tying my shoes.” “Oh.”

“I never wear shoes.”

“One day I’d like to be married—”

“Amazing what a snowstorm and shoelaces will bring to mind.”

“—and for my honeymoon, I want to spend a whole month, maybe a whole spring, summer, and fall, just riding and camping in Yellowstone. That would be the best wedding gift a husband could give me. Other than himself, that is.”

Zeph blinked his eyes several times to clear the snow and get a look at her face as she said all this. Did she mean it? Or was she passing the time? And why was she telling him?

“Doesn’t sound like a difficult honeymoon to make happen,” he responded. “Be sure your wishes are clear to the gentleman who wins your hand.”

“Oh, they will be. There is a problem, however.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m married to a man already.”

“You are?” Zeph couldn’t tell if she was still joking.

“I am. Fremont Wyoming. We have two children. And, do you know, I cannot recall a wedding ceremony or cradles or cribs, and I certainly cannot recall a honeymoon. I don’t believe there ever was one.”

“How did you let that slip past you?”

“I think the marriage just came upon me too fast. I was overwhelmed. A husband, a son, a daughter, it all happened at once. There never was time for a honeymoon.”

“A woman like Conner Wyoming, I think she’d rectify that.”

“Hold up!” called Stan from the driver’s box. “We’re clear!”

Zeph and Charlotte stopped walking and so did the team. Stars were shining like lanterns. The moon was shaped like a silver cradle. The wind had dropped to a cool breeze. The road ahead was open and dry.

“Looks like we came down some,” remarked Zeph.

Stan nodded. “A drop in elevation did the trick.” He climbed down from the coach and shook Zeph’s hand. “I’m obliged to you, young man. Missus.”

Looking like walking, talking snowmen, Stoner and another man got off the coach and came over. “Thank you, mister,” said Stoner.

“Name’s Bert. You got a way with those beasts,” said the second man, his beard glittering with icicles. “You ought to be head wrangler with some big outfit down in Pecos, Texas.”

“I’d like that warmth right about now,” Zeph replied.

Bert grinned through the ice. “So would I.”

“You’re quite the lady, missus,” said Stoner. He took off his hat and whacked it against his leg. Snow flew in all directions.

Charlotte inclined her head. “Thank you.”

“Both of you got a way about you,” nodded Stan. “Nice to see a couple that got so much in common hitched and filling up the West with children.”

“We have always thanked God for our marriage,” said Charlotte.

“We got time for coffee?” called Slick as he opened the coach door for Cody and Cheyenne. “Why, you got your fixin’s?”

“I do.”

Slick had a sack out of which he pulled wood, newspaper, matches, coffee, a coffeepot, brown sugar, and tin cups. “A habit I picked up during my gold rush days.” He lit a fire at the side of the road, melted snow in the pot, boiled it, added the coffee grounds, let it steep, added sugar, and started pouring.

“The kids have some?” he asked Charlotte.

“A little bit would do them no harm.”

“And I have some cocoa to sprinkle into it, for Slick and those under twenty only.” He winked, producing a can and a thick block wrapped in paper.

“What’s in the paper, Slick?” asked Stoner.

“Only for those under twenty, ladies and gentlemen.”

He opened the paper, broke off chunks of dark chocolate, and dropped them first into Cheyenne’s cup and then Cody’s. “Give it a minute to melt some,” he told them.

Stan laughed and tilted back his hat. “Slick, I got to say, you are some ball of fire.”

Bert snorted. “Missed your calling. Should’ve opened up a stage station. People’d take the trip through Apache country just to sit down to one of your hot drinks.”

“When I retire from keeping you alive, Bert.”

Zeph sipped at his cup. The heat was giving him new life. Charlotte still had her arm through his. A scarf was wound around her head, just leaving a space for her eyes, nose, and mouth. Snow was melting on the scarf and the loose strands of hair that had slipped out from under.

Moonlight and starlight always found her eyes. She was more beautiful than God’s heaven and earth. Now how was he supposed to tell her something like that with all these men standing around and the horses snorting and blowing and stamping and steaming? He gazed at the mountains to the east.

“Were you going to say something?” she asked.

“The moon makes the mountains look like mother of pearl.”

“Is that what it was?”

“And you,” he said so the others could not hear. “The moon makes me see a beauty in you I’ve never seen anywhere else on earth.”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t answer him. Instead she looked away.

Stan glanced over and poured the dregs of his coffee on the ground. “Let’s get on board, ladies and gents. Mister and Missus Wyoming have a train to catch in Utah.”

Chapter 11

T
he locomotive stood hissing and trembling, like a blackened and smoking arrowhead quivering on a bowstring, ready to let fly at the snow-capped Rockies and the hundreds of miles of open plain that stretched east of them.

Zeph and Cody stood together and stared at it.
US G
RANT
was painted in white italic script on the side of the locomotive’s cab.

“Is that the president?” asked Cody.

“That’s right,” replied Zeph. “Though maybe this locomotive was commissioned while he was still commanding the Union army.”

“That is simon-pure.”

A man in striped overalls with a striped hat, clean white shirt, and bright-red scarf climbed down from the cab, pulled off one of his thick tan gloves, and put out a hand for Zeph to shake. He turned and shook Cody’s hand, too, a big smile playing over his sun- and wind-burnt face.

“Bobby E. Clements,” he said with a grin, “kind of like Bobby E. Lee, what folk in Carolina called me during the war, though now most call me by the name the railroad hung around my neck, Cannonball Clements.”

“Fremont Wyoming. And my son, Cody.”

“Proud to meet you. You two on board?”

“All the way to Omaha,” said Zeph.

“I take her more than halfway to Cheyenne. Cody, I will cut her slick as river water through the valley, you’ll have a fine ride.”

“Will we see buffalo?” asked Cody.

“Buffalo? Well, who knows. Now and then we might see a small herd south of the tracks. I see any coming up, I’ll blow the whistle four times, how’s about that?”

Cody smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

“I heard you talking while I was up in the cab. You bet, Mister Wyoming, the Union Pacific had this engine named for the president before he ever was a president. Might seem funny to have an old Rebel like me driving a locomotive named after a Yankee general, but I got no quarrels with Grant. He treated Lee fair at Appomattox. Treated us all fair, for that matter, back in ‘65.”

Zeph thought he was going to say something else about how Grant had treated the South since ‘69 when he’d become president, but Cannonball squinted up at the sun and shook his head. “It ain’t all what presidents do or don’t do that makes the South what it is, or the whole country for that matter. We do plenty of harm on our own.” He looked Zeph in the eye. “I don’t think much of these armed gangs decidin’ who gets to vote and who doesn’t in Carolina. I won’t go back unless my own people make it right. Maybe I’ll never go back. I guess I’m three parts a westerner by now, anyhow.”

He walked over and patted the side of the US Grant. “She’s a good one. Danforth Locomotive Works, four drivers five foot in diameter, twenty-four inch length of stroke. There’s ones with more drivers, but Grant holds her own. She does well, very well.”

“Cannonball!” called the fireman from the cab. He had his pocket watch open in his hand. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”

“Easy, Dan,” said Cannonball. “We’ll make it up.”

He shook hands with Cody and Zeph again. “You two enjoy the trip. Got sleepers?” Zeph nodded.

“The rails’ll rock you like babies. Good day, gentlemen.”

Cannonball climbed back up into the cab. Zeph put his arm around Cody, and they started walking back to their car where Charlotte and Cheyenne were waiting. The air had frost in it, but the day was not uncomfortable.

“How long will it take for us to reach Omaha?” asked Cody.

“I’d say about three days.”

“It took us a lot longer to come out by wagon from Pennsylvania.”

“I guess it did. Train goes from California to New York in a week and a day.”

Charlotte was at the window, smiling down. They could just make out her voice. “I thought we might have to haul everything out of the baggage car and wait for the next train east.”

“We met the engineer!” said Cody excitedly. “A very nice man named Cannonball. He will blow the whistle four times when he sees buffalo!”

“Will he?” Charlotte laughed. “I hope he doesn’t spot a herd at midnight.”

Zeph and Cody swung up into the car and sat in their seats facing Charlotte and Cheyenne. The car was crowded with people heading east for Cheyenne, Omaha, Chicago, and New York. Charlotte handed them each an orange. Cody’s eye lit up.

“Something special,” she said, offering the boy her black-handled John Petty and Sons pen-knife. “Real William Wolfskill oranges from Los Angeles, California.” Zeph glanced at the knife. “Where’s that from?” “It was Ricky’s. He had it in the army.” “Sheffield, England?”

Charlotte looked over at him. “What a question. I never examined it with a magnifying glass. I just use it.”

Zeph took out his own pocketknife, a J.M. Vance with a spear point and a small saw people called a cock spur.
V & Co
was stamped on the blade. He began to peel his orange. He noticed that Cody was more interested in the knives than he was in the oranges.

“Where did you find the fruit?” Zeph asked Charlotte.

She was helping Cheyenne use another knife that looked to be German made with mother of pearl handles. “There was a market downtown. I purchased more apples, too. In case we run into another blizzard.”

Zeph grunted. “You think the locomotive will eat apples?”

“The engineer might.”

Cody opened the knife Charlotte had given him and started poking at the skin on his orange, but he kept glancing up at Zeph.

“What is it, boy?” Zeph finally asked, popping a few orange segments into his mouth.

“What do you use the saw for?”

“Every now and then it cuts something better than the straight edge of the big blade.”

“Where did you get it from, Mister—”

“What’s that, son?” Zeph interrupted.

“Pa, where did you buy it from?” Cody’s face reddened.

“Well, I picked it up in Pennsylvania, Cody.” Zeph winked to ease the boy’s discomfort at calling him Pa for the first time. “Here. Made in Philadelphia. Why don’t you try it on that William Wolfskill?” He folded in the blade and saw and handed the pocketknife to the boy.

Cody’s discomfort vanished as he held Zeph’s knife with the warm honey bone handles.

“Thank you … Pa.”

“You’re welcome, son.”

Charlotte glanced up from Cheyenne’s orange. “I didn’t know you’d been to Pennsylvania.”

Zeph finished eating his orange and looked out the window at Ogden. “I’ve been.”

“You’ve never mentioned it. Here I thought we had a great surprise in store for you.”