Two in the Field (17 page)

“The Army is thereabouts,” he said, “under General Custer.”

That revelation didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

“Do you know anything of Caitlin O’Neill?”

The name drew a blank.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be leaving.”

“Be quick about it,” he said. “I can guarantee your safety only as far as Minersville.”

“Let me offer you something back.”

“What would that be?”

“You have a Pinkerton here,” I said, voice lowered. “He’s gathering information to use against you.”

The blue eyes narrowed and I wondered if I’d made a disastrous mistake. But if things played out as they had before, Kehoe and others were doomed.

“Who is this … person?” Kehoe asked, the deep voice deceptively soft.

I glanced at the door to be sure it was shut. “Keep your eye on a man who sings and has ready cash for drinks.”

Kehoe’s mouth was a grim line. “That’s a serious charge.”

“A suggestion, no more.”

“It’s much more,” he snapped. “You’ve accused one of the
Order of the most devilish crime imaginable. Why do you suspect him?”

“I can’t tell you.” What could I say? That I’d come back in time? I spread my hands placatingly. “If I turn out to be wrong, you’ve double-checked one of your members, that’s all.” I paused for emphasis. “But if I’m right, I’ve saved your neck and others’.”

“You’d better be gone,” he said, rising. “Now and for good.”

I stood up. “Thanks for the information.”

“Perhaps I’ve done you no grand favor,” he said tersely, “sending you off to the savage wilds.”

Maybe so, I thought, but it definitely beat sticking around there.

 ELEVEN 

I stopped in Minersville long enough to retrieve my valise from the station locker and the parcel I’d left with Noola containing most of my money.

“I used one of your dollars,” she said, “to get a man to John Kehoe.”

“You may have saved my life,” I told her. “Things over there look ugly.”

“It’ll surely get worse,” she told me. “Every day there are beatings and shooting. The strikers can’t hold out much longer; the union is talking about marching on the operators.”

I told her what I’d heard about the Nebraska settlement and urged her again to give thought to moving West. She said she would. I promised to wire her, and insisted she keep five dollars, perhaps for future train tickets.

Railroad buffs who romanticize nineteenth-century train travel obviously never spent endless days and nights riding those wretched jolting cars with no heating or cooling. They weren’t whiplashed by the frequent lurching halts necessitated by the locomotives’ hunger for coal and water. Their clothes weren’t riddled by hot cinders as they waited on station platforms.

Then there were the passengers. By now I’d become accustomed to deodorant-challenged bodies; I was no prize in that respect myself. But I couldn’t get used to tobacco spitting, which was universally practiced. A disgusting phenomenon. Funny to think that ballplayers would be among the few to continue it a century later.

Pullman cars became scarcer the farther west I traveled. In
them, little sofas ran along the sides, each two forming a “section” that, joined at night, made an adequate bed. But older cars provided only a plank with cotton ticking that swung out from the wall. From the train boy you could buy a straw mattress for fifty cents. Forget privacy. And with fewer women on these lines, the nights were orchestrated with cacophonous snoring and farting and belching.

Not to forget spitting.

Passengers ate most meals in station cafes. Eastern cuisine was no great shakes, but out West the food was truly awful. Staples of every meal were beef—salted, boiled or roasted—along with bacon, tea and coffee. To hold off scurvy, cabbage occasionally was available.

At every station, land agents poured into the cars, brandishing pamphlets that promised Eden-like bliss on the prairies. Seeing my eastern clothes, they hit on me like flies. For practically nothing I could buy a quarter—hell, make it a third!—of some budding metropolis. Spreading out their paper plans of a new Athens or Rome of the West, they showed off gridworks of avenues and streets, plazas and public gardens, railway stations and banks and churches.

If pushed they would grudgingly acknowledge that presently only some fifty souls inhabited wooden shacks on the site. But inside of three years there would be more than twenty thousand, and for a man of my type, “a capitalist with an eye to the prime chance,” it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Or if I wanted something more rural and serene, a few hundred dollars—at most a measly thousand—would set me up like a feudal baron and I’d spend the rest of my days in unbounded prosperity. The prairie soil was so rich that if I tossed out a few handfuls of seeds in April, by the end of July I’d reap forty bushels per acre. Just turn the soil, no manure required. As for
livestock, steers cost only twenty-five dollars. To feed them through the winter, merely cut and store a little hay in advance. Couldn’t be simpler.

Just sign right here.

If capital was a problem (unlikely for a man of my distinguished character), credit was easily available. And if cash somehow ran short later on, I could work for friendly neighbors at the going rate of two dollars a day. More than fair.

More than believable, too, I thought, in a time when wages were scarce and jobs paid half that or less. When I asked about the O’Neill settlement, the answer was usually a disdainful sniff or put-down remark about Fenian communists. Several said bluntly that the so-called colony was merely a staging area for the O’Neill’s next invasion of Canada.

Had they visited the Elkhorn settlement?

Nobody had.

Hard on the heels of the land peddlers were agents pushing mining claims that offered a bewitching assortment of ore-bearing titles. Custer’s ’74 expedition had brought back the first definitive word of gold flakes on exposed rocks and nuggets visible in stream beds. The Black Hills region was a treasure trove.

But hadn’t the best claims already been staked?

Not at all. Last winter’s ignorant and ill-provisioned gold-rushers had discovered only a few sites, certainly not the most lucrative ones, and their claims were worthless anyway. The U.S. Army was presently driving them out because by law the land still belonged to the Sioux.

In that case, why should I buy in?

Because it was widely known that the Indians were ready to sell. Negotiations were proceeding even as we talked. Once title cleared, prospectors would be allowed in, this time legally. Those with the resources for placer or pit mines would come away with
vast fortunes. And those sorts of operations were, of course, precisely what they were offering shares in.

It was from one of these agents, a plump, derby-topped Oliver Hardyish sort of gent, that I finally got a bit of concrete information about O’Neill’s settlement. “It’s mainly a provision stop for prospectors,” he told me. “Men of a rougher class than yourself.”

As we crossed Iowa I’d been seeing more of the pick-and-shovel crowd: young guys in jeans with prospecting gear.

“You’ve actually been there?”

He nodded. “ ‘O’Neill City,’ they’re calling it. Way up in Holt County, on the Elkhorn. Lovely spot. Not much there yet in the way of buildings, but they got smart and laid in mining gear to peddle to the goldbugs. Now it’s all the General can do to keep his Irish boys from running off to dig up the Hills.”

“Any women there?” I held my breath.

“Some few.” He winked. “One’s quite the goods.”

Interpreting my happy grin as a sales breakthrough, he riffled through his claim forms. “Now here’s the stock company you’d want, located not too far from O’Neill City.…”

Ironically, as soon as I encountered decent food in Omaha, I got deathly sick. Maybe the strain of everything caught up with me. Dysentery laid me flat. Bone-shaking chills wracked my body. As if that weren’t enough, I developed a gum-imploding toothache. And to cap everything, the bedding in my room in the fleabag hotel I’d barely managed to reach from the U.P. depot gave me a nasty body rash and a big ugly boil on my butt. I’d come this close to Cait only to be brought to a dead halt.

The days blurred together.

A stout German maid finally insisted on bringing a doctor, who, reeking of liquor, “prescribed” a heavy dose of brandy fortified with pepper.

“That’s nuts,” I protested, but drank it to get rid of him.

Next day the runs and chills were gone. Go figure. The toothache stayed longer but I gutted it out. No way I was letting some nineteenth-century butcher inside my mouth.

Finally on my feet again, I set out on the Omaha & Northwestern for Blair, only twenty-nine miles away. It took a whole day to get there.

The reason: ’hoppers.

I’d never seen anything like the whirring mass that dimmed the sun. The papers said afterward it was a mile high and six miles square—and not that big a deal as grasshopper invasions went. Some swarms had been estimated at 175 miles in width and 350 in length. Still, they were so thick that our wheels spun on their mashed bodies, and there was real danger of going off the rails. The train halted and we got out to rubberneck at insects stripping whole trees bare of their greenery.

“They’ll eat most anything, even sumac,” a weathered old-timer said, “although they’re partial to what costs labor and has value. See that stubble?” He pointed to a barren-looking plot. “A few days ago that was foot-high corn. These ’hoppers are working their third and fourth crops this season.

“Cattle and horses cain’t find nothing to eat, not even buds,” he went on, plucking a tangle of insects from his sleeve. “Hard to kill the little bastards. You can rip off their wings and legs—and they go on eatin’.”

I brushed some off my neck. My skin felt crawly. “Can’t they be trapped or something?”

“We tried everything you could imagine, including settin’ fire to trenches filled with coal oil.” He spat. “Might as well use a bucket to hold back the Missouri. Farmer name of Rib-Eye Jacobs got hisself caught out amongst the ‘hoppers tryin’ to fight ’em off—and they ate
him
up, too!”

I looked to see if he was serious and couldn’t tell.

“Folks are puttin’ in new crops—rutabaga, sugar beets, millet—hopin’ the bugs won’t take to ’em. Others are sellin’ off their hogs in case they don’t get
no
corn this year.”

Nebraska agriculture seemed a nightmare. “What about up along the Elkhorn?” I asked. “Things as bad there?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “ ’Hoppers seem worst here along the Missouri.” He scratched a welt on his arm. “But you cain’t never tell.”