The Way West (9 page)

TIME WE GET to the Platte, we can figure we've made a start," Dick Summers said.
   Lije Evans answered, "Uh-huh," thinking that in Dick's eyes already was the look of the Platte, the look of distance, the look of far-off things brought close in memory.
   Evans squinted ahead, searching for the hills that people spoke of as the coasts of Nebraska. "It's the on'y trip I ever made that it took the best part of a month to get started on," he said.
   He knew what Dick meant, though. He meant that once they reached the Platte they'd be sure enough in a different country, sure enough on the real start to the mountains and to Oregon. He felt that way himself even though he never had been on the trail before and never seen the Platte except as his mind saw it from what people said. It would be a shallow, spreadout, sandy river with flat banks and no trees except on the islands, and it would run muddy from the feet of more buffalo than any wan could count.
   Patch rode along with him and Dick, Patch and Daugherty and Martin. Together they were scouting for Indians and picking out the way for the wagons that followed after. Dick carried a big rag with him and sometimes tore pieces from it and posted little flags across breaks and washes to show the lead teamster where to head. Now Patch said to Evans, "This would seem like more than a start if you had started from Massachusetts."
   "A man wouldn't think Oregon fever would carry so far," Evans answered.
   A little questioning smile came on Patch's face. "Ever hear of Hall Kelley or Captain Wyeth?"
   "Can't say as I did."
   Summers was nodding. "I knowed Wyeth. Creek back there a ways is named for him." Evans expected Dick to say more, but all Dick added was, "Good man." Looking at him, seeing the face marked by thought, Evans imagined his mind was far back, remembering Wyeth and the days that had gone before.
   Patch said, "Kelley and Wyeth puffed Oregon as much as anybody, especially Kelley. We had a touch of Oregon fever before others even knew about it." Patch, too, fell silent, his thin and sharp-nosed face wearing its usual look of quiet wideawakeness. It was a Yankee face he had, Evans thought, but not a bad face even so.
   Evans turned in his saddle. Old Rock had just finished a scout into the bushes after some varmint or other and now trotted at the heels of the horses. A steady, quiet old dog, Rock was, who carried himself wise and dignified. Farther back of them, maybe a mile down the gradual slope they had climbed, he could see the wagon train winding, the gray-white train squirming in its haze of dust. The time was coming on toward noon and the train had straggled out. Behind the wagons came the loose horses and behind the horses the cattle, with riders back of them and to the sides, keeping them in line and pushing them along. Out from the wagon, to the windward side so as to be out of the dust, women and children were walking, walking and probably laughing and chattering and looking for wild flowers tough enough to grow on this dry ridge between the Little Blue and the Platte. It was cactus they'd find, and thistle and low sage standing silverish in the sun. The only flowers they were likely to see were the little yellow-hearted daisies that could sprout from a stone -daisies and now and then one of the wild roses that were just beginning to bloom.
   In the high sun the colors made flashes through the dust -the white of the wagon covers, the red and white and black of the critters, the blue of a dress a woman had on. Evans saw a man walking along the line. It probably was Tadlock, trying to get the train to bunch up. He was a great one for order, a great one for orders, as far as that went, though he wasn't much horseman and so didn't ride ahead as often as a captain might. Evans wondered if he ever thought about the dogs he had wanted killed. A dog trailed him now, and a half dozen others paced along with the women and children and now and then made dashes to the side. Dogs traveled more miles than any horse or ox, but still they kept on.
   Evans could see his own two wagons, he thought, and a figure by one of them that he took for Rebecca. Brownie must be inside the second wagon, riding. He knew, with a little welling of secret pride, that Rebecca would be searching ahead for him, wanting him to be all right, just as he was searching back for her.
   This was one day, he thought, when Brownie wouldn't have to breathe so much dust. Mack had talked Shields into helping him once in a while, and today Shields was back with the cows. Evans never thought of Mack but he thought of the night of the stampede and the Indian Mack had shot. The shooting seemed like a cruel and useless thing from what he could make out of it, though some of the men laughed and said the Indian had got a case of falling sickness. You would think from listening to them that an Indian was no different from a varmint. Still, Mack seemed like a pretty good man, if a strange one.
   Evans turned back in the saddle. "Tadlock don't think we're doing so good," he said.
   "Tadlock eats too many beans," Patch said. He spoke as if he had turned things over in his mind and come to an answer no one could outtalk.
   Martin had come with Tadlock from Illinois. He said, "Tadlock's all right," and looked at Patch out of his dull eyes. He had a face that looked as if it knew it hadn't got any special favors when faces were divvied out. He walked and rode hunched over like a man on a cold day.
   Patch wasn't one to start a fight, though Evans imagined he could take care of himself if he had to. He didn't answer Martin.
   Evans said, "Maybe it ain't such a bad thing to have someone like him pushin'."
   "That's what I say," Martin put in.
   "Like he says, someone has to take charge."
   The grin took the bite out of Dick's words. "He don't have to take it like God hisself had give it to him. Eh, Daugherty?"
   Daugherty didn't join in the talk. He never did talk much, though Irish was written plain on his face. He went along silent, a blue-eyed, fair-complected man whose cheeks burned under the sun and wind and then peeled off like a snake skin and then burned again. He wore an old red hunting shirt and carried a flintlock his daddy must have hunted with as a boy in western Virginia.
   "Long time ago," Dick said, "I pulled loose from the notion that what galled me or puked me was good for me, body or soul."
   "Best not let Brother Weatherby hear you," Evans told him.
   "What cured me," Dick said, just making talk, "was Injun physic."
   Patch asked, "Injun physic?"
   "It was brewed from a root, and it would gag a hog. My ma would grab me by the nose, and when I opened my mouth to breathe, she would pour it down, a tin cup to a dose. She figured it must be good because it tasted so bad."
   "And was it?" Patch asked.
   "Like doctors," Dick went on. "They figure the less life in you the less disease, never stoppin' to think the less life you got the less misery you can stand."
   "You're talking about bleeders?"
   "Bleeders and physickers and all. Trouble with gettin' sick is can you live through the cure."
   Patch smiled as if he didn't think Dick believed what he was saying. "Did the Indian physic help?"
   "It done what it was aimed to do. It overdone it. Take a dose of it, and there better be a bush close."
   "So maybe it was good."
   "Not to my way of thinkin'. Oncet I swallowed a piece of money, and money was skeerce with us, so Ma dug her up a root and b'iled it and got the tea inside me, and don't you know that money came out so sick it wouldn't spend!"
   Patch asked, "Well?"
   "The store man said it was counterfeit. Said it rang hollow. I knowed it would. That Injun physic would take the insides out of anything."
   Daugherty laughed for once, and Patch grinned while he sized up Dick, as if he'd never come across the likes of Dick hefore. After a while he said, "So you mean Tadlock's like Indian physic?"
   "The talk just put me in mind of the physic was all."
   "Take away Tadlock," Evans said, "and we'd have nary a thing to chew on."
   He hadn't meant to stop the conversation, but it stopped, nobody bothering to say they could still talk about Indians or about turning back or about waiting up until another train joined theirs. In camp there were always people wanting to do this or that, wanting to do anything except to go on in the way they had decided in the first place.
   The five of them rode along quiet, and the only sounds under all the bright sky were the little sounds of the horses walking and the saddles squeaking.
   Dick picked out the nooning place. It would be a dry camp, here on the dividing ridge, and what water was used would have to come from the kegs they had filled that morning. There wasn't supposed to be any water all the way from the head of the Little Blue to the Platte, but Dick had known where a trickle of it was, a couple of miles off the trail, and had taken them to it for a camping place last night. It occurred to Evans again how lucky they were to have Dick. Without him they would have had to travel dry for the whole twenty-five miles.
   The wagons rolled in by and by, pulling up in columns four abreast as they did at noon, and the oxen were unloosened but not unyoked, and the women got busy with the victuals.
   Rebecca looked tired, and Evans asked while she cleared up after the meal, "Why'n't you rest this evenin'? I'll drive."
   "You go ahead, Lije. You want to see the Platte soon's you can, and Brownie don't have to trail them cows today."
   He smiled at her, not answering but wondering again how it was she knew what was in him. He hadn't let on to her he was anxious to get a look at the Platte.
   Everybody ate fast, and what talk there was was mostly about the river, and then the bugle sounded and the train began to roll, and no one seemed to be sleepy with food and heat as they usually were after noon, but all a little excited.
   Before the wagons started, Evans had climbed his horse, going to join with Dick and Patch and the other outriders. Rock had got up, slow but dutiful, and followed him. On the way Evans saw Brother Weatherby, talking earnest to a couple of women. Even the Platte couldn't get Weatherby off the road to salvation. Tadlock stood by his wagon, his bull whip in his hand, as if ready to rouse up anyone who lazed.
   The way lay level and long ahead of them, with nothing on it to catch the eye except now and then for an antelope that stood with its head high while it watched. It would turn and run, showing its white rump, and then wheel around to watch some more. Patch wanted to shoot one, but Dick told him they'd find plenty along the river bottom; no need to pack one all that piece.
   They rode without talking much. Daugherty had stayed back with the train, and so there were just the four of them, and Martin's slow horse dropped back after a while, taking him out of earshot except when he pounded it to a run and so caught up for a minute.
   Dick's eyes were never quiet. They ran to right and left and looked ahead and back, and what they missed, Evans imagined, wasn't much. When they crossed a trail that ran north and south, Dick gave it just a glance, but Evans had a notion that Dick knew from the one quick look just about when it had been traveled last.
   "Pawnee road. To the Arkansas," Dick said.
   "We ain't seen a Pawnee."
   "Not likely to, yet. They'll be west with the buffler."
   The sun swung over and by and by got under Evans' hat brim and struck his cheek. Some of the heat had gone out of it so that it lay restful on the skin. It made Evans drowsy. He slumped down in the saddle, letting Dick do the watching while his mind fooled with one thing and then another, none of them important.
   Dick brought him to, Dick standing in his stirrups and saying, "There's the coast, I'm thinking."
What Evans saw looked like a range of high and broken hills. standing sharp and blue against the northwest sky. "Mountains!" Patch said.
   "Sand hills, and not as high as you'd think from here."
   It turned out Dick was right. As they drew closer, weaving among a long set of badger holes, the hills shrank, until at last they were just piles of sand forty to sixty feet high, blown up by the wind and held together by cactus and thistle and, Evans saw as he rode into them, by fine grasses that his horse kept tugging for. A powderlike salt patched the ground with white.
   Evans had heard about the Platte. He had pictured it in his mind. He thought he knew what he was going to see, but now that his horse stood on the summit, he couldn't believe. He couldn't believe that flat could be so flat or that distance ran so far or that the sky lifted so dizzy-deep or that the world stood so empty. He saw old Rock chase a badger into a hole, saw a bunch of antelope drifting, saw the river sluiced and the woods rising on its islands and the sand in a great gray waste, but it was something he couldn't put a name to that held him. He thought he never had seen the world before. He never had known distance until now. He had lived shut off by trees and hills and had thought the world was a doll's world and distance just three hollers away and the sky no higher than a rifle shot.
   He said, "By God, Dick! By God!" and Dick nodded, knowing how it was with him, and silence stronger than any sound closed in on the words as if he had broken the rules by speaking.
   He held his horse up, Dick on one side of him, Patch on the other, and Martin riding up from the rear. Feeling rose in him, a shudder of feeling that left the skin cold and grained. "I never knew it would be like this," he said aloud but still to himself. He was humbled and set up at the same time and proud how with a fierce, unworded pride that he had put out for Oregon. It wouldn't be easy. It wouldn't be what people called it in. Great was the name for it, the only name he could find in his mind.