“And if we lose livestock or property in the river?” Timothy asked.
“Then there is no price. You have made the crossing without it costing you a penny.” Ferocious Storm grinned suddenly. His teeth were stained a brown darker than his skin, and some of them were missing, and the rest of them were crooked. But his smile was so contagiously mirthsome that it caused all the men standing around him to grin in return. “And if any of you should drown,” he said, smiling, “we will pay you the agreed-upon price.”
Timothy laughed. The others, not knowing what had been said, laughed too. The bargaining had been concluded.
The Indians had built their landing at a bend downstream, where a rock-strewn cove of silt and coarse sand formed a small natural harbor. Their vessel was a raft some fifteen feet wide and thirty long. It lay at the landing now, its forward end lashed at each corner to the makeshift dock, its stern — if one could so distinguish either end from the other — tossing and bobbing in the restless current. The raft looked flimsy and primitive, its lashings frayed, its logs of uneven length, battered and skinned from collisions with river rocks and floating timber.
Close by the landing, a white man crouched over a small pit, striking sparks from his flint into a bed of tinder. He was brown and grizzled, the knuckles on his hands oversized, the wrists bony; he seemed to be made altogether of sinew. A woman probably his wife was coming up from the river carrying meat dripping water. She was as tall, as spare, and as brown as he was. Her flowered dress and sunbonnet were both faded almost white and one of her shoes was worn through at the little toe. A little way off, a covered wagon stood on a grassy level patch of earth. A pair of hobbled oxen were grazing alongside it. Two young boys with pale pinched faces peered through the puckered opening of the cover.
The woman put the meat into a skillet. Her husband asked her to get some buffalo chips from the wagon, and she went to it and returned a moment later carrying a handful of dried dung. Hadley knew there were no buffalo this side of the Kansas nor even anywhere nearby on the other side. So where’d the buffalo chips come from?
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
“How d’you do, sir?” the man said, and glanced up briefy at Hadley, and then went back to the fire.
“Hadley Chisholm,” Hadley said.
“Ralph Hutchinson.” He did not introduce the woman. She stood waiting for the tinder to catch. When it did, she dropped the buffalo chips into it and fanned them to a blaze with her bonnet.
“Where are you bound, sir, may I ask?” Hadley said.
“East to Council Bluffs,” Hutchinson said.
From the corner of his eye, Hadley saw Jonah Comyns walking up from the river landing, where he’d been inspecting the raft. “Are you traveling alone then?” he asked.
“Just me and mine,” Hutchinson said. “Left a train of eleven wagons bound for Oregon.”
Comyns was at the fire now. He nodded to Hutchinson in brief greeting. Hutchinson nodded back.
“How far ahead are they?” Hadley asked.
“Left them a week ago.”
“Any reason?”
“Children took ill,” Hutchinson said.
“Of what?” Comyns asked at once.
“We thought at first it was cholera, like swept the land in ’32.”
“What was it then?”
“Don’t know,” Hutchinson said, and shook his head. “Camp fever, I guess. More’n a dozen in our party came down with it.”
Comyns’s eyes looked troubled; they kept darting to where Sarah stood talking to Bonnie Sue, the baby in her arms. Hadley didn’t like what was happening. He knew the Pennsylvania widower had been preaching turnabout to anyone who’d listen. Here now was a man telling of fever on the trail ahead, and Comyns was taking it all in. Willoughby came up to the fire and stood there like a spook, tall and mournful, his ears open as water jugs.
“Is there game ahead, though?” Comyns asked.
“Game aplenty,” Hutchinson said. “You won’t go hungry on the plains unless you’re lazy. This is buffalo meat right here. Wife was just down the river cuttin out the maggots and givin it a rinse.”
“Are there Indians beyond?” Willoughby asked.
“Yep,” Hutchinson said. “That’s what there is out there; that’s Indian territory out there.” He brought the skillet to the fire, leveled it on the rocks surrounding the pit and the flames. The meat began to sizzle at once. Its aroma was unlike anything Hadley had ever sniffed before. He’d eaten breakfast not an hour and a half before, yet the smell of the cooking meat set his stomach to growling again.
“But you can kill an Indian by putting a bullet in him,” Hutchinson said. “I don’t know any way to kill a thing I can’t see, that’s causin my sons to burn with fever. I fear disease,” he said simply.
“And I,” Comyns said.
“The trail back to Council Bluffs? Has there been rain to turn it soft?”
“We came from Independence,” Comyns said. “There was rain Monday night, but only sunshine since.”
“Ah, good then,” Hutchinson said.
“I can’t risk it,” Comyns said abruptly. “I’m sorry, Chisholm, I cannot risk it. I’d brave the river, I’d shoot wild Indians, but I can’t risk the infant coming down with a fever might consume her. I’m sorry,” he said, and shook his head, and turned again to Hutchinson. “If you want company the way back,” he said, “there’s me and my family’ll provide it, sir.”
“Welcome then,” Hutchinson said.
Hadley waited.
“I’ll join you, too,” Willoughby said, and nodded.
Bobbo watched wagon and raft whirling away from the dock and was certain all their goods would be carried clear back to Westport, where the river poured into the Missouri at the center of the nation. The Indians were wearing only breechclouts and moccasins, shouting instructions to each other in the language common to both their tribes poling the raft across the river as if it were a pony they’d each and separately ridden before. By the time they returned again to the right bank to collect the humans and the livestock, Bobbo was beginning to feel a bit more confident of their skill. But that was before the raft lurched away from the landing and the current caught at it and sent its forward end plunging below the surface for a heart-stopping thirty seconds.
It was worse than the Falls of Ohio.
The mules began pawing at once, pulling against the pickets driven into the logs, braying as they had on the descent through the Kentucky chute. The raft dove again, water coming up over its forward end to engulf it, the river hitting Bobbo’s face in a harsh cold smack. He closed his eyes against it, and then opened them again immediately, fearing he’d drown without witnessing the cause of it. Muscles rippled like whitleather along the brown backs of the Indians. Biceps bulging, breechclouts slapping about their legs, they stepped swiftly and constantly for balance, as if dancing a jig across the river. When at last the raft reached the opposite shore, Bobbo looked back and marveled that he was still alive. Timothy haggled further with Ferocious Storm, who insisted that the agreed-upon price be honored even though the Indians had ferried across only two wagons rather than four. Timothy staunchly maintained that the price should be cut in half. They reached a compromise Ferocious Storm apparently did not enjoy. He muttered something in his native tongue and then carried the bartered merchandise onto the raft, lashed it down tightly, and crossed the river again with his partners, never once looking back at the white men standing wet and bedraggled on the shore.
They camped for the night on a bend of the river some ten or twelve miles upstream. The sunset was more vivid than any they had ever seen back home. The entire horizon glowed with orange and gold that turned a deeper red and then a purple like gerardia. Blue then. And black. The blackest night, not a single star showing.