My Brother Sam is Dead (12 page)

I was alone most of the time because Father was out of sight somewhere up the road. In the snow Grey made very little noise, so that I couldn't hear him coming. Every once in a while Father would surprise me by riding silently into sight. He'd wave, and I'd wave back to let him know that everything was all right, and he'd ride away again.

I didn't like being alone so much. Suppose the cow-boys came suddenly up behind me? Or suppose they were hiding in one of the houses or barns along the side of the road? They'd get to me before I could run. As I slogged along I kept turning around and looking down the road behind me, trying to see around corners and through clumps of trees. About every five minutes I would imagine that I was hearing horses, and jump around ready to run for it. Then I would look up and there would be nothing but the empty white sheet lying over the fields and hills.

At lunchtime Father came back. We sat in the wagon, drank some beer and ate some biscuits. “Ridgebury is about two miles up ahead,” he said. “I'll ride through and come back and then we'll go through together. I'll be a lot happier when we're through this place.” He shook his head. “We might as well push on and get it over with, Tim,” he said. “Bear up, it won't last forever.”

We got through Ridgebury all right. Some people came to the tavern door and stared at us as we went through. I guess they thought it queer to see us trying to travel in that snow. Father looked grim. “If nobody knew we were around before, they do now,” he said. Then we got out of the village and he rode on ahead again, scouting.

My feet were wet and cold, and I was still hungry—biscuits and beer don't make much of a lunch when you're working oxen along. To keep my mind off my troubles I began trying to name all the countries in the world, which I was supposed to know because I'd learned them in geography. Some were easy to name: England, France, Sweden, Russia. But there were all those little hard ones, like Hesse and Tuscany and Piedmont. It took me a while to decide if I should count America or not. If the Rebels won the war then we would be a country; but Father was sure they were going to lose, so I decided not to count us. Another trouble was keeping them all straight in my head. After I got over twenty I'd sometimes forget whether I'd already counted Serbia or India or some place and have to go back over the whole list again. And I was trying to figure out whether or not I'd counted Arabia when it suddenly hit me that I hadn't seen Father for a long, long time.

I was shocked. How long had it been since the last time he'd ridden silently into sight? I couldn't tell. It seemed like it had to be a half an hour at least, and maybe an hour. I jumped up onto the wagon and looked back across the white countryside, trying to get a feeling of how far I'd come since I last saw him. All I could see was white, a few clumps of trees, a couple of farmhouses, and the muddy black trail of the oxcart winding through it. Where had I been when I last saw Father? I couldn't remember.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it had only
seemed
like a long time. Maybe being involved with listing all those countries gave me a funny idea of time.

But I didn't believe it; we'd come a long way, as far back over the hills as I could see, and that was a couple of miles. Now I was really worried. Of course there were a lot of simple explanations. Father could have met somebody he knew and started talking. Or he could have gone off somewhere to look for an escort. Or he could have stopped at a farmhouse to get us something warm to eat. There were a lot of explanations, but I knew none of them were true. If he'd been planning to leave me alone for a while he would have told me. He wouldn't have left me by myself this long; he just wouldn't have done it.

So then what? Perhaps something had happened to Grey. He could easily have tripped in the snow and hurt himself. Maybe Father got hurt in the accident, too. Maybe he twisted an ankle or even broke his leg. No matter what it was, the important thing was for me to catch up to him quickly. I belted the oxen across their rumps with my stick. They grunted and shivered their heads and picked up their pace a little, but five minutes later they had slowed down. I hit them again, this time harder. They went faster but hardly for more than a minute or two. They couldn't go much faster because of the snow, and even if they could they just weren't going to. They weren't horses, they were oxen and they just plain didn't move fast.

That worried me some more. If Grey had slipped, Father might have been badly hurt. He might be bleeding or even lying unconscious in the snow. And to tell the truth, I was feeling scared and lonely without him. I wanted to find him. So I pulled the oxen as far off to the side of the road as I could, kicked away some snow so they could find some weeds to graze on, and started plowing on up the road as quickly as I could.

It was easy enough to follow Grey's tracks. Nobody else had been along the road but Father. It was hard trying to jog in the snow, and I began to sweat. Every few minutes I stopped to rest and have a look ahead. If there was a rock or a high stump by the roadside I would climb up on that and look on ahead. But all I saw were the horse tracks running on and on.

I went on along like this for around fifteen minutes covering a good mile and maybe more, when I saw a patch of hemlocks bordering the left-hand side of the road. There was a farmhouse on the hillside behind them. Perhaps Father had gone in there for food or something. I considered cutting off the road across the field to go directly to the farmhouse, but then I decided I'd better stick to following the horse tracks, in case. I plowed on until I came to where the hemlocks began to border the road, casting a cool shadow on the snow. There it was written out for me to see as plain as if I were reading it in a book. The road was all a turmoil of mud and snow marked with dozens of hoof-prints. There were more hoofprints in the hemlock grove; and then going on up the road away from me the tracks of three or four horses. The cow-boys had lain in ambush in the hemlock groves, jumped Father, and taken him away someplace.

I stood there in the snow trying to think, but my mind just stopped working. All I could think was that Father was gone. I began silently to pray, “Oh please, God, oh please.” Then suddenly I realized that the cow-boys might be still around, hiding somewhere and watching me. My neck began to prickle and I swung around and stared off across the fields, then back to the hemlocks. There was nobody. All was silence: no sound of horses, no sound of people talking, no sound of anything but a faint wind breathing in the tops of the hemlocks.

Why hadn't they come back for the wagon? Perhaps Father had got them to believe some story. Or perhaps they were going to do something with him first and then come after me and the wagon. What I wanted to do was start running and not stop until I got home. It wasn't more than twelve or fifteen miles: I could make it in three hours if I pushed. I was scared, that was the truth. It felt so lonely to be by myself with Father gone and maybe dead and nobody but myself to do—to do whatever had to be done. I was too scared even to cry; I just felt frozen and unable to move or think of what I should do next.

But finally I told myself that I had to stop being scared, I had to stop just standing there in the middle of the road. To get myself shaken awake I jumped up and down a few times and clapped my hands. That unfroze me a little and I began to think.

The first thing I did was duck back into the hemlocks to hide in case somebody came along. Then I asked myself what Sam would do if it were him, because he'd be brave and smart and do the right thing. And of course Sam wouldn't go running home. He'd do something daring. The most daring thing to do would be to track down Father, which wouldn't be too hard in the snow, and rescue him. That would be daring all right: I didn't have a gun, didn't have a sword or anything but a knife and a stick.

Then it came to me that even though rescuing Father was the daring thing to do, it wasn't the smartest thing. So I asked myself another question: what would Father do? And the answer that came pretty quickly was that he'd get the oxen and the wagon and the load of goods back home if he could so we'd have something to run the store and the tavern on through the winter. When I thought about it for a minute more I could see that it was the right answer. Maybe Father would get away; the cow-boys might even let him go after a while. One way or another he would be counting on me to get the wagon home—that was for certain.

I jumped out of the hemlock grove and started jogging back toward the wagon. The oxen wouldn't have strayed; oxen don't wander when they're attached to a heavy wagon. The only risk was that somebody had come along and stolen them or made off with the goods. I went along as fast as I could, all the while looking around for signs of people j but there was nobody and in a few minutes I got back to the wagon. Everything was all right. I picked up my stick, banged the oxen on their rumps and they heaved and grunted and started off.

There wasn't much point any longer in listening for the cow-boys. I was pretty certain they'd be along sooner or later, after they'd done—done whatever they were going to do with Father. What I had to do was figure out some way of persuading them to leave me and the wagonload alone. I could always run up into the fields and save myself, but the point was to try to get the wagon home so we could earn our livelihood through the winter.

About half an hour later I came to the hemlock grove and the place along the road where they'd captured Father. Now I began to watch ahead for tracks leading off to the sides of the road where cow-boys might try to ambush me. But I didn't see anything, and on I went, trying to think of a good story for the cow-boys when they came.

The sun was beginning to get down in the sky behind me. It would be getting dark soon. Already it was getting cold and a bit of a chill wind was springing up. I was just as glad of the dark, though. There were houses to pass by and little villages to go through and in the dark it would be safer. I planned not to stop for the night, but just push on all the way home. Besides, I didn't know of anyplace to stop; Father had friends along the way but they were strangers to me. I went on thinking about something to tell the cow-boys; and after a while I began to get an idea.

On I went, belting the oxen when they slowed down.

The sun dropped behind the hills in back of me, leaving a red smear on the sky, which slowly turned black. I shivered. I was hungry. There were some more biscuits and jerked beef in a sack in the wagon, and a bottle of wine Mr. Bogardus had given Father for a present. The wine would warm me up a bit. But I decided not to eat or drink anything yet. I knew I was going to be really tired and cold and miserable soon enough, and it would be nice to have the food and the wine to look forward to.

I was thinking about the wine when I saw the cow-boys. They were sitting on horseback in the middle of the road about twenty yards ahead of me—three black figures stock still in the night. The sight of those unmoving figures shocked me, and I almost ran. But I didn't. Instead I slapped the oxen on their rumps as if I hadn't any worries about who was standing in the middle of the road. One of the horses stamped and his bridle jingled in the night.

I cleared my throat quietly so I wouldn't sound scared. Then I shouted, “Are you the escort? Am I ever glad to see you.”

One of them pulled the cover off a lantern he had been holding. A circle of hazy light spilled out into the night, showing bits of horses and faces and guns and the trampled snow. “Pull up the oxen,” the man with the lantern shouted.

I stopped the oxen up and walked forward a few paces. Then the man with the lantern leaned forward to let the light shine on me. “It's the boy,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Father said that the escort would be along soon, but when you didn't come I was worried that the cow-boys would get to me first.”

“We're not the—” one of them started to say.

“Shut up, Carter,” the man with the lantern said. “Come here, boy.”

I took a couple of steps forward. Now the lantern was shining in my eyes, and it was hard for me to look up and see their expressions. All I could see was the horses' legs and the snow. The man's voice just came out of the glare. “When did your father say the es—we'd be here?”

“He figured you'd be here an hour ago. That's why I was so worried. He told me not to worry, but I couldn't help it. He said that when the shooting started to fall flat and I'd be all right.” I paused “I thought there'd be more of you, though. Father said there'd be at least a half dozen men in the escort. He said just fall flat when the shooting started.”

There was silence and then one of the others said, “I don't like this. It sounds like an ambush.”

The man with the lantern swung around a bit to face him. “Are you going to get scared off by a boy's story?”

“What, sir?” I said.

“Never mind, boy.”

“Do you have anything to eat, sir?”

“Shut up, boy.”

“I don't like this. Let's go.”

The man raised the lantern to look at the others. Now I could see their faces a little. Oh they looked tough—unshaven and dirty, wearing swords and pistols, and muskets tucked in behind their saddles. “Are both of you going to be scared off by a boy's story?” he snarled.

“I still don't like it. How do you know it's a story?”

“Oh stop being a couple of old women.”

“It isn't worth the risk, Judson. Let's leave.”

“Not worth the risk? There's a hundred pounds worth of stuff in that wagon.”

“Judson, stealing rum is a hanging matter. I don't want to—”

Just then a dog barked in the distance. The oxen bawled.

“Damn,” one of them said.

“It's them.”

“It's just a dog barking,” Judson shouted.

“I'm not taking the chance.” He wheeled his horse in the snow, and the other did likewise.