Wind Walker (40 page)

“I gave Bingham an order, Burwell,” the captain snarled. “Since you’re in no condition to help him dig this man’s grave, Bingham will dig it for the both of you—”

“I ain’t going,” Hoyt said, taking a bold step away from his wife at their breakfast fire.

Hargrove’s cold eyes narrowed menacingly as Benjamin shifted on his saddle, preparing for what violence loomed. “Trouble happens, Bingham. Folks get hurt, sometimes through no fault of their own. Then there’s folks like you and Burwell—they get hurt because it’s their own stupid undoing.”

“You ain’t gonna bully an’ beat us, not from here on out.” Burwell stood bravely, one arm braced against the bandage that was wrapped tightly around his broken ribs.

That sudden show of bravery appeared to buoy Bingham and some others with renewed courage. Turning back to Hargrove, Hoyt Bingham declared in a clear voice, “Don’t you remember what happened a few days back?”

“You do remember that council meeting you called real clear, don’t you, Hargrove?” Truell asked as he stepped up beside Roman Burwell.

“You was voted out,” Bingham reminded with new backbone.

“Maybe you and what you got left of these toughs oughtta get outta our camp!” cried the smooth-jawed Fenton.

Iverson stepped up to the line slowly being formed against Hargrove and Benjamin. “You and the rest shouldn’t travel with our company no more!”

“You can’t do this to me!” Hargrove bellowed like a
wounded bull surrounded by gaunt and hungry wolves. “You said we could accompany your train till we reach Fort Hall!”

Surprising them all, Roman Burwell unsteadily pushed himself away from the wagon’s tailgate, wincing a bit with the movement. “Don’t you hear what these men are saying?” he asked. “That’s the voice of the people saying you been voted out. Now it’s time you got out.”

When Hargrove reined his horse aside so he could look squarely at Burwell, both of Scratch’s dogs growled where they were restrained at a wagon wheel, their neck hair ruffing, as Amanda stepped under her husband’s arm, attempting to support him on her shoulders. Roman gently pushed her away, wagged his head at her, and stood there alone.

The ousted wagon boss jutted his chin out and told the wounded emigrant, “Not one of you farmers here is man enough to go against me—”

“We aren’t gonna force you an’ your hired men out, less’n you make us,” Burwell interrupted. “As for the rest of them who want to go to California with you, all of you can stay with us till we get to Fort Hall. We’ll see your bunch is safe till you get to the Snake. But you ain’t our captain no more.”

At the edge of the gathering crowd a man named Rankin grumbled loudly, “I say the California folks go their own way from here on out!”

“No!” Burwell cried, wincing with a spasm of pain. “We aren’t gonna become the sort of people Hargrove is.”

Titus glanced at his daughter as she stood easily within reach of her weakened husband but gave Roman his stand. Amanda’s cheeks glistened with tears, her eyes shiny with pride in her husband. A pride that had long lain dormant until Hargrove’s unremitting cruelty had reawakened it.

“Why not, Roman?” asked a man named Winston. “He damn well tried to do the same to you!”

“Maybe that’s the way things was for folks back there in the East,” Roman said steadily. “Fact is, that’s the way it was for most all of us. Them with money had the power to rule over the rest. If we was so happy with that way of
things back there—why’d any of us decide to strike out for Oregon in the first place?”

“Better lives!”

“That’s right!” Burwell responded to the anonymous cry from the crowd. “But, are any of us gonna have better lives if we all act like Hargrove and his kind when we get where we’re going? What have we made better for our families if we still fight to grab money and power for ourselves?”

Bingham started for the wounded emigrant, saying, “How’re you saying we’re supposed to make things different?”

“This here journey to a new land is our chance to do something good for our women and our children,” he explained to the hushed gathering. “We can make a new life for ourselves—not just new homes and new farms. But a new
life
! We’re not going to Oregon to end up the same sort of folks that Hargrove and them others are! Let him and his kind go to California. We’re going to start a new life in Oregon for our families. For our children’s children.”

Bingham stepped to Roman’s side and laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “My fellow captain is right! We must make new homes in a new land—not live things the way they were back east. We’ll let those who are happy with the Hargroves of the world stay back there and live out their lives, or let them follow Hargrove to California. As for us, we’re on to Oregon!”

Iverson leaped up and shouted, “The Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company!”

“Oregon or bust!” shouted Murray.

Pushing her way through the crowd that immediately surged toward Roman, Amanda threaded her way to his side, grabbed his face in both her hands, and pulled it down to her mouth as she raised herself on her toes. Watching them together at this pivotal moment, Titus felt his heart grow light, weighing far less than it had ever since that day at Bridger’s forge, when she told him about her husband and the troubles they were running from back in Missouri. For days now
Scratch had been consumed by the fear that they would never outrun their mistakes, never get beyond the failures of Roman Burwell. Fear that Amanda had married a man who would one day plunge his whole family into disaster, if not with Phineas Hargrove on the road to Oregon, then surely once they had reached the mouth of the Willamette.

But instead, his son-in-law had stood up for the right, as Titus saw it. He had stood up to power, greed, and bullies. Here with the coming of the dawn, Scratch had realized his son-in-law was not so simple a man as one might suspect at first blush. Roman Burwell was as loving a husband as any he could hope for Amanda, as good and kind a father as he himself could be to his own children. The farmer was, in the end, the sort of man Scratch believed he could call friend. And to the old trapper there was no finer distinction than that.

“Oregon or bust!” the crowd echoed again as they washed forward, forcing the two horsemen back from their rejoicing in a swell of noise and a surge of bodies.

Amanda and Roman were going to be all right. For the first time in days, Titus felt that clear to his marrow. They and their children were going to be all right. The family would get to Oregon, and that country would indeed prove to be their promised land.

He felt his eyes sting as he watched that crowd of jubilant men, women, and children tighten around Burwell and Bingham, clapping and singing trail songs of Oregon. How proud he was to witness this moment. Strong, simple, good people—the sort who could surely make that new land thrive the way nothing back east ever would again.

Titus Bass felt as if he was witnessing the birth of a whole new country.

Off in the distance there was no mistaking that narrow, winding tangle of emerald green, luring and seductive against the sere and sunburned sienna of the summer landscape.

“That’s the Bear,” Titus said to Waits in English, holding the first two of those fingers left on his right hand in front of
his mouth, pointed down as if they were the mighty canines of the beast.

She repeated in his native tongue, “Bear.”

“You said that good,” he sighed with contentment. “Off in that country, south aways, I first met Jim Bridger.”

“How long?”

“Hmmm,” he considered. “That’s some. Must be … goin’ on twenty winters now.”

“Too-wen-tee?” she mimed. Then asked again, “How long?”

So he balanced his longrifle across the tops of his thighs as the horse rocked beneath him, and held up both hands, fingers extended. Then he quickly closed his fists once and extended the fingers again. “Twenty.”

“Old man, this Ti-tuzz now!”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Some days, I feel so goddamned old I wonder why I’m still livin’.”

She looked at him with worry creasing the crow’s-feet at her eyes. In her own tongue she asked the difficult question, “Your heart … it’s ready to die?”

With a shake of his head, Titus answered, “No. Not ready to die.”

He recalled that her people believed very strongly that every man would know when he was about to cross over. That same mighty power was what had prompted, provoked, and inspired Jack Hatcher to warble his favorite song as he lay mortally wounded in battle against the Blackfoot in Pierre’s Hole.
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And the very same spirit that compelled Asa McAfferty to pick his own time and his own place to make what Asa realized was coming down to his final stand. To these warrior peoples of the High Plains and the tall mountains, a man knew in his bones when his time had come to cross over that last, high, and lonely divide. Alone … for dying was at best a one-man job.

“You stay with me a long, long time still,” she said, the worry gone from her face.

“Woman—ain’t none of us know what’s in store,” he admitted. “Much as I’d love to die in my blankets with you and our children at my side, a passel of grandpups crawlin’ on the floor of our lodge … in this here country nothin’ lives long but the rocks and the sky.”

Her eyes misted a little, gone cloudy as a stormy day when she turned away from him and nodded once in agreement. “Only the rocks and sky live long, husband.”

“But—just look at you!” he exclaimed with good cheer, leaning over in the saddle and grabbing hold of her elbow. “Why, you ain’t ever gonna grow old, are you, woman?” He gazed deeply into her eyes.

“Many winters have come and gone since you first looked at me,” she said in Crow, gazing at him from beneath those black eyelashes with a profound gratitude for his compliment.

“But you don’t look no differ’nt than the day you come to sit with me aside the Elk River.”
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“But, what of the … sickness that ravaged my face?”

“I don’t see that,” he confessed. “When I look at you I never have seen the sickness scars.”

“How long … you and me … was together?” She struggled some with his American tongue.

“Fourteen. This’ll be fourteen winters since you come to talk with me on that rock beside the river.”

She smiled at him. “You give me four good children.”

“Four?” As suddenly as he spoke the question, Bass realized his mistake and grinned at her, roaring, “Yes! Number four is comin’ this winter near my own birthin’ day!”

How he wanted to be back up in Absaroka long before then. Before the hard winds blew the yellow leaves off the cottonwood standing so stately along the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, on north to the winding valleys of the Judith and the fabled Musselshell. By the time the trembling aspen on the high slopes had begun to shed their leaves of gold and the snowline crept down, down, down toward the rolling prairie
where the buffalo had begun to put on winter coats and take shelter in the lee of the mountains. How he hungered to be back among the places where the white man did not come with his women and wagons, with his ways meant to change everything that had been into what those stiff-backed folks demanded it must be.

To be back among a people living generations beyond count in a land that had always been. All a man could do was pray that the soft ones back east would never find a way to change that on him. For, if they did … then life would no longer be worth the living.

If a man could no longer hear the shrill whistle of a red-tailed hawk circling overhead but for the noisy clatter of mankind and his wagons, if he could no longer make out a wolf’s howl drifting down from the nearby hills because the aching stillness of night had been ruined by the nearness of one dirty, stinking settlement after another … then life no longer was sweet. Life was no longer worth the living. Till then, he’d go higher, and higher still, farther and farther back—all to stay away from those who came to take what they could from each new place before they ruined it and moved on. Men like Phineas Hargrove and his kind.

But then, there had always been that kind.

Yet wasn’t he much the same sort? Hadn’t the beaver men come to take until there was little left to take? Perhaps it was so … and it made his heart ache with the weight of that realization.

Still, he brooded, there was a marked difference between the him he was in those early years and the him he had slowly become. When the bottom fell out of beaver and there was no earthly reason to wade ice-cold streams in search of the elusive flat-tails, most all the old trappers had given up and fled: east for what once was, and west in the hope of what might be. But only a handful stayed on, clinging to what could never be again. Maybeso, that proved he was not like the rest, not the sort who came, used, and moved on when they had taken all that could be dug up, cut down, or carried off.

Which got Scratch to wondering just how white a man he was anymore. Gradually, inexorably, more and more with every year, he had come to think of himself as a man in between, someone who could never become a part of his wife’s Crow people, someone who would never again be considered completely white by his own kind. If most of the white trappers had fled back east to old jobs and old ways, and other white folks fled the East in their wagons, desperate to make a new start and new lives for themselves far to the west beyond these mountains … being neither white nor red anymore, just what the hell was he? Merely some mule-stubborn old man refusing to let go of a way of life that was in its death throes?

And all the more important: He worried about what the devil a man would do as he realized he would never fit into that world he saw coming down the trail.

Titus stood at the lower edge of a crusty patch of ground where the sulfur-laden waters had soaked into the earth over the eons, relentlessly leaving behind one thin layer of mineral sediment on top of another.

“That’s boiling water?” asked young Leah.

“Hotter’n your mama has in her kettle,” he explained to his grand-daughter.

As Ghost and Digger traipsed away to sniff at new and intriguing smells off in the sagebrush, both young boys accompanied the old trapper on this excursion to witness a true wonder of nature. Jackrabbit gripped one of his gnarled hands, and Lucas clutched the other. On both sides of him stood the other children, all of them a little in awe at the sight. As soon as the first steamy gush of water spewed from the geyser,
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more than a hundred excited, enthralled emigrants came racing out of the camp they were setting up that afternoon near Soda Springs.