Medicine Road (14 page)

"Push on," replied the mountain man, "and push
on fast. When I'm smelling them, I don't like to
squat around with the stink in my nostrils. The wagons ought to roll at five."

"Stopping at Paiute Crossing, tomorry?" Andy
Hobbs knew they would, wanted to get a little more
out of the taciturn wagon scout.

"Yeah. I'll leave ahead of you, about three. She's
moon dark the early part of the way, and I'll jog
slow. Want to make sure them sons don't get around
and flank us, again. I had them figured to leave us
be once we got here to Wild Hoss Bend, but with
them toting that white man along, I don't know.
Something's up, likely. It's got me fretted, too. Happen the crazy scuts might yet take another cut at us."

"Well, you go ahead and have your look, Jesse."
The wagon master chucked his head confidently. "But
they ain't going to bother us no more. You'll see."

"I hope so," was all the mountain man said.

"You ain't just a-wolfing," was Morgan Bates's
fervent amendment.

Jesse rode slowly but even so his Sioux mare,
Heyoka, had him far up the Cut-Off by first light.
The scant morning gray let him refresh his remembering of this part of the Fort Road, quickly showing him it hadn't changed so much as a buffalo chip
since the last time he'd covered it. It was an open,
desolate country, lonely as a dog wolf crying the sun
down back of the Wasatches. What grass there was
had become so dry it powdered under a horse's
hoofs like he was walking in a sun-baked puffball
bed. The hills on the far side of the Black Fork built
themselves rapidly into a regular range, fish white
in color and bare of cover as a mangy hound's head.
And withal, high enough to hide all the Arapahoes
in the Northwest behind the lowest one of them.

Hell. Watonga could be over there a mile away,
with half the Arapaho nation, and not show himself
any more than a tumble bug rolling a rabbit berry.

As soon as the sun got up enough to allow a man
some far looking, Jesse began spotting distant
hands of quick-drifting dust puffs. Antelope, by
damn, and him so sick of stringy old mule meat and
sowbelly he could scarcely bear it. Still a man
wouldn't dast shoot one of the cussed goats if it
came up and begged him for the favor. In a country
like this, where the loudest morning noise was a
hawk's shadow chasing a white-foot mouse through
the buffalo grass, a shot would carry almost to De seret and back. One pop out of his Hawken just then
would like as not have a man up to his armpits in
Arapaho hostiles before the powder smell blew off
his buckskins.

By ten o'clock, the smooth-walking Heyoka had
covered sixteen miles, bringing the mountain man
within long sight of that night's wagon camp at
Paiute Crossing.

The burned-out frontier post at this spot had always been an interesting place to Jesse, and what he
spied when he got up on it this time did nothing to
dull that interest. At the site of the gutted log walls,
the south-bank hills threw a spur of their range over
onto the north side of the Fork. This wing of hills
sheltered a good grove of big pines, protecting them
from prairie fire wipe out and letting them survive
to furnish firewood, sun shade, and storm shelter to
the Cut-Off traffic. The crumbling walls of the old
post made a handy breastwork to get back of in case
of an Indian attack, and the cool Black Fork ran
close by, with its bottoms meadows thick with excellent forage grasses. It was the favored campsite on
the old Fort Bridger Road-of both white and red
traveler.

In this case what intrigued the narrow-eyed Jesse
was that it was being favored by both colors! Even at
the distance, the mountain man could see that the
white outfit was an emigrant train, and a poor one.
Their shoddy wagons were corralled around the ancient log walls about as sloppy as any outfit could
be, their cook fires and camp rig scattered around
outside the protecting timbers.

The red camp was something else. Or it would be
once the Indians, now methodically rearing their
lodges, got it set up. And for a spell of years there after, certain surviving members of that shabby
white caravan were going to be blessing the fact that
Jim Bridger's close-mouthed protege and hastily appointed supply-train chaperon rode into their lives
when he did-which was in good time to see those
lodges going up. And to read from the number of
lodgepoles employed in the teepee frames and the
distinctive markings of the buffalo-hide coverings,
their exact tribal identity was Northern Wind River
Arapahoes.

Jesse watched the Indians for a string of long minutes, saw they were intent on setting their village
straight, knew from that, and the absence of picketed war ponies close in, that they were planning no
immediate trouble for the whites.

Putting Heyoka to a stiff lope, he sent the smokegray mare up the Fork bottoms, keeping her down
behind the shelving banks that buttressed the
stream at this point. When he got upstream, past the
old log walls, he turned the mare into the heavy timber of the grove, came silently down behind the
straggling white camp.

Midway through the grove, an old channel of the
Fork, cut there by some forgotten year's high water,
protruded from the main channel like a probing finger feeling back into the woods. After a wet spring
like the past one, this side channel held a trap of
backwater well through summer. Called Paiute
Slough, this sometime wilderness pool made a perfect spot for secluded bathing, particularly welcome
to pioneer white womenfolk who had likely been on
the trail many a dusty day's drive from Fort
Laramie without any such god-made grove to hide
their ablutions. With Heyoka stepping neat and
dainty as a cat, Jesse came up to the slough without being seen-but not without seeing. And what he
was seeing was six white women bathing in Paiute
Slough. Six Wasicun squaws just as naked as the day
the Lord had delivered them.

Heyoka's ears went forward and she got her nostrils flared for a good loud snort. And that was all
she got. Jesse clamped his paw so tightly on her
snout, she nearly swallowed her teeth before the
snort got halfway down her Roman nose. Muzzlewrapping her with a quick turn of the hackamore,
the trapper slid his buckskinned leg over her crouching rump and stepped noiselessly to the ground.
Only after that did he grant himself the pleasure of a
silent whistle of plumb-center satisfaction.

A man sort of got women out of his head living
the life Jesse Callahan had been living these past
lonely years. Seeing these white womenfolk got his
thoughts moving again to his restless and uncertain
future. Jesse was of an age for a man to start figuring
on a female and young ones. These women made
him remember that, just as quickly as they had set
him to thinking of the other thing. But God certainly
knew a man like him had crawled through enough
teepee flaps and known enough Arapaho women to
last him till kingdom come. And now maybe Old
Man Above was trying to tell him that what Jesse
Callahan wanted more than all the gold in California was a real woman of his own color. A whiteskinned one, by damn, and light-haired. And one
with real blue eyes. That was his idea of a woman,
by cripes! One with yellow hair and blue eyes.

Right now, though, he wasn't seeing any that fitted the bill. Besides, the whole bunch of them were
having such a proper time of it, yelling and splashing each other with so much honest ginger, it couldn't help, after those first minutes of getting his
hunger of normal curiosity quieted down, but take a
man's mind back to what he was doing there. And
what he was doing there wasn't supposed to be
brush-spying on a bunch of middle-aged emigrant
women taking themselves a decent bath!

Jesse backed away from the slough brush, careful
to put his feet so as not to startle the bathers with
any twig poppings. Then, swinging up on Heyoka,
he began walking her on around the slough. He had
gone perhaps forty yards, coming to the inland end
of the water, when he saw her.

Maybe if God had set it up otherwise, a lot of
things might not have happened. A red-wheeled
Pittsburgh full of gunpowder might have wound up
in Fort Bridger where it belonged. Jesse Callahan
might have gone on wandering around the Rockies
until he was as old and knee-sprung as Andy Hobbs.
And Watonga might have headed for home with a
full hide of hair and an unsmoked reputation. But
God had it in mind otherwise. She was sitting on a
sandbar at the far edge of the slough, maybe fifty feet
from the staring mountain man. She had been out of
the water long enough for the morning sun to get into
her hair and fluff it out. And, man, that was some hair
to get into! Yellow as July corn silk, it flooded down
over her shoulders clean to her rump and, damn it,
the way she was sitting, it covered a lot a man would
admire to see. Even more than he would the hair.

She had her long legs drawn up under her, her
body sort of angled forward to the slant of the sun,
and that way about all a man could make out of her
was that she was naked! Jesse, blood pumping in his
head until his temples were near bursting with the
hammer of it, was wishing she would move a mite.

Obligingly she did. Stretching slowly, she brought
her arms up to brush the gold wave back where it
belonged. She had been crouching on an old piece of
buffalo robe and now she lay back onto it with an
ease and smoothness reminding Jesse of nothing so
much as a big, slim cat sprawling out to sun soak.
Arching her back, she flung her arms and legs out to
let the mountain man see she was a real blonde, the
soft down curling under her arms and nesting below her belly curve, fluffing a thick wavy-gold in
the sunglow.

Apparently she had lain back only to stretch, for
after a minute that had Jesse's stomach wrapped
three ways around his backbone, she rolled to her
knees, and stood up. Then you saw her. By cripes,
you really saw her! She was tall, five-ten, anyway,
Jesse guessed, and a pure cross between a cat and a
young willow for slender-moving grace. But that
slender part of it went only as far as it should. Like
the waist, the slim wrists and ankles, the tapering
hands, small feet, symmetrical calves and clean,
straight knees. Otherwise, what she was supposed
to have, was where she was supposed to have it.

Her breasts were hand-size, for a man with real
hands, and pointing out to the sides just a trace, the
way Jesse liked to see them. And they had that
sweeping upcurve along the bottom line of them
that put the nipples to standing with their erected
points nosing upward. Her arms and shoulders and
thighs had that full roundness so rare in slender
women, her hips, that sudden, soft, jut-out over the
upper bones, together with the sculped hollows and
cuppings of the big buttocks that, to Jesse's thinking, made a woman.

That the enchanted mountain man could have sat still for much more of this unplanned peeptomming will have to remain in the realm of the
highly improbable. Fortunately the young woman
took this moment to turn with her retrieved dress
over her arm, looking for the first time across the
slough.

In riding up on the emigrant woman, Heyoka had
carried Jesse out of the covering brush. For the full
term of his high-blood preview, the red-haired trapper had sat there in plain view, fat and stupid as a
tickbird on a buffalo's bottom. The girl didn't waste
any effort screaming; she just went diving behind
the nearest brush clump, immediately popping her
head back over the top of it. There, she poised herself, wide-eyed, motionless, waiting for the stranger
to speak.

A man couldn't help liking that, too, her not yapping like a stepped-on puppy just because a strange
man had seen her naked. Most women would have
still been ki-yiying about it. There was another thing
he liked, too. Something he hadn't noticed about her
until she'd gotten that slinky, wildcat's body of hers
covered up: her face, by damn!

Breaking out his best set of teeth, Jesse flashed her
a spreading grin. "'Morning, ma'am. Trust I didn't
startle you. I didn't aim to ride up on you thisaway."
As he talked, he watched her face, liking it better
every second.

He'd always cottoned to high cheek-boned
women, with thin nostrils and short, straight noses.
If those noses turned up a midge on the end, like
this one, he didn't mind that, either. At the same
time, he liked a good jaw on a girl. And a full, wide
mouth. And above all, a juicy lower lip that pouted
out a mite like hers was doing, right now.

"You frightened me, all right, mister." The voice
had just enough satin in it to go right with the face
and figure. "What do you want?"

Jesse ignored her question to put his own. "What's
your name, ma'am?"

"Lacey. Lacey O'Mara."

"O'Mara. .."-he let his tongue curl around the
name like a kid slurping blackstrap off a bent
pewter spoon-"Lacey O'Mara! Sure, the whole
thing's the luck of the Irish, ma'am. Mine's Callahan. Jesse Patrick Callahan."

For the first time the girl's face relaxed. Jesse
thought he had thrown her a real dazzler with that
smile of his but he abruptly discarded his whole
previous scale of smile values. He had never seen a
real smile before. He practically had to squint his
eyes shut to bear the way the sun bounced off her
white teeth.

"That's fine, Mister Jesse Patrick Callahan, but I'm
not Irish and you're not in luck. That O'Mara didn't
come with me. I picked it up along the way. It's Missus O'Mara to you, mister!"

Jesse clucked to Heyoka. The little mare stepped
into the slough, started splashing through the shallows toward the hiding girl.

"It's all right, ma'am!" the mountain man called,
noticing the alarm that straightened the smile-curve
of her mouth. "I'm just coming over to see the color
of your eyes."

When he had reined Heyoka out the far side, the
girl found her voice. "You bring that mangy little
horse one step closer and I'll scream bloody murder!"