With the ease of long practice, Malcolm shifted into his Denver persona.
"Yeah, I s'pect so, ma'am. Lots of prairie schooners in that train."
Malcolm's uncanny ability to mimic local languages, even dialects, always amazed Margo. It was his way of reminding Margo that she, too, would have to master the knack.
"But I thought all the wagon trains were a thing of the past? I mean, I read somewhere that the whole continent had been settled by 1885 or so."
Malcolm shook his head. "Nope. With book learnin' you has to go deep to ferret out truth. Lemme 'splain somethin', ma'am. This here city o' Denver weren't nothin' more'n paper plans, laid out nice and neat, back in '59. Then along comes the Pikes Peak rush, over what?'
Margo's brow furrowed delightfully Then her whole face lit with an incandescent glow. "Gold! The 59 Gold Rush."
Malcolm chuckled. "Very good. 'Cept nobody could find any. Miners called it the biggest humbug in all history, they did, and left in disgust. But the experienced men, now, the ones who'd sluiced and dug out the big Georgia and California motherlode, they stayed on. Saw the same signs, they did, same as the signs they'd noticed before. So they stayed on and come late '59 and into '60, made the really big strikes. Caused another rush, of course," he chuckle.
"Yes, but what's that got to do with that?" She pointed toward the wagons.
"W-e-e-l-l-l, that's another story, now, ain't it? There's still odd bits and pieces o' land rattling around this big country, pieces that're still unclaimed for homesteadin'." He lowered his voice to a nearly inaudible murmur. He whispered into her ear, "In fact, four times as many acres were homesteaded after 1890 than before it, but you'd never guess it from period attitudes about land. It borders on sacredness." Then at a slightly higher volume and a more discreet distance, he said, "Take careful note 'o what those wagons is carryin'. And what they ain't."
Another lesson, even during the very serious duty of watching for sluglike Farley? Malcolm Moore was always so sure of himself, yet so gentle compared to the men in her old life. She studied each wagon in turn, trying to ignore weird shadows thrown against the canvas tops as those departing checked over their equipment. She saw the usual rifles and pistols, bandoliers and boxes of ammunition to hunt game for the table, dozens of tools whose use Margo could only guess at, and a few rough-hewn bits of furniture.
"No women's things," Margo said abruptly. "No trunks for clothing or quilts, no butter churns, no barrels of padded china from back East. And no children. Those men aren't married. No farming equipment either, and no livestock except the oxen and horses pulling those wagons. Not even a single laying hen-and you can hear them clucking a fair distance away. And believe me, they cluck loud when they're upset. Do you hear any chickens?"
Malcolm shook his head solemnly.
"No, me neither."
"Very nice, indeed," Malcolm purred. "You've a good eye-and ear-for detail. Now just keep up with the bookwork and you'll make one damned fine time scout."
Margo's fierce blush was, thank God, hidden by the dark night.
"Those," Malcolm continued very quietly, "are hardened frontiersmen, always on the move. They follow the remnants of the buffalo herds for their hides, which are commanding good prices again, now that there are so few buffalo left. They follow hints and whispers of gold found on this creek or that. Or they work for hire as ranch hands, even drovers, although that profession is just about as extinct as the poor buffalo. Now that bunch," he turned Margo's head toward the front wagon in the caravan, "is bound for the Indian Territory, or my name isn't Malcolm Moore."
"Indian Territory?" Margo echoed.
"Later renamed several things, but Oklahoma was generally mixed in there somewhere. Right now men are streaming in by the hundreds to support David Payne, a cutthroat frontiersman leading a band of even more violent frontiersman in a war against the Indians given that land, even against the Federal Government."
"Your accent's slipping,"
"Right you are, ma'am, and thank you it is for the reminder."
"So," Margo concentrated, her brow deeply furrowed as she thought it through, "these men are going to stir up Indian tribes by taking part of their land illegally?"
"Yep. Worse trouble'n anybody thought they'd stir up. But the whole country's clamorin' to kick out the `savages' and open up Oklahoma for `decent' folk to settle."
Margo shivered, watching these men pack away their clothes, excess weapons, and whatever they considered valuable enough to take along. The rest, they abandoned along the road, in bundles and boxes, for anyone to salvage. "The more I learn about history, the more savage I find it was. These men are going out to murder as many Indians as they can get into their goddamned sights, aren't they?"
"My dear lady, you shock me! Such language!"
Gentle reprimand, steel-hard warning behind it. Ladies of quality did not curse like sailors in 1885, not even in the frontier. Of course, barmaids and whores could be expected to say anything and everything ... but Margo did most emphatically not wish to be associated with them.
Not Minnesota prudishness this time-she'd lost a lot of that on a beach in Southeastern Africa-but a cold, calculated decision in the direction of survival. Time scouts, as her grandfather Kit Carson put it, had to be bloody careful anywhere downtime. Especially if scouting an unknown gate. Shaking inside her frontier, multibutton, impossible-to-fasten boots (until Malcolm, shaking with silent laughter, handed her a button hook and explained its use) Margo recalled her formidable but lonely grandfather, a man who'd stepped through a gate to rescue her, not knowing if he'd survive the trip to the other side; then glared at the men in those murder-wagons, at the ones standing outside in little knots, smoking some kind of foul-smelling cigars, their boasts of killing no-account Indians like it was some insane game where they tallied score by the number of people they butchered.
Not that she thought the Indians shoved into that Oklahoma Reservation to be the peaceful, nature revering, squeaky clean role-models the TV ads and movies made them out to be. She'd read with a clinical, removed-from-the-dreadful-scenes detachment as her only defense against descriptions of massacres perpetrated by desperate and enraged young warriors, young men with their blood up, refusing to give up either tribal or manly pride. Pride! How much trouble that one little word had caused the world ... That was new-these insights and connections she'd begun making about all kinds of subjects, to the everlasting astonishment of her professors and the steady rise of her GPA.
She slitted her eyes slightly against the sting of windborne cigar smoke, thinking it all through as carefully and thoroughly as possible-as Kit and Malcolm had jointly taught her to do. No, the Native American tribes hadn't been peaceful nature lovers at all, even before the coming of Europeans; before that momentous date, they'd made war on one another in just as savage a fashion as they later made war against the pale invaders of their continent. But what the American government had later done to these people was hideous, unforgivable. margo liked getting her facts strait, more and more so the longer she was in college, delving through books she had once abhorred, so she could understand the real message behind admittedly biased writing on Native American Indians--contemporary accounts by trappers, traders, settlers, mountain men-as well as modern scholarly research-hero-worship crap about people who-according to several archaeological site-analyses written by the archaeologists themselves, tossed their meal scraps right out of the teepee's front door for weeks, maybe even months on end (at least, that was true of some of the plains tribes, well before the arrival of the European); people who thought nothing of making their immediate surroundings a latrine/cesspit and thought their women attractive in hair dressed in bear-grease applied six months previously. Margo shuddered delicately.