The Passionate and the Proud (13 page)

Garn rode straight up to the Arapaho chieftain, holding his hands before him to show that he was not armed.

Arapaho braves on horseback immediately surrounded him and he was lost from sight. Emmalee could not deny a pang of fear for him, and explained it to herself by thinking that she would be just as afraid for anyone in that position.

Then the Indians moved away from Garn, their ponies dancing and sidestepping, and Emmalee saw him, still on his black, next to the chief. A few moments later, the two men were riding down towards the pioneer camp, trailed by at least two dozen warriors.

“I wonder what’s happening now?” Emmalee heard Torquist fret.

“Be ready, boys,” Cassidy instructed. “But don’t go grabbin’ for your guns until they make the first move.”

Garn and Chief Fire-On-The-Moon reined their horses in front of Mr. Torquist and the scouts. The mounted braves fanned out into a circle around the men, protecting their chieftain, threatening Torquist’s group. One brave took up a position right outside the wagon in which Emmalee was hiding. She did not dare to move or breathe. He was so close that she could smell the heat of his body, see the intricate diamondlike designs in the silver armbands he wore. This was an alien, and his eyes were sharp and savage. Emmalee held her breath, no longer disbelieving stories about people roasted alive over slow fires. The circle of braves could kill Garn, the scouts, Horace Torquist, and Randy Clay in the space of seconds.

But they had not as yet made any move to do so.

Then Emmalee looked at Chief Fire-On-The-Moon and knew that her own death, the deaths of all the others, was only a matter of time. The combination of a rangy, sinewy body, crown of eagle feathers, and lean, sardonic visage made the chief more animal than man, a prince of animals perhaps, but savage all the same. He looked down at Torquist with curiosity and a kind of arrogant amusement that Emmalee recalled having seen recently on the face of someone else.

No time to think about that, though. Garn was speaking.

“Mr. Torquist,” he said, slowly and with great seriousness, “our visitor, great chief of the Arapaho nation, is here to partake of our hospitality and generosity.”

Horace Torquist looked confused. Then he said, “It is our wish to have a peaceful visit with the chief. Tell him that, Landar. Tell him we’re peaceable people. We don’t even have weapons.”

Emmalee, peering through the tiny opening in the canvas, saw Garn turn to the chief. Using a series of rapid hand gestures, with now and again a word strange to Enunalee’s ears, he conveyed the wagonleader’s message.

The chief snorted, speaking quickly to Garn, gesturing as well.

“Fire-On-The-Moon has no wish to harm us,” Garn told Torquist. “But he and his people are very angry that the coming of the railroad, along with the depredations of the buffalo hunters, are making it difficult for his people to sustain themselves.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Torquist, lifting his hands, letting them fall. “But what can I do?”

Again, Garn and the chief exchanged words and gestures.

“In return for the passage of white men across his lands,” Garn translated, “the Indians have decided to exact a fee.”

“Yes, yes,” said the wagonmaster almost happily, “I have money…”

Garn shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “The Arapaho want our cattle, in replacement for the buffalo that have been killed. They need meat for food and skins for clothing and dwellings.”

Emmalee saw Torquist’s face turn pale. The precious cattle! They were to be the breeding stock of great dairy herds in Olympia!

The brave sitting on his horse in front of Emmalee suddenly jerked his head in the direction of the wagon, as if he’d heard something. She felt her heart stop for a beat, then it recovered, hammering away like mad. The Indian relaxed. Emmalee almost sobbed in relief.

“Ask him if there is anything else we might give him,” Torquist was instructing Garn. “Anything except the cattle.”

“I can’t do that,” Garn said. “It would insult him. He wants only the cattle. In return, he will leave us alone, unharmed, and let us go on our way.”

Torquist hesitated.

Sensing difficulty, Fire-On-The-Moon sat up even straighter on his horse and made an abrupt gesture to his braves, who tensed for action.

Then it happened. Emmalee felt rather than heard someone slip into the wagon. Her poor muscles were already screaming from holding herself motionless all this time, and her nerves were screaming from the tension of the Indian just outside. So she screamed too.

“God, girl!” Myrtle Higgins said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Wanted to find out what was happening.”

There was no more time for talk. The brave, startled by her scream, grabbed his knife and slashed a giant swath out of the canvas. There stood Emmalee for all to see, in her pretty dress and with her gold hair spilling down.

“Jesus Christ, Emmalee,” she heard Garn say.

I’m sorry
was in her mind, but her tongue failed to work. The Indian reached up, grabbed her, and swung her through the air. She landed stomach-down across the back of his pony, so hard the wind was knocked out of her. She was conscious of the horse moving. Even before she’d regained her breath, the brave jerked her upright. She found herself looking into the pitiless, sardonic eyes of Fire-On-The-Moon.

Fire-On-The-Moon said something in his language and laughed. All the braves joined in. So did Garn, sitting on his horse next to the chief.

“My compliments to you, Emmalee,” he said dryly. “Arapaho don’t laugh much.”

Emmalee felt stupid and ridiculous. She was also angry, mostly at herself and her predicament, but also at Garn for laughing.

Fire-On-The-Moon was saying something to Garn. The chief reached out and ran his fingers through Emmalee’s hair.

“Tell him to get his hands off the woman,” Torquist said edgily. “I won’t stand for anything like that.”

“Shut up,” Garn told him, smiling pleasantly, his voice so mild he might have been commenting on the weather. “Shut up. He’s decided that he wants Emmalee.”

Fully afraid now, Emmalee tried desperately and unsuccessfully to squirm free of the brave’s grasp.

“If this feathered barbarian is so keen on letting us live,” she said to Garn, “ask him why he poisoned the river.”

“I already did. It is a sign of his determination. If his people do not get the cattle, neither do we. If they do not survive, we perish as well.”

The chief had grabbed a big handful of Emmalee’s hair. He didn’t pull it but he held on tightly and made some gestures to Garn with his free hand.

Garn gestured back, smiling and easy, and patted Fire-On-The-Moon’s magnificent white horse.

“What’s going on?” Emmalee asked through her teeth.

Garn was nonchalant. “He says he wants you. I told him you’re mine. I offered to trade you for-his horse.

“His
horse
!”

“Emmalee, if you say another word, I swear I’ll cut your tongue out,” Garn said, smiling. “And how could you live without it? I just want you to know that it’s going to cost plenty to get you out of this.”

The chieftain counted his fingers, pointing in turn at his horse, Emmalee, then Garn, who responded by counting his fingers and gesturing too. Emmalee lost track of what was happening. Suddenly the chief grunted, the brave released her, and she fell to the ground, sprawling in the dust, dirty and trembling but otherwise all right. She was sure she’d never get the smell of the Indian out of her red-and-white dress.

The Indians laughed again, seeing Emmalee there in the dirt, but this time Garn did not join them.

“Well, Torquist,” he told the wagonmaster, “the Arapaho will let us go without taking anyone or harming anyone. Fire-On-The-Moon holds all the cards, and you’re losing time. He could keep us here under siege, if he wanted. You can buy new cattle out west, but if Pennington gets to the best land first…”

Torquist saw that he had no choice and yielded.

“Tell them to take the cattle.” He sighed, a sad-eyed, wild-haired prophet astride the Kansas plains. He might have interpreted this outcome, unpleasant as it was, as a victory, because the lives and futures of his people had been retained. But his purity of purpose could not abide compromise, which he believed to be defeat. And so Horace Torquist retreated again to his tent, bearing a burden of disappointment and guilt that was to gnaw its way into his soul.

Death at Arapaho hands would have been relatively quick; the summer sun, the seemingly endless trail, showed less mercy. Hot June gave way to torrid July, each day more unbearable than the one before. Pioneers woke to searing dawns, their bodies soaked with sweat, and spent countless hours trudging beside the ever-rolling wheels. They gasped burning air, could not speak for the dust. From time to time great thunderheads appeared suddenly in the sky, to dump hail and driving rain on the plains. When the clouds rolled away, the sun beat down again, turning the rainwater into vapor. Moisture filled the air like steam; it was even hotter than before the storm.

August proved more terrible than July. Emmalee believed that she would never be cool again. Day by day, week after week, the wagon train rolled on, dreaming of Colorado, of icy mountain springs and wind in the high Rockies.

After each day on the trail, while his people made camp, Horace Torquist found the best vantage point in the area, climbed to the top of knoll or hill or promontory, and scanned the horizon. Always he descended in elation, the intensity of which increased as the wagon train neared Denver. Not once did he see any sign of Burt Pennington’s wagons, nor the great cloud of dust they raised. To the wagonleader it meant that Pennington had held to a northern route, longer and less traveled, and that he therefore must have fallen far behind.

So when the Torquist company rolled into Denver on August 20, 1868—with plenty of time to re-outfit and all of September to cross the looming Rockies—the wagonmaster and his weary followers looking forward to celebrating their arrival were shocked and crestfallen to find their rancher rivals already encamped, prepared to break camp; in fact, sassy, rested, and ready to roll.

The arrival or departure of any big group of pioneers was always an event. Residents of Denver and members of wagon trains already camped there for re-outfitting and recuperation gathered around the Torquist people as they stumbled disconsolately onto the flats east of the city. Emmalee, riding with the Creels, immediately saw Burt Pennington, Lottie, and Otis, the savvy scout. Pennington’s bald pate was brown as a nut from the sun; Lottie looked cool and elegant in a long pink dress with matching pink, patent-leather pumps; Otis wore a sidearm, high boots, and a belt of cartridges buckled around his hard belly. He was chewing on a weed.

“Hey, Torquist!” Otis goaded the leader of the farmers. “You boys might as well turn around and go back to Missouri. Ain’t too many supplies left here for you.”

“It’ll be impossible for you to reach Olympia by the first of October for the start of the land rush,” Pennington added cheerfully. “Just as well too. The land beyond the mountains is meant to graze longhorns, not to plow up for wheat and corn.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Torquist, smiling without spirit. “The only question I have is: If there aren’t adequate animals and supplies to re-outfit here, how did
you
do it?”

“Just one of them there lucky breaks,” Otis gloated.

“Yep,” said Pennington. “We had to swing north to avoid them Indians. As luck would have it, we passed through Fort Morgan on our way here to Denver. They had
all kinds
of horses and oxen and mules. We could cross the Rockies five times with the grub and gear we got.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Torquist said, trying to keep up a good front.

Lottie flashed Emmalee a dazzling smile as the wagon on which Emmalee was riding rolled by. “Seems I remember that dress from St. Joe!” she called bitchily.

“Who in the hell was that?” asked Ebenezer Creel in a snarling wheeze. He was riding next to Emmalee on the wagon seat.

“Pennington’s daughter.”

“Huh!” pronounced Ebenezer, taking another look at the spiteful Lottie. “I can tell she ain’t never had to work a day in her life. Don’t you pay no never-mind to her, Emmalee. You’re a whole lot tougher than
she
is. Although I think you still ought to tie up with a good man who’ll protect you from yuhself. Anyway, when it comes to hard times across the Rockies, I’d bet you against prissy Miss Pennington any day!”

Ebenezer was just trying to be nice, Emmalee realized. He was hoping to cheer her up. Ever since the morning at Smoky Hill River, when she’d thrown the whole train in jeopardy by disobeying orders and hiding in the Conestoga, Emmalee had been the butt of jokes, “the girl who almost ruined things for everyone.”

“Hey, Em!” Myrtle Higgins had attempted to console her. “You didn’t try to do anything but find out what them damn men was up to. That was my idea too. The only difference is that you got caught.”

Quite a difference.

Since that morning, Emmalee’s wounded pride wouldn’t permit her to face Garn. Ebenezer had let drop, now and again, that Garn was “comin’ over to the wagon for a little snort,” but Emmalee always found an excuse to be elsewhere when he appeared. She was sure he would gloat about having saved her from the chief, tell her how comical she’d looked upside-down on the Indian’s horse.

“That scout ast after you,” Ebenezer always said. “I reckon he thinks yer avoidin’ him.”

“Maybe he’s right,” Emmalee replied ruefully. The trouble with pride was that it was pretty hard to live with after you’d gone and done something really stupid.

Randy Clay had come around too, and he was more than sweet. He told her that what had happened out there on the prairie hadn’t mattered. “What matters is the future,” he assured her fervently. And he
was
right. But then he proceeded to speak of the adjacent tracts of land that he and Emmalee would claim, and how someday…

Emmalee listened to him, appreciating his ambition and liking him immensely.

“Let’s wait and see what it’s like when we get to Olympia,” she would say. Which was good enough for Randy.

“You an’ me, Em,” he’d say, in his manner that was at once totally direct and appealingly modest, “I just think good things’re gonna happen to the two of us. I just feel it in my bones.”

“I think so too,” Emmalee always told him, but still she had the dream of
her
land,
her
home,
her
life. After she gained those things, gained them on her own,
then
she might turn her attention to other matters. Why did she feel this way? Emmalee had sometimes asked herself that very question. The answer was complicated, comprised partly of her God-given independence of spirit, partly of the trials she’d had to endure after her parents died, and partly of a compelling memory. She recalled, as vividly as if it were yesterday, the morning she and her father and mother had piled their worldly goods onto the wagon and driven away from their little farm in the Pennsylvania hills. They were caught up in a sense of adventure, Destiny sang in their hearts, yet when Emmalee had looked back for the last time at the small, square white house and the big red barn, when she thought of herself at play beneath the lilacs or hiking up along the Appalachian ridges, she believed in her soul that somewhere on the far side of America there waited a place as dear and sweet as that one had been.

Her great journey was a trek from home to home. Once a person had her patch of earth, her piece of sky,
then
there would be time for all the other things.

“Let’s wait and see what it’s like in Olympia,” she’d told Randy Clay.

But Olympia was still beyond the Rockies. This was only Denver, a rude frontier town aswarm with all sorts of people bound for points distant, attempting to scratch from each day just enough to tide them over to another dawn. There were cowboys, employed, unemployed, or passing from one place of employment to the next. There were many Chinese, hired to do construction work on the cross-continental railroad. And there were hundreds of pilgrims and pioneers, like Emmalee herself.

To the west, beyond Denver, loomed the fantastic, implacable Rockies. They rose to the sky; they seemed to
hold up
the sky, bastions and bulwarks so mighty that the heavens could never fall.

Emmalee quivered in her soul and stood in awe before those mountains.

Yet others had crossed them.

And so would she.

Since leaving St. Joe, the Torquist farmers had lost all their cattle to the Arapaho. Fifty-six horses had died, along with twenty-nine oxen. Three dogs were dead, seven had run away, and twenty-one of the original 178 Conestogas had broken down irredeemably and been abandoned. The wagon train had come over six hundred miles. Fifteen people had died, and Bernice Creel was failing fast.

“I just don’t know what we’re gonna do now,” mourned Ebenezer. He had given his poor wife a triple dose of opium, and still she writhed in agony, biting down hard on a piece of wood to keep from screaming.

The wagon train was bedded down for the night. Last rays of red twilight lanced through purple peaks and colored the camping plain with the brilliant hues of roses and blood. Emmalee stood beside Ebenezer in the cramped Conestoga, looking down at his wife, powerless to alleviate her agony.

“I’ll go into town and find a doctor,” she said. “He’ll be able to do something.”

“Oh, God, I hope so,” said Ebenezer.

“No.” Bernice Creel groaned. She took the piece of wood from her mouth, scarred with the indentations of her ancient teeth. “Carry me outside,” she said. “I want to see the mountains.”

“Awww, honey,” said Ebenezer.

“We’ve come all this way and I want to see the Rockies, at least.”

“You got a right,” said Ebenezer.

He and Emmalee unhitched the hammock from its moorings and carried Bernice out through the canvas flaps of the Conestoga, laying her down gently on the endgate. Her body was incredibly thin and wasted; she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. But her eyes were still alive, her mind still clear, and when she turned to look at the mountains, at the last rays of sunlight shining through the purple peaks, the old woman let out a faint cry of wonder and, yes, happiness.

“I have come this far, after all,” she said. “Ebenezer, you go on. I want you to go on.”

“What are you talking about?” said the old man gruffly, kneeling down beside her. “We’re both of us crossing over to the other side.”

“Yes, but in different ways, Eb. I have to cross first and go farther.”

Emmalee felt a sudden chill in the air, which she attributed to the coming of mountain night. Then she knelt down beside Mrs. Creel, too, and knew differently. She was on the hard wooden planks of a wagon, but her knees were in the sod beside the Monongahela, in the earth of Springfield, Illinois. All over camp, people were talking and working and living, but an invisibile canopy of death was descending upon the Creels’ wagon.

“You’ve been a good man to me, Ebenezer…” Mrs. Creel was saying.

The old man knew what was about to happen, but he did not admit it. “I did my best,” he said, taking her hand, “but don’t talk like this. You’ll only get yourself into a state. We don’t want this kind of talk.”

“Ebenezer!” exclaimed Mrs. Creel, in a gasp that was like a shout, a cry for help. A paroxysm shook her, as if her body had been seized and shaken by a gigantic hand.

“Bernice!” the old man wailed. “Hang on, Bernice, we’ll get you some medicine.”

But it was too late for medicine, it was too late for anything. Bernice died with her face to the mountains; the great blue peaks were reflected eternally in her gaze.

Later, as Ebenezer in his hammock slept the sleep of the abandoned and bereft, with the sound of coffin nails reverberating throughout the camp, Emmalee and Myrtle Higgins washed Bernice’s body. Looking down sadly upon this withered husk that had once been a woman, Emmalee began to cry.

“I know,” said Myrtle. “Here you took care of her all this time, brought her all this way…”

“It’s not only that. I was thinking of everybody. We’re all young once, but time passes so quickly. And this is how everything ends.”

“No news in that, honey. You’ll pardon me for being blunt. I don’t talk no other way. Sure it ends like this. What matters is how you handle the time you got.”

“Ebenezer’s all alone now.”

“So that’s what’s on your mind? Being alone?”

“Not really, I—”

“You can lie to yourself, honey, but don’t lie to me. Everybody’s alone in death. But in life nobody is, unless they want to be. Remember what I told you about choices? Life is your time to make choices. After that, it’s too late.”

They finished their task, sponging the body that had once cradled youth and dreams, love and lust and desire, all gone now. Emmalee found Mrs. Creel’s dresses, picked the one that looked best, and put it on the body. The garment was too large for the shrunken woman. Myrtle used pins to give the dress an appearance of proper fit. Then she drew herself a cup of whiskey from Ebenezer’s barrel, splashed about an inch of it into a second cup, and motioned Emmalee to follow her.

They sat down in the dirt alongside one of the Conestoga’s big wooden-spoked wheels. Myrtle drank and grimaced. Emmalee sipped and coughed.

“Have some more,” Myrtle said. “Just what the doctor ordered, believe me.”

Emmalee’s second sip went down more smoothly. Across camp, the hammering stopped.

“Carpenter’ll be bringin’ over the coffin in a minute. Funeral in the mornin’. Ain’t nobody got much time to grieve. How you feelin’ now?”

“Better.”

Myrtle drank, smacked her lips, cleared her throat.

“I understand that Randy Clay’s thinkin’ of marryin’ you?”

“Well, he’s…he’s been talking about getting land together.”

Myrtle’s laugh was a snort. “I don’t see much difference, do you? Hey, honey, you should give it some real serious thought. Choices, remember. Chance for a good man like that don’t come along every day. Bet I know what’s really on your mind though.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Garn Landar. You’re just plumb flatout buffaloed by him now.”

“I am not!”

“Like I said, don’t lie to me. First you think he’s some sort of a rake, could charm the snakes down outta trees. A gorgeous, reckless ne’er-do-well, and a man to stay away from. Then, when we all get ourselves in a big mess, way out beyond the high-water mark with them Indians, he ups an’ saves our arses. And while he
is
savin’ our hides, you go an’ figure out a way to make a fool of yourself, an’ to almost foul up the deal Landar is cuttin’ with big chief Fire-On-The-Moon.”