There were only the two wagons now.
You rode the seat till your backside was sore and aching, sun beating down on you, mules shitting — you could find the damn trail west just by following the animal shit of the party ahead. There was always the stench of manure in your nostrils. You’d think out here in the open, the stink’d be blown away in a minute, but you was moving so slow all the time, just that damn steady pace of the mules, that whenever one of them let go, you always got a whiff could knock you off the wagon seat. Walked beside the wagon sometimes. Got off the seat and walked. You could keep up easy enough, wagon was going so slow. Walked awhile, then got back up on the seat again, swapped places with Pa maybe, handled the reins awhile. Or went back inside to sit with Ma and the girls. Got your brains jiggled all the time.
Kept moving.
Through a valley thick with grass high as your waist. Streams fanning out from the river like the veins on the backs of your hands. Clouds coming up over the timbered hills behind.
When you was driving the mules, you yelled “Ha-ya!”
Some fun, this moving on west.
“I’m afraid here,” Annabel said.
“Ain’t nothin to be afraid of.”
“Yes, Indians,” she said.
They came calling on the morning of the seventeenth.
There were six in all — four full-blooded Kansas braves, a woman who was squaw to one of them, and a half-breed trailing a cow. Timothy hid his wife inside the covered Chisholm wagon, and went out to greet them. Their language was Siouan, which Timothy could only sing. But the half-breed knew some English, and they were able to communicate. He wanted to trade the cow for a horse. He kept looking around for where they had hobbled their horses.
“For cow, horse,” he said.
“We have no horses,” Timothy said.
The half-breed looked around.
“No horse,” he said.
“Correct. No horse.”
“Mule then. Two mules. For cow.” He held up two fingers. “Two.”
“We need the mules,” Timothy said.
“Then what?” the half-breed asked.
The squaw spoke French. She said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est? I’l n’y a pas un cheval?”
The half-breed blinked.
“Pas des cheveaux,” Timothy said.
“Alors,” she said, and clucked her tongue.
They had fresh vegetables to trade, butter and milk. They showed the produce — onions, beans, lettuce, pumpkins, corn — and invited tastes of the milk and butter to prove the one wasn’t sour and the other churned to creamy smoothness. When they left the encampment, they were carrying with them a string of beads that had been Annabel’s, and a pocket watch Timothy claimed he would not need once they reached the Platte. Minerva, too, had been willing to part with half her tin of coffee for the good fresh milk and the sweet butter. The squaw called back “Au’voir,” and the party rode off through the trees.
Timothy explained then why he’d hidden his wife.
“There’re two tribes who’ve been at war with the Pawnee since last spring,” he said. “One’s the Dakota, beyond and to the north. The other’s the Kansas, right here and now.”
“You think they saw her?” Bobbo asked,
“I don’t know,” Hadley said.
“Cause, Pa, if they did...”
“I know what you’re thinkin.”
The wagons were drawn up on either side of the fire, thirty feet between them. One end of the camp was against the river; the sound of splashing water would serve as an alarm if anyone approached from that side. In the open end of the U formed by wagons and river, Bobbo and Hadley stood guard.
“They’ll come get her, Pa,” Bobbo said. “Them people are enemies.”
“Same as us and the Cassadas.”
“Worse’n that, Pa.”
“I’m wonderin about the one spoke a little English,” Hadley said. “He seemed to want them mules real bad. Kept eying them all the while we were tradin for butter and milk.”
“I saw him,” Bobbo said.
“Had to have seen how small a party we are.”
“Blind man would’ve seen that,” Bobbo said. “Pa, he might come back tonight with a whole damn tribe!”
Hadley didn’t answer.
“Pa?”
“Yeah, he sure enough might,” Hadley said.
At the fire, Timothy was reading to the women. In a voice deliberately hoarse, he whispered, “ ‘During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low...’ ”
They left the river bottom on the morning of the nineteenth, following the trail to higher ground. In the distance, ten miles or more away, they could still see the Kansas flowing eastward to Missouri, blue against a lush surrounding green. The hills through which they traveled now were consistently verdant. Red sandstone boulders erupted from the vegetation like huge blood blisters. Thickets of willows filled the ravines. Even in creeks run dry there were natural springs. Antelope raced through the woods.
Each time one crossed the trail, Bobbo thought it was Indians.
They came upon the village by accident.
It had been burned to the ground.
The wilderness claimed whatever had been consumed by fire, weeds and grass encroaching to the doorsteps of blackened lodges.
“Kansas village,” Timothy said.
On the ground there were shields marked with Pawnee symbols, broken Pawnee lances. Strewn everywhere about in scorched garments were the skeletons of Kansas women and children. The skies were gray. There were ghosts in this place. They moved through it and past it swiftly.
The temperature that night dropped to forty-nine degrees.
The road northwestward to the Platte took them through shaded forests and glittering shallow pools, crossed them over streams that rushed as swiftly as rivers or dribbled away to nothingness. Amorpha was in bloom everywhere on the sun-washed hillsides, purple clusters bursting against soil almost black... and now there were roses!
Roses blooming on the prairie in small bunches, like unexpected cries of welcome. Roses thicker yet, spreading wild across the meadows, wafting a thick sweet scent on the southerly winds. Hadley picked a bouquet for Minerva, and she blushed as pink as what she held in her trembling hands.
Roses.
But not a sign of an Indian anywhere.
Timothy said the Indians were busy with their own problems, but Bobbo still feared that the ones who’d come to trade had spied a glimpse of his wife in the wagon, and would eventually come get her. Either that or her own damn people’d think she was being held prisoner, come raiding to rescue her. This was Pawnee country, Timothy said, as if that would keep them safe from attack.
The landscape kept changing.
The soil was coarser, red rocks mixed with some a sick yellow color, others gray as death. Big black boulders in the creeks. Bobbo worried about Indians all the time, worried, too, about catching up with the Oregon train. If just they could catch up, he’d stop worrying about Indians altogether. But the train were always just ahead.
“They’re just ahead,” his father kept saying.
Just ahead. Find traces of their fires. Pair of spectacles in a creek run dry. But never them. Like chasing a dream, Bobbo thought. You reach out for it, all that happens is you wake yourself up.
On the twenty-fifth, they made camp near where a Pawnee party had been hunting sometime past. There were still buffalo bones on the ground. A broken knife. Wooden frames upon which the Indians had stretched their hides to dry. The river bottom was covered with thistle, and the scent of something sweetish filled the woods.