Powder River (6 page)

When Dixon returned to his house on Sunday morning, Mrs. MacGill ran out to meet him, breathless and disheveled.

“They're gone,” she said. “They've run off, Caleb and Lorna.”

“Run off?” he said, sliding to the ground. “Why? When? How long have they been gone?”

“Oh, Doctor, I don't know,” she said, twisting her apron in her work-roughened hands. “I haven't seen them since last night. They went out to do their chores, like always, but when I got up this morning they were gone. They took the pony and the blankets off their beds.”

Dixon looked north, toward the snow-covered mountains. Though the February afternoon was uncharacteristically warm, the weather was preparing to turn. Dark clouds were moving toward them, like crouching bears. “Where's Harry?”

“In town,” Mrs. MacGill said, “staying with the Donahues. Remember?”

Dixon nodded absently. He'd forgotten Harry was spending the week in town with a friend's family, and now he was sorry he'd agreed to it. He could use his help.

“I think I know where they're headed,” Dixon said, “and I have to go after them now, before the snow comes. Is there anything else you can tell me? Did something happen to upset them?”

Mrs. MacGill put her hand to her white head; her topknot had loosened and was listing to one side. “Well, I scolded 'em, I did. I told them to muck out the horses' stalls, and when they were done there to fill the barrels in the kitchen and upstairs. Cal would've done it—and Lorna's share, too—but she commenced to complaining and so he started in. So I switched 'em, the both, on the backside. But I didn't expect the two to take off. I've switched 'em before.”

Dixon frowned. He did not hit his children and did not want anyone else to strike them, either. “I thought we had an understanding about that,” he said.

“Yes, Doctor, but they need discipline! Lorna won't make old bones without someone to take her in hand. She'll find trouble, and sure enough. Save her and you'll save the boy, too, the way she owns him. Anyhow, like I said, I don't think 'twas the switchin' made 'em take off.”

Dixon did not argue. What Mrs. MacGill said was true, the twelve-year-old twins were out of control and it was his fault. He hadn't given them a father's love or a father's attention. Sometimes he could barely even look at them. Even though he knew, in his rational, physician's mind, that Caleb and Lorna were not responsible for Rose's death, he had not been able to make his heart believe it, too.

“Please pack some food, Mrs. MacGill. I hope to be back with them tonight, but give us enough for two days, just in case.”

* * *

Dixon left at two o'clock, riding his mare, Alice, a long-legged sorrel with a flax mane and tail, and leading a mule with the food and a tent. The day's sunny warmth held for the first few hours, and he had no trouble following the pony's tracks. As he suspected, Lorna and Caleb were going north, probably to the Crow village. Even now, more than a year after leaving Paradise Valley, the twins were more Indian than white. Unlike Harry, neither had any interest in schooling—it was all he could do to get them to wear shoes.

After about three hours, the wind acquired a sting and the first few flakes of the snow that had been threatening all day began to fall. Dixon turned up the collar of his sheepskin coat and hunched his shoulders, hoping he would not regret his decision to travel alone. Mrs. MacGill had tried to talk him into riding to Buffalo to enlist Sheriff Canton's help, but Dixon refused. “There's no time,” he said, “not if I'm going to catch up with them tonight.” Guilt and fear drove him to take speedy action, but now he was forced to admit another pair of eyes would have been useful, especially if they were in for a heavy snow.

The sky was going red, and the valleys ahead were bathed in violet shadow. The snow was coming faster and the pony's tracks were becoming harder to see. Dixon's mind drifted back, sixteen years, to the first time he'd traveled this stretch of the Bozeman Road. It was late summer, and he rode with the three-man team of Montgomery Van Valzah, the barrel-chested civilian who carried the locked mailbag between forts Laramie and Phil Kearny, with stops at Fort Reno and Bridger's Ferry. This was still Sioux country then, and the sixty-five-mile journey from Fort Reno to Phil Kearny was a perilous one, but all of Red Cloud's painted warriors could not have stopped him, for Rose was at Fort Phil Kearny and nothing would keep him away.

Even in the bright sunlight, the fort's blackened skeleton held the power to chill him. Now, as he neared it again, Dixon found himself growing uneasy about confronting the ruins in the winter moonlight. Would ghosts of the slaughtered soldiers stand sentry in the ruined blockhouses? Would spectral voices echo through the gutted barracks and the quartermaster's yard? A shiver ran through him, and not only because of the cold wind that blew down his collar.

It was fully dark now and the snow was thick and blowing. Though he could no longer see the pony's tracks, Dixon had no choice but to press on. The twins would follow the old Bozeman Road, he was confident of that. With any luck, Jesse, the over-burdened pony, would tire and the children would be forced to find a place to stop for the night. Had they brought bedrolls suitable for the weather? He thought so; Cal and Lorna were wild, but they weren't stupid. No one had ever said that of them. They would build a fire if they could, though it would be difficult in this weather even for a seasoned outdoorsman.

Dixon raised his eyes to the inky sky, trying to gauge the time. He reckoned it was getting on toward eight o'clock. The snow was letting up, but the wind was not. After one especially savage blast, Alice turned her head and gave him the side eye, as if to say,
Do you have any idea what you're doing?

They crested a ridge and Dixon found himself looking down on the remains of Fort Phil Kearny. Though he'd been anticipating the sight, and the eerie stillness of the frozen Piney Creek Valley, his nerve endings tingled as Alice daintily picked her way down the steep trail, followed by the mule. Every part of Dixon's soul rebelled. He did not want to return to this haunted place. He sensed a malevolent presence waiting, yet he knew he had to press on. His children might be sheltering there.

The ice groaned under Alice's feet as they crossed the frozen Little Piney. They rode through the collapsed water gates and over the blackened ground that used to be the quartermaster's yard. Dixon looked to the right, at the remains of the stables and the teamsters' quarters. He saw the charred remnants of the slag pile, where young Private Rooney chopped off a thumb while splitting firewood, and the listing clothesline that held the bed sheets that comically entangled Colonel Carrington one windy day as he scolded a soldier for a minor uniform violation. Some cabins still stood along laundresses' row, though they were roofless. They would provide little protection from the elements, but a child might seek shelter there. Dixon dismounted and checked each one, without result.

He climbed the slope from the quartermaster's yard and into the fort proper, leading Alice and the mule along the red gravel path that ran between officers' row and the parade lawn. How many times had he and Rose trod these iron-red stones? He stopped before the hulk that once was her cabin, and then their cabin, the place where he first kissed her, where they first made love. His throat tightened, and he closed his eyes. They thought they had long lives ahead of them, a joyful future together, but this was a lie, just another of God's cruel jokes.

Alice nickered and nudged him with her nose. He turned to see a shadow moving toward him through the snow. He saw the dark shape only briefly before it vanished behind a blowing curtain of white. Dixon closed his eyes and looked again. Nothing . . . then, yes! It was closer now, bulky and slow moving. Alice saw the apparition also; she remained motionless, ears forward, tail blowing between her legs. Dixon was surprised by the horse's calmness; generally, she was quick to sense and react to the presence of an intruder. Gradually, above the keening of the wind, Dixon heard a voice calling. The words were not intelligible until the man—for it was a man and not a ghost—drew nearer.

“Doctor! I've got them, Cal and Lorna. They're safe.”

Dixon peered into the snow, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Who is it? I can't see you.”

“Billy Sun.” He came closer until Dixon could make out his features. Years had passed since he'd last seen the half-breed, and he was virtually swallowed by the soldier's buffalo coat and red woolen scarf he wore, but there was no mistaking those pale green eyes. He turned and waved a wolf-hide mitten toward a crumbling structure Dixon recognized as the remains of the bakery, the post's only stone structure. “They're in there,” he said. “I got a fire going.”

Dixon felt a rush of relief and gratitude. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank you, Billy. Thank you.”

“They were in a bad way when I found them,” Billy said. “Cold and hungry but they're good now.”

They started walking toward the bakery. “Where did you find them?” Dixon said.

“North of here, about half a mile, on the old Fort Smith Road. Their pony died and they were trying to make a shelter out of blankets and rocks. They weren't having luck, or with a fire, either, because of the wind. It was a good thing I came along when I did.”

As they neared the stone walls, Dixon smelled a wood fire and saw its warm glow flickering through an open window. Before they arrived, he put out an arm to stop Billy. “Where were they going? Back to your village?”

Billy hesitated, looking at his feet. He wore tall moccasins, like his gloves, made of wolf skin with the fur on the inside. Dixon, whose own feet felt like blocks of blue ice inside his square-toed leather boots, would have given one hundred dollars for a pair like them. “Yes, they were going to the village,” Billy said.

“The surgeon at Fort McKinney told me there is sickness there. Is it true?”

“Yes. Many of the people have died and many more are sick. Biwi fell ill.”

“Do the children know of Biwi's illness? Could that be why they were going there, to see her?”

Billy shook his head. “I don't know. They will have to tell you their reasons. I'm going for more firewood.”

Dixon almost stopped him; he would have liked to have Billy with him when he reunited with his children, but the half-breed had already vanished into the darkness. Dixon went on alone, the dry, ankle-deep snow squeaking beneath his feet. It was bitterly cold; if Billy hadn't found them, Cal and Lorna would have frozen to death. If Rose was watching from above—and sometimes he felt she was—she would have been angry with Dixon for letting that happen.

The bakery door had burned away, but the charred frame was still in place. He stooped to enter and found the twins, huddled in their blankets, like a pair of towheaded Indians, before the fire. They raised their pale eyes to their father, but neither spoke.

“Well?” Dixon said. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

They looked at each other, a pair of defeated conspirators. When Lorna finally spoke, her first words were for the pony. “Jesse kept going slower and slower. I could tell he was tired, so we got off to walk, but he fell over and couldn't get up.” Tears ran from her eyes, and she brushed them away with the back of her hand. “Jesse made awful noises when he was dying, Pa. I've never heard anything like that before.”

Dixon said, “I'm sorry. Jesse was a sweet pony.”
You knew how old he was, how his wind had gone,
he thought
. You shouldn't have used him so hard.

Lorna nodded miserably, the firelight gleaming red on her hair. Cal kept his eyes on the flames and said nothing.

“The two of you could have died with him,” Dixon said. “Why did you do this foolish thing? I expect an answer.”

Again, it was Lorna who spoke. “It was my idea. I needed to go to the Crow village and Cal wanted to come with me.”

“Why did you need to go there?”

“I just did,” she said.

Dixon shook his head in disbelief. “You didn't think about telling me, or Mrs. MacGill? You didn't think about the storm?”

“You wouldn't let us go,” she said sullenly. “I didn't know about the storm.”

“There's sickness in the village; many people have died. You could have gotten sick, too.”

Lorna gestured toward a canvas bag lying on the ground. “I had medicine.”

Dixon picked up the bag and loosened the drawstring. Inside, a number of glass vials glistened green and blue in the firelight. He examined them: quinine and laudanum. Somehow, she had taken them from the medicine cabinet in his surgery without him noticing.

“I watch you,” she said. “From that little upstairs room with the bed in it. Those two bottles were the ones you used on that old lady last fall, Mrs. Dillard, and she got better.”

Dixon had never noticed Lorna hanging around the surgery. Why would she do that, and secretly? If she was interested in his work, as Harry was, he would be happy to instruct her. He looked at her and shook his head. Lorna was his child, but he saw nothing of himself in her and certainly nothing of her mother. He did not know his only daughter at all. Sometimes, her strangeness almost frightened him.

“Mrs. Dillard had dengue fever, Lorna, and yes, it's treated with quinine and laudanum. Those are dangerous drugs, the laudanum especially. We don't know what's making the Indians sick, and anyhow, stealing is wrong. You know that.”

Do they
?
Have I taught them not to steal, lie, cheat, take advantage of the less fortunate? Have I taught them to be kind?
In truth, Dixon didn't remember imparting those or any other life lesson to these two. He assumed Mrs. MacGill was taking care of those things.