Colter's Path (9781101604830) (12 page)

Wilberforce looked around at the large group of watchers and listeners. “For the sake of dignity and the good name of a college upon which I have served proudly as a trustee, I will refrain from speaking the details in such a public arena,” he said. “Suffice it to say I can be trusted when I declare that former President McSwain is a thief. And a particularly scoundrelous one at that. There is good reason why the word ‘former' attaches to his title.”

“Well, I know nothing of that,” replied Witherspoon. “All I know is the man had long held a high reputation in our community, and that he wanted to join us and was able and ready to pay for the privilege.”

“He would not be here had I known of it,” Wilberforce said, and the look he gave to the humiliated former collegiate leader was withering. Jedd admired how well
McSwain held up beneath it, and promised himself to get to the bottom of what this alleged thievery business was all about.

At that moment the other man in Crabtree's grasp managed to wriggle free and dance aside. With the attention focused on McSwain up to that point, Jedd had not even noticed that the second captive was none other than Ben Scarlett.

“I think I know you, sir,” Wilberforce said to Ben. “I've seen your vile self drunk in the gutters more than once. Worthless piece of street rubbish! What's your name—Scarlett, I think?”

It was Ben's turn to put on as dignified a look as he could…a challenge given the raggedness of his attire and his typically unshorn and unshaven condition. He was not as tall as Wilberforce but somehow managed to make himself appear nearly so.

“My name is Benjamin Scarlett, sir, and I do not appreciate being called ‘rubbish.' I am a man and a citizen of Knoxville, and I expect the respect proper to such a status.”

“You're a damned town drunk,” Wilberforce replied derisively. “One of too many of your ilk in our city. You are far from the kind of citizen California will need as it builds its future on the gold we all expect to find.” Wilberforce turned to his brother. “Withers, are you going to tell me that this…this vagrant is also a ‘paid and approved' member of our group?”

Witherspoon shook his head. “I know nothing of him and cannot account for his presence among us,” he said.

“Sneaked into a wagon, I'll bet,” a nearby man said. “I know Ben Scarlett. Nice enough gent when he's sober. But sober don't happen as often as it should.”

Wilberforce stepped in front of Ben and looked down his long nose at him. “Is that what happened, sot?” he said. “You sneaked onto a wagon?”

Ben did his best to maintain the self-possessed look he'd managed to achieve, but clearly it was difficult. He stammered meaninglessly at his challenger; then his eyes began darting from side to side. Looking for escape.

“He's with me,” said Jedd Colter, stepping up and
placing himself at Ben's side. “I invited him to come, and I'm paying his fee.”

Ben looked at Jedd with an expression of confusion, respect, and gratitude mixed together. Meanwhile Wilberforce stared Jedd stonily in the eye and said, “Are you speaking the truth, Jedd?”

Jedd cocked up one brow. “You wouldn't imply I'm a liar, would you, Wilberforce?”

Ben Scarlett, beginning to gather courage because of Jedd's support, bounced on the balls of his feet like a fighter ready for a scrap. “Yeah!” he shot at Wilberforce. “You calling my friend a liar?”

Wilberforce wrinkled his nose like a man smelling filth, and said, “You stink, sir. Like a heap of dung. Like a mountain of rotted potatoes. Like a worm-eaten corpse.”

Ben's face reddened, but he saw the prudence of restraint and took a step back from the man. Jedd stepped up in Ben's place.

“There's no call to talk to him that way,” Jedd said. “I'm going to ask you not to do it again.”

Wilberforce lost a good deal of haughtiness when faced with Jedd's intense, blue-eyed gaze.

“I doubt I'll have cause to address him, or anything about him, again,” Wilberforce said. “If you are this man's sponsor, Jedd, I'll accept him. But I know his habits and ways, and I'll expect you to keep him under your wing and out of trouble while he is among us.”

“Ben will give you no trouble. Will you, Ben?”

“No, sir. No, sirree. Not a bit. You got the word of Ben Scarlett on that.”

Wilberforce laughed. He looked around at the crowd. “Well! I'm satisfied! I've got the word of a man who pees his own pants regularly! A man who squats with dogs in a ditch to do his necessaries! A man who would give up his last bite of bacon for a swig of rum. A man who—”

“That's enough,” Jedd said.

Wilberforce glared at Jedd but shut up and turned away.

Ben faced Jedd. “Thank you,” he said. “But he was right. I did sneak onto a wagon. And I ain't paid no fee.”

“Stay close to me and I'll see you're all right,” Jedd said quietly. “And, Ben, while we're traveling, stay away from the liquor. Will you?”

“I'll try.”

“Try hard, you hear me? Really hard.”

“Are they going to try to make you pay my fee?”

“Don't worry over it. I encouraged you to come to California, you'll recollect. I'll do what needs doing.”

“It's what you said to me that put the notion in my mind. You know, about California being a place where a man can maybe get a new start.”

“I've had some further discussions along that line lately,” Jedd said. “They've reminded me that there's another side of this thing that you can't overlook. You can get a new start in California—no question about it—but new starts don't go far if old problems are left festering. A man can travel across a whole nation, Ben, and his old ways and habits and problems can follow him sure and steady as a faithful old hound. He goes off and thinks he's left it behind. Then he wakes up one morning and the old hound's scratching at the door just like it used to…and before he knows it, his new life has turned back into the same old one he tried to get away from. Do you know what I'm saying, Ben?”

Ben Scarlett looked away, wistfully, and watched a buzzard circling off above the nearest wooded hilltop. “I think I do, Jedd. I think I do. You're telling me there's some things a man can't shuck off just by putting miles behind him. Like maybe…his drinking, if he does too much of it. Like I do.”

The travelers were not far along when the first significant rumblings of discontent over leadership emerged. It took the form of an unauthorized meeting among the men to talk over General Lloyd's heightening tendency toward lethargy and indecision.

The immediate issue was horses. From the outset, some of the group had complained that Lloyd's decision to use horses to pull the wagons was a bad one. Mules were the predominant preference, though some declared
oxen would have proven best in the long run. Whatever the individual preferences, most seemed agreed that the general had been overly dictatorial in how the decision had been made. He had not even consulted the Sadlers, nor Jedd Colter, but had made his choice based on his “long experience in the military realm.” Or so he told the restless and glowering crowd that challenged him.

“I want to hear what Colter thinks about it!” a man called out. “Ain't that one of the reasons he's here, to tell us what we need to know about such as this?”

General Lloyd lifted his chin and looked fleetingly like the dignified officer he once had been. “I don't object to hearing what Mr. Colter has to say.”

Jedd found himself forced into the conversation. “General, a man can transport his hind end to California by way of any number of dragging beasts. Hell, he could string enough cats together to do the job, if he could manage it. That'd be something to see, wouldn't it? Wagon with a quarter mile of cats yoked up and pulling along together…man would think he'd gone lunatic, seeing something like that.”

“What are you babbling about, son?” the general cut in. “What's this childish nonsense about cats? You're saying we should be pulling our wagons with cats?” A titter of laughter in the crowd made the general glance at the people and give a fast and uncharacteristic grin. He wasn't accustomed to making people laugh, and found he liked it.

Jedd said, “No, sir. What I'm saying is that no matter whether a man is pulling his wagon with horses or mules or cats or salamanders, when he reaches some of that mountain country in the West, he'll wish he had oxen. Other times, it may not matter so much.” Jedd paused, deciding whether or not to continue. What the devil? “What
does
matter, though, is that all that early-on talk about this being the group that will make the California crossing faster than anybody else is going to wind up as nothing more than idle talk, the way we're going. Taking time out to argue over dray beasts only slows it more. Here's the fact: what we've got is horses. It's like
marriage—for better or for worse, you end up having to go with what you picked. It's time to quit talking and keep moving. A little faster, if we can do it.”

“I used to live in Kentucky,” said one of the few women in the group. “There'll be no going faster for a long spell yet. The Kentucky country's too hilly. It will take us a long while just to move the wagons through the mountains without having them skid back down backward on the up-slopes or run out of control on the down-slopes.”

Jedd and the general shared a mutual shrug. “Oh well, then,” Jedd said. “We press on as best we can.” And General Lloyd nodded sadly.

I
f anything said inspired the “commander” of the California Enterprise Company of East Tennessee to try to pick up the speed of the journey, the commander failed to show it. The train moved only a few more miles before General Lloyd called it to a halt again, declaring that his wagon and a couple of others required repair. Jedd anticipated that Wilberforce Sadler would rise in fury and maybe even oust the general from his leadership position. It didn't happen. Jedd began to wonder if maybe the old military man had a hold of some sort over the Sadlers…knew something incriminatory about them, maybe. Or was owed something by one or both of the brothers.

For whatever reason, the Sadlers glumly let the poky old man grind the venture to a halt while his wagon was disassembled and put back together again, slowly. Jedd heard Wilberforce ask his brother, “Reckon that wagon maker is Lloyd's twin brother? They move at the same speed.” To which Witherspoon replied, “Move? You've actually seen the general
move
?”

Wilberforce laughed and cordially patted his brother's shoulder. It was a rare and astonishing event for all who saw it.

*    *    *

With nothing else that seemed more worth doing during the period of waiting, and with open country all around him, Jedd took Treemont with him and the pair hunted for a full day. Coming back into the camp that evening, bearing fresh meat, they saw something new: a man, not previously part of the group, seated before a canvas on an easel with a brush in his hand, painting an image of Wilberforce Sadler's wife, who was nicely dressed and seated primly on a chair somebody had dragged off a wagon.

“I'll be!” Jedd said. “You see that, Treemont? We got us a picture painter here.”

“Well, it's something to do while everybody waits on the general, I guess,” Tree replied.

“What? You think he'd want to paint your ugly face?”

“Hell no. But if he's going to paint pretty women, I'm glad to watch. The women, not him.”

“Well, Wilberforce's wife is pretty enough, I'll grant you. But she's Wilberforce's wife. That's the end of that story.”

The painter was named Dupont Gale and had wandered into the camp in the late morning, seeking a passage to California. He had little money and sought the right to cover his fee by labor, creating portraits of attractive women—attractive, at least, once he was finished enhancing their images in pigment. He also painted men who considered themselves important enough to be enshrined on canvas and were willing to pay to make that happen. Wilberforce Sadler was already signed up for a turn in the model's chair after his wife's turn was through.

Jedd, a classic frontiersman figure by any standard, drew Gale's artistic eye. Gale urged Jedd to sit for a portrait, but Jedd would have none of it. It went too strongly against his nature. Even so, over time he caught Gale sketching him on the sneak when he wasn't busy at his easel. Jedd soon began avoiding the man. He had visions of a picture of himself hanging in the hallway at the Sadlers' headquarters back in Knoxville, and didn't like the idea. At last the artist stopped asking, but spent
more time observing and sketching Jedd when he wasn't looking.

It appeared he would create a portrait of Jedd Colter, with permission or not.

As time passed, it was clear that General Lloyd's propensity for dragging things out was not about to change. The man was incapable of making any decision without thinking it through at least three times. His slowness became a humorless joke among the members of the wagon train. It was evident that the passage of the California Enterprise Company of East Tennessee was likely not to be the fastest crossing on record, as intended, but the slowest.

They hadn't even yet reached the Mississippi.

Once through Jamestown in Tennessee, the train of wagons moved north into and through Kentucky, heading for Louisville. Jedd, a traveled man, knew better than some what they faced. Hills and hollows, mountains and streams of many sizes…the wagons seemed to crawl along, and often even the crawl slowed when, on the steeper inclines, it was necessary to use long poles to help hoist the wagons up and forward. Then it was usually necessary to use skid boxes beneath the wheels on the far side of the hills to keep the wagons from sliding, or pushing the horses into an unsafe and uncontrollable pace. Progress slowed substantially in such terrain, so much so that even General Lloyd complained.