The Big Sky (41 page)

"There's danger, all right," Jim agreed. "Red Horn, now, he don't want us to go."

"Goddam Red Horn!"

"I don't understand," Peabody put in. "Who is Red Horn?"

"It don't amount to anything," Boone answered. "Just
Injun talk."

"He don't like it, though, Boone. Maybe we'd best give it up, account of him."

"Damn you, Jim. You just aim to get my dander up."

"Is she up enough?" There was a crooked smile on Jim's face. He went on, "I ain't just devilin' you. Come on, Boone! It won't be no fun without you. Tell the man yes."

"I don't like Red Horn to get the notion he can herd me around."

"That's he-bear talk now."

Peabody was looking from one to the other of them. A little frown sat over his eyes. "I'm not sure I follow you," he said to Boone.

"It ain't no skin off of me. Me and Jim can get us out of a fix, all right enough, not sayin' we can do the same for you. I'll p'int the way."

"Splendid!" The little man rubbed his fat hands together and reached over suddenly and got his glass from the table and took a whole swallow all at once. "I'll need help and advice getting ready. My two French Canadians won't be of much assistance there. If you want to lend a hand, I'll start your pay at once, at the agreed rate of a dollar and a half."

"Might as well," Jim said. "I'm that poor I couldn't buy a bead for my fav'rite squaw."

"Who's the French?" Boone asked.

"They're named Zenon and Beauchamp. This Beauchamp is a powerful man."

"Hope they know how to pack a horse. Me and Jim, we figger just to raise meat and lead the way."

Boone walked over and let himself out of the room. Rooms made a man feel shut in on himself; they made him uneasy, so's his mind never rightly put itself to a thing but kept thinking about a way out, like a mouse in a bucket. He walked past the cannon and the flagstaff. A sleepy gate watcher let him out of the inner gate. There were a couple of Bloods in the Indian store and one man he took to be a Cree, acting pretty well drunked up. "No whisky," the clerk was saying. "No got medicine water." The Cree came over to Boone, begging tobacco. He was a stout Indian, not tall, but built wide and chesty. Boone shook his head and started by him, but the Cree reached up and grabbed one of his braids of hair to hold him by, saying something in his throat while he yanked. Boone hit him in the belly and heard the wind grunt out of him and felt the hand let go the plait. The Cree bent over, his arms wrapped across his belly. Boone hit him again, striking up in the face, and the Cree slammed backwards on the dirt floor and lay still. There wasn't anything said, not by the clerk or the two Bloods. Boone felt their eyes following him as he went through the big gate to the outside.

The sun had lost itself behind some clouds to the west, and a keen chill had fallen on the land. It would be dark soon. With winter coming on, the sun no more than took a peek at things and then ducked behind the mountains. Smoke was coming from the tepees pitched around the fort, rising gray to the cold sky. There was the smell of wood smoke in the air, and the smell of snow. Off to his right the river ran dull as lead.

Teal Eye would be waiting for him in the lodge she had pitched. She would be waiting and wondering, but she wouldn't ask when he got there. She would see there was meat for him and that the fire was good, and all the time her eyes would be on him with the unasked question in them, and her face with a light in it that he had noticed lately, a kind of soft gleam through the flesh. She wouldn't ask, but all her small ways would be listening ways, bringing the answer to her from his looks or his motions or the tone of his voice. A woman got a hold on a man and pushed him one way and another without so much as opening her mouth. Sensing her all around him, a man didn't feel like his own self sometimes. He wanted to shake loose and say to hell with it and strike out somewhere, with nothing hanging to him of what he had been or what he had done. He wouldn't do it, though, not forever -not if he had a woman like Teal Eye. A little time away from her was enough, four moons maybe, while he took a crazy by thunder Yankee across to Oregon.
 

It was just as Boone had known it would be. There was jerked meat, boiled and cooked with pounded prairie turnips, and the fire warm in its circle of stones, and Teal Eye doing around while the edge of her eye kept on him and her face waited for what might come to her ear or eye. He grunted and sat down and ate out of a bowl and afterwards fired his pipe with the trader's black tobacco mixed with the bark of the red willow. It was a soft-stone pipe he had, with a round bowl on a square base and a willow stem. He had made it himself, after the style of the Blackfeet, and while it wasn't as fancy as some that other tribes made, it was sweet and drew easy. He studied it while he smoked, letting his mind turn things over slow.

After a while, without looking at Teal Eye, he said in Blackfoot, "You will go back to Red Horn and wait."

She didn't need to say anything, not with the quick look on her face.

He counted on his fingers. "After six sleeps we will start." He let his glance go to her while he pulled on his pipe. "Red Hair and I and the white man and two Bad Medicines."

She bent her head and her hands made a little flutter above her leather skirt. She said, "I will get the warm clothes ready."

It was one of the things he prized her for, that she didn't argue. For all that her eyes might say, or her face or her hands, the mouth didn't come out with it. He spoke his mind, and that was that, and he didn't have to fuss about it. It saved a man a heap of bother.

Her look questioned him again, and he answered. "In the time of the big winds I will be back, or sooner if the winter opens, in the time when the great owl nests."

She said, without looking at him, "You will come back?"

"In the time of the big winds, or sooner."

"You will come back to the Piegans?"

"I told you once I would!" he answered sharply in English. "Think I aim to stay with the Flatheads or Snakes or somebody?"

"Every day I shall look to the west." She sat quiet, looking down at her hands.

"I reckon you could get yourself another man, if it came to that."

She got up, not speaking, as if what he had said had hurt her inside.

"Jim would take you, I reckon."

The wind whistled in the tops of the lodgepoles overhead and a puff of it came down the smoke hole and chased the smoke around. Dark was settling inside the lodge, making the fire look sharper. He would sleep on his rifle tonight. A man couldn't tell what some crazy Blood might take it into his head to do after filling up on firewater.

Teal Eye was already under the robe when he went to it and put himself down with his feet to the fire. He lay there, letting things run in his head, thinking she was asleep, and then her hand came over and barely touched him and her voice said, "Strong Arm will have a son."

He said, "For Christ sake!" and thought about it some more and said, "For Christ sake!" again.

A man wondered what his young one would look like and what he would be like. It gave a man a solid feeling, knowing he had got himself a pup.

He went to sleep with his mind on it. Once he awakened, thinking he had felt Teal Eye shaking under the robe, thinking he had heard a little held-in cry, but all there was was the wind singing by the lodgepoles and the fire dying.
 

From high in the canyon one could look down on the foothills and far beyond them to the yellow plains shimmering under the early winter sun. Elisha Peabody checked his horse. It was an enormous world, a world of heights and depths and distances that numbed the imagination. One felt inclined to draw into himself, like a turtle. The mountains were loftier than any Peabody ever had seen; the streams were swifter, the wind fiercer, the air sharper, the view vaster. It occurred to him that everything had been made to giant's measure; it was as if proportion had run wild. The great sprawling magnitude of the west made the hills and parks of home seem small and artificial, like a yard with a picket fence around it.

The human soul inclined to extremes, too. Yesterday it had soared, feeling wild and free, feeling so inconsequential among these physical immensities as to be lost to the sight of God and His wrath. Last night, with the great darkness crowding in, it came back like a bird to roost, sensing the awful power and glory of God all about. Peabody knew humility then, and prayed for guidance and strength and God's favor, without which even Yankee ingenuity could be of no avail. Today there rode with him a small burden of oppression that no circumstance could account for, unless it was that the wordless vigilance of Caudill had given rise to a vague and foolish misgiving. More than once Caudill had hitched around in his saddle to study the way they had come. Under the black brows his eyes were always busy, scanning the slopes, the timber, the stream, the game trails. What his eyes told him his mouth did not utter or his expression reveal. There was the sharp awareness of a wild animal in his face, but nothing more.

A strange man, Boone Caudill, riding rawboned and slouched at the head of the column while his Indian's braids swung to the swing of his horse. A strange man, with moodiness in him, and quickness to anger and the promise of a childlike savagery. Was it the rude half-civilization of the Kentucky frontier that had made him what he was, or his years with the red Arabs of the plains? Watching him ride ahead, his strong shoulders loose and his body giving to the pace of his horse, Peabody concluded he was more Indian than white man. Outwardly he was hardly white man at all. He wore the clothes of an Indian and carried a bag of amulets -a medicine bundle, as it was called. His voice was rough and deep in his chest, even when the sounds it made were English sounds. His face was dark-eyed, weathered, and often inscrutable. He had a squaw for a wife.

Caudill could be a difficult man, even a dangerous one, Peabody imagined. One of gentler breeding sometimes felt uncertain and impotent in his presence, as if the strength and forwardness and primitive masculinity of the man dwarfed any disciplined powers. Peabody shrugged that feeling away while his eyes ranged far out on the plains. A Yankee could hold his own in any company, by wit and courage and perseverance, as Yankees had demonstrated through generations. Caudill would be a penniless white renegade among the Indians long after his own enterprise and vision had made him comfortable and important.

His eye came back up the canyon, following the winding stream, until it reached the pack string and saw Deakins sitting quiet on his horse at the tail of it, waiting for Peabody to go on. Deakins grinned, showing a flash of teeth. He and Caudill had come from different molds. Where Caudill was silent, Deakins talked; where Caudill flared out, Deakins fashioned a joke; where there was in Caudill the suggestion of quick ferocity, there was in Deakins the indication of considered action. Whimsicality was a part of Deakins' make-up, and humor, half-sly, half-innocent, so that one never quite knew the depth of his perception. The two constituted a good if godless pair, the one balancing and conditioning the other.

Peabody kicked his horse, and heard the pack animals behind him clumping into action and Zenon chattering French. He could picture the smile on Zenon's face, the mouth mobile and expressive under eyes as eloquent as any maiden's. He could see his small hands moving as he talked. Occasionally he heard Beauchamp answer Zenon's fluent words. Beauchamp was a heavy wedge of a man with the neck and shoulders of a bull and a skull inhabited by a slow brute wit. Against Zenon's quick understanding he matched his muscle, as if in the final reckoning it was force that told the measure of a man. He liked to show the knot of muscle on his biceps and to seize Zenon's arm afterward and make him wince with the power of his grip. He had liked to, that is, until Deakins interfered on their second night out from Fort McKenzie.

"If I was Zenon, now, I would shoot that damn hand of yours off, I would," Deakina had said. Peabody saw, with a little turn of astonishment, that the twinkle was gone from his blue eyes.

Beauchamp let go of Zenon. It was an instant before he answered. His gaze traveled over Deakins as if measuring his strength. Then he said, "By damn, me think you need one fusil, to stand with Beauchamp."

Before Deakins could answer, Caudill stepped around the fire. Wordless, he walked up to Beauchamp. Peabody remembered how deliberately he stepped and how suddenly he struck. Miraculously, Beauchamp kept his feet. He staggered back, almost falling, but caught his balance and stood silent as if allowing time for thought to turn in his head. He brought up his hand to feel of his jaw. His eyes dropped from Caudill's face and went to the ground and hunted around. Peabody was reminded of a mouse seeking a hole.

"There ain't no real fight in him, Zenon," Caudill said. "No need to be afeared of him. He only looks like a man."

There had been no trouble since, nor, Peabody imagined, was there likely to be any. Beauchamp was like an ox tamed by the whip, with no resentment in him and no impulse to revenge. Day by day he did his work. Altogether, thought Peabody, he had a good crew. He turned his mind away from the reasonless oppression he felt, thinking of the good crew, the open weather, the purposeful progress they were making. Oregon lay just beyond the hills. God willing, he would reach the Columbia.

As they traveled the canyon, bearing to the southwest, it seemed more and more logical to assume that God was willing, for the way lay wide and easy, except for windfall and the new growth that had sprung up along the trails that forgotten Indians had worn. On all sides the mountains lifted in great peaks and bulges of rock, thrusting so high that white clouds moved among them; the wind blew the keen breath of winter, sometimes with the spit of storm in it; but the pass rolled on, gradual and safe and bare of snow. It was more than Peabody had dared hope for, by thunder. Looking into the future, one could see pack trains climbing it, and carts and four-wheeled wagons piled with settlers' goods, bound for the fertile valleys of the Columbia. They would be free men, these, without a slave among them -free men going to free country to establish what would come to be free states of the Union, once the claims of the British had been dismissed. Afterward the lanes of commerce would open, replacing the long, slow sea route around the Horn. He could see cargoes going up and down the Missouri and the Columbia and being transshipped across the mountains over the very ground his horse trod -cargoes of processed goods and imports, of textiles, tools, rifles, coffee, tea, and sugar, flowing west in exchange for the products the settlers had wrested from the new land. How could South Pass, without the benefits of navigation, rival the course he was traveling? There would be opportunity here for men of industry and foresight. He who was early on the ground would have the better chance. He who knew the way could profit by his knowledge. There would be stores to establish and transportation lines to build and operate and land to be dealt in. Once one was familiar with the country he would know where to direct his energies. Boston men would be told of the pass, and Boston men would be acquainted with the possibilities, and Boston money, hitherto so cautious, would answer to the assurance of tidy earnings. Peabody brought his compass and notebook from his pocket. Tonight, by the light of the campfire, he would enlarge on this hasty sketching.