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Indians, rattlesnakes, prairie wolves. What next? “How kind of you to mention it,” she said with exaggerated civility, “for I had completely forgotten about the prairie wolves following your trail.”
“Wolf,” he corrected. “Just one. You’ll recognize him by his cropped ear. I think I saw him a couple of hours ago, but I can’t be sure. Not to worry, though. I’d say he weighs less than a hundred pounds, and wolves have always feared humans, so I’m guessing this one will keep his distance.”
“How reassuring,” she said, and resolutely left the shelter of the trees. As she made her way toward the river, she dared to wonder whether the man-beast had mentioned the wolf so that she wouldn’t run away from him and leave him to fend for himself. However, just in case he wasn’t the kind to stoop to scare tactics, she kept a nervous eye out for the wolf.
She saw nothing to disturb her at the river and performed her morning ablutions to the extent that the primitive conditions would allow. She dearly wished for a comb and a brush and a mirror, but made do with her fingers. She spent the whole of the time dressing her hair mentally arguing with that vexatious man-beast, who always seemed to be putting her in the wrong. She donned her bonnet, then knelt down by the river, cupped her hands and dipped them in the water. When she tasted the freshness on her tongue and the chill against her teeth, she was arrested by memories of the thoughts she had entertained the day before when drinking from the river at this very same spot.
She had judged the trip to be more like a pleasant outing? She had reckoned that difficulties might lie ahead?
Hah! She hadn’t guessed the half of it!
Then, an uneasy thought occurred to her. Was this the “Someday” that her mother had predicted for her? Had she, in some mysterious fashion, brought this present calamity upon herself?
Sarah recalled her mother’s reaction upon being informed that her daughter had turned down William’s offer of marriage. Her mother began gently enough. “Sarah, love, you’ve had everything your own way for too long, I’m afraid, and I don’t know what to tell you anymore except that you will simply have to stop leading these poor men on.”
“Now, Mother, I didn’t lead William on.”
Her mother’s normally serene expression had set into lines of disapproval. “You toyed with Mr. James’s affections as if he were a parlor poodle, and if you haven’t determined your effect on men by now—especially after all the ruckus you raised in England—”
“Gossip! Malicious gossip, all of it!”
“Then you are a far more insensitive young woman than I had ever imagined! And I don’t want to hear another word about ‘malicious gossip.’ A woman who looks like you and behaves like you can expect tongues to wag on occasion, and given your reputation, I can only wonder how poor Mr. James allowed himself to fall prey to your toils!”
Sarah had been unwise enough at this point to observe, somewhat flippantly, “William isn’t poor.”
“Indeed not!” her mother had instantly agreed. “Everyone knows he comes from one of the richest families in Baltimore, and he’s a fine-looking man, I might add. As much as I love you, I’m beginning to think that my love has been blind and that the gossips have been right. Could it be, young lady, that the only reason why you would crush such an eligible man beneath your heel is that you think far too highly of yourself?”
“But William dotes on me, Mother! I couldn’t bear a man who dotes on me all day long!”
“Since you don’t seem to be able to inspire in a man any other desire but to dote on you, you will be pleased to accompany us on the journey we must make to join Laurence and Cathy.”
Sarah had been aghast. “To the Oregon Territory? Me? You must be joking!”
But her mother hadn’t been joking, and nothing Sarah had said afterward had persuaded either her mother or her father from their unreasonable position. She had left that particular discussion angered by her mother’s gross mis-representation of her character.
And now, here she was, standing at the edge of a river in the middle of nowhere, recalling her mother’s final words. “Someday, Sarah Ross Harris,” her mother had said on a note of threat. “Someday, you will get what’s coming to you.”
For one hideous moment, Sarah was seized by the idea that she had been deliberately abandoned by her mother and father to the Sioux, the rattlesnakes, the prairie wolves and the man-beast. But then her reason reasserted itself. She hadn’t imagined the war whoops or the Widower Reynolds’s dead body, and her parents had had other opportunities before now to abandon her along the way. Besides which, they wouldn’t be capable of doing anything so despicably underhanded to her, would they. Would they?
She returned to the clump of trees, repeating to herself that she hadn’t wanted to come on this journey, no she hadn’t, which was proof enough in her mind that she wasn’t responsible for having brought any of her present misfortune upon herself. And the General? What would he have said about the events of the past day? Why, to be sure, he would have agreed that none of this was of her making, and he would have reminded her to be on her mettle.
Once within the shelter she noted that the man-beast had finished his breakfast, for the fire was banked, and he was sitting under his tree, his back against the trunk. The pieces of her shawl were wrapped around his feet, but they were no longer bloody. He looked as if he was about to say something to her, but since she was feeling hungry and out of sorts and unable to take one of his disagreeable comments just then, she said, “I’m going to return to the Widower Reynolds’s wagon and see what provisions may be there.”
“The Sioux would have already taken all of use and value.”
“They didn’t take his trousers.”
“They don’t tend to touch dead white men, and they’ve no need for white man’s clothing.”
“I’ve a mind to go to the wagon anyway.”
“Before you go, I want to—”
She held up a hand. “To warn me. I know. Rattlesnakes.”
He made no further comment. She left the glade, scrambled up the slope, where she discovered that the broken-down wagon had been picked clean, and returned to the shelter of the trees empty-handed. At least the man-beast didn’t annoy her with obvious remarks about having been right.
Instead, he asked, “How many petticoats are you wearing?”
She was so surprised by the question that she answered it. “Two.”
“Give me one.”
The ensuing discussion roused her indignation, which brought her out of her dejection and partially restored her spirits. It ended with the surrender of one of her petticoats, but she decided to make a virtue of necessity and offered up the white cotton as if it were a magnificent sacrifice. She soon discovered that its fate was even more ignominious than that of her shawl, for the half of it was reduced to long strips that she was told would serve as jackrabbit traps. The other half would be saved for the future.
She was put to work and obliged to carry out the man-beast’s instructions while he lounged against the tree trunk. She set up the rather ingenious traps, as directed, which were composed of sticks and strips of cloth and clover. She fetched the man-beast water in her shoes. She gathered the plants that he told her to gather. She flipped back the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse and used the hem of her skirts to wipe the sweat from her brow. She found two stones he told her to find and kept them with her in case she might encounter the prairie wolf. She was not to use the stones as lancing objects. Rather, she was to chip away at one rock with the other. She was told that that was how Indians made arrowheads. She wasn’t expected to actually make an arrowhead, but the chipping sound made animals, like prairie wolves, wary, as wild animals are of anything strange.
The morning ran quickly into afternoon. The afternoon brought the capture of two jackrabbits. After that, the man-beast was busy with her scissors, skinning the rabbits and cooking them over a fire that gave almost no smoke. Then he set about fashioning the hide.
At one moment while the man-beast was involved in scraping out the rabbit skin, she was troubled enough to say, “I can’t understand why my family hasn’t returned to look for me. That is, if they escaped, which it seems they did. They should be worried about me, no?”
“They’re probably thankful you weren’t on hand during the attack yesterday afternoon. If they haven’t come back for you, it’s because they’re not able to come back for you.”
“Which makes me worried about them, then.”
“Of course.”
His response to her concern had been reasonable. No gushing sympathy. No unrealistic assurances of her family’s well-being, either. But he had offered her a kind of fellow understanding nonetheless, and she was inclined to judge the man-beast the better for it. She had too much to do, however, to dwell on her slightly improved opinion of her partner in misfortune.
In the course of her afternoon’s work, she didn’t encounter any wild animals, so she didn’t have occasion to chip away at her stones, although she was aware at odd times during the day of being watched. However, whenever she looked about her, she saw nothing. No Indians. No prairie wolves. She kept the rocks with her, and when she smoothed them in her palms, her jumping nerves steadied.
The afternoon was spent, and so were her energies. She went one last time to the river, removed her bonnet and splashed water on her face. Heedless of the fact that her hair was tumbling around her shoulders, hairpins askew, she returned to the glade and plopped down on the ground at the base of her tree. She was happy to empty her mind and stare into the lengthening evening shadows.
When the faintest twinklings could be seen in the sky through the leafy arches in the trees, the rude, inconsiderate man-beast tossed two rabbit skins into her lap and said, “It’s time to move on.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_2e9545dc-04e5-5931-9baf-5cce7f3d1cc3)
Powell rose to his full height, tested his weight first on one sole, then the other. His feet were still torn and sore, but the covering of wet rabbit hide made it easier to stand on them. He flexed his knees and felt the ache of muscles in his calves from the awkward way he had walked trying to spare his feet over the last few days. Still, his condition was no longer bad enough to warrant the risk of playing the role of sitting duck another day.
The trousers were a definite inconvenience. The Widower Reynolds had evidently been a much shorter man than he, for the pant legs reached only to his midcalf. The suspenders did not adjust and were, therefore, unusable. The trousers were too short in the crotch, too, but the waist was snug enough so that he didn’t have to waste one of the precious strips of petticoat cloth as a belt. If the beautiful idiot hadn’t been with him, he would have preferred to go naked. However, since she was with him, something about keeping to the conventions of dress seemed like a good idea.
He had already packed up the sack he had made from one half of her petticoat. It now held the suspenders, the torn shawl, the strips of cloth retrieved from the traps, and the beautiful idiot’s shoes. Her scissors he carried in one of his back pockets. He had already dismantled the rocks he had used for the two fires he had made, the one for the tree frogs, the other for the jackrabbits, which he had built a few feet away from the first. He had scattered twigs and leaves over the warm ground where the fires had been and had disposed of the jackrabbit remains. All day long he had been rescaling the map of the territory in his head to fit the proportions of crossing it on foot. He had charted their course.
He figured they were ready to go.
When he took his first tentative steps toward the riverside edge of the trees, he became aware that the beautiful idiot had not moved. He looked over his shoulder and repeated, “It’s time to move on.”
She remained seated and motionless at the base of the tree. The twilight silvered the golden hair that was swirling about her heart-shaped face and shoulders like a fallen halo. The soft half-light paled her rosy skin, giving it the texture of flower petals. Her big brown eyes were luminous with a feisty mix of emotions, and her pretty lips were set in a line oddly expressive of seduction and obstinance at once. She had crossed her arms under full breasts and crossed her legs at their shapely ankles. Her feet peeped out from under the flounces of her petticoat and overskirt. The moccasins lay untouched in her lap where he had tossed them.
“You cannot be serious,” she stated in that falsely pleasant voice that grated on his nerves.
It took him a moment to absorb the impact of that statement, then another moment to suppress the desire to strangle her. He shifted the sack on his back and demanded, “Are you always like this, or only when survival is at stake?”
“Always like what, sir?”
Why mince words? “Always idiotic.” He saw the flash in her eyes shift from seductive obstinance to outright anger. “We’ve done fine for the day here, but I’ve no desire to linger longer and make myself easy prey for either man or animal. And I’m assuming you see the advantage of traveling at night, so that I don’t have to spell it out for you.”
“No, you don’t have to spell it out for me, but I’d like to point out that I’m the one who’s been working all day while you’ve been sitting around.”
He gave her a very deliberate once-over. “You look like a healthy woman, and the amount of ‘work’ you did is nothing compared to the physical demands that will be put on both of us tonight—which is why I gave you half an hour to rest. We need to move, and the time is now.”
She didn’t budge.
It would take only one more idiotic word from her for him to leave her here to her own devices. Let her die, for all he cared. But then he thought of her scissors in his pocket, the valuable cloth in his hands and the fact that she had fetched him water more than once today, and he realized that it wouldn’t be fair to leave her. But when was life ever fair? Besides which, it was her choice, after all, to stay or come. You could lead a horse to water…and all that.
He turned to go.
“I need my shoes,” she said. “I don’t see them lying about, so I’m guessing that you have them in the half of my petticoat that you have slung over your shoulder.”
“Wear the moccasins I made you.”
“I want my shoes.”
“Moccasins don’t leave the same footprints as white man’s shoes, and I had to cut up the laces of your ankle boots to make four ties for our two pairs.” He saw her lift the rabbit skins and examine the ties. He saw her jaw drop. He cut off whatever idiotic thing was going to come out of her pretty mouth by saying swiftly, “They’ll fit you perfectly. I measured them against your shoes. Now, let’s go!”
He slipped through the trees and stepped out onto the riverbank, half hoping she wouldn’t follow him.
No such luck, but, then again, that was just his luck. He hadn’t gone ten paces before she was behind him, asking, “Where are we going?”
“To deliver you to your family.” He added, with feeling, “And without delay.”
“Oh! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” When she caught up with him, she said, “You know, we might get along much better if you would explain yourself to me instead of making me out to be an…an idiot! And I could think of you less as a man-beast and in a more kindly manner if I had a name to call you.”
At that he stopped in his tracks and looked down at her. She was looking up at him, her beautiful eyes wide and almost beseeching, but not quite. Her practiced social smile held a hint of something else that he wasn’t willing to examine just yet. Instead, he pinned his thoughts on the incredible idea that she had called him a man-beast, and he almost laughed. Good God, she was an irritating woman, but she had a way of diverting his attention from the pain in his feet. He’d grant her that much.
“I asked you your name, sir,” she repeated.
“Powell.”
“Just Powell? Only that?”
“Wesley.”
“Well, which is the first name and which the last, sir? I’m afraid I cannot distinguish.”
“Wesley Powell,” he said slowly. “My name is Wesley Powell.”
“Very well, then, Mr. Powell.” She nodded her head graciously. “I am Miss Harris.”
He regarded her a moment longer, then grunted and began walking again. Really, she had expected no better from the man-beast, but she found that it humanized him to have a name, and such a perfectly ordinary one, although he had pronounced it with a kind of reluctance. Or did his tone hint of challenge?
No matter. Since their immediate goal was to find her family, she was content—if content was an appropriate word to describe her emotional state in a situation where her survival was not assured from one hour to the next—to walk along beside him. She hardly needed to be told that he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she didn’t need to be told twice, no, three times, that he preferred her silence to her conversation. However, since she saw no reason why she should behave according to his preferences rather than hers, she continued chattily, “So, Mr. Powell, can you tell me how we are going to achieve the very worthy goal of finding my family?”
“First, tell me whether, before embarking on this journey, you and your family established a meeting place in the event you should become separated.”
She had to consider that question at length. She did recall her father and mother discussing such a situation, but she hadn’t paid attention to what the outcome of the discussion had been. At the time, she had been thinking it would be a mercy to be separated from her bratty little sisters, but now, imagining that they had met some unspeakable fate—but, no, she turned her thoughts from dwelling on horrors and bent them toward remembering the names of the various stages of the journey that Morgan Harris had recited on more than one occasion. It seemed logical that her father would have decided that, if separated, the family would meet up at the next landmark.
She said, “Chimney Rock,” since that was the only landmark she could recall, and if she didn’t say something soon, Mr. Powell would think her an even bigger idiot than he already did—not that she cared.
“Chimney Rock?” he repeated under his breath.
Hoping that the landmark was ahead of them rather than one they had already passed, she repeated with confidence, “Yes, Chimney Rock. Is there something that troubles you in that, sir?”
“Nothing beyond the fact that it lies some two hundred miles and more to the west of here. Did you not identify more proximate meeting points? Windlass Hill, perhaps? Ash Hollow?”
“Ah, yes, Windlass Hill,” she said, picking the landmark that sounded the closest. “I had forgotten.”
“You don’t have the faintest idea of a meeting point, do you?” he snapped. “No, don’t answer that question! Tell me instead whether, in one of your two trips to the Widower Reynolds’s wagon, you bothered to notice the direction of the tracks of the wagons that had fled the scene?”
She interpreted this question as just another one of his gratuitous attempts to expose her ignorance. She composed herself before answering, “The character of the know-it-all is one of society’s least attractive types, in case you didn’t know it, Mr. Powell. Now, you might have asked me to notice the direction of the wagon tracks earlier in the day, if you had wanted the information, and you will not waste your breath asking me any more questions of this type if you know—and I make no secret of it—that I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place and would far, far rather be in Baltimore!”
He grumbled inarticulately, but she caught several syllables. Although her lady’s ears were offended, she guessed that he was cursing himself for having failed to ask her to investigate what seemed, to his mind at any rate, important clues left at the previous day’s wagon site. After a few more paces he turned away from the riverbank and made his way up the slope. She supposed she was to follow him, but his long legs scissored through the tall grasses at a faster clip than she could sustain, so she stopped not far from the top of the slope and hung back while he tramped around the wagon site, his head bent toward the earth. After a while, he stopped that activity and stood looking into the distance. He was facing toward the sun, which had set beyond the horizon but which was still streaking the open sky with broad strokes of pink and orange, while the earth below was bedding down in layers of gray shadows.
She refrained from calling out and asking him if she should come over to him or if he was going to return to her or what she should do. She was rewarded for her forbearance when, about ten minutes later, he returned to her side and said, rather grimly, that they would follow the river only for another mile or so. She also forbore to ask what they would do after that, thinking she’d find out soon enough, which she did. A mile, she had already learned, was not a considerable distance in this part of the world, even when one was on foot.
They traipsed along at the water’s edge, hidden from sight by the slight slope that rose on either side of the broad river. The air was getting chillier by the minute. She knew that although the temperature had dipped into the cool range the night before, it had not become uncomfortablycold. She was hungry, having only nibbled at a little jackrabbit all day, but she refrained from asking about food on the perfectly good grounds that if she brought up the subject, the perverse Mr. Powell was sure to concoct something disgusting to eat. She would wait until he got hungry, then eat what he ate.
At length he stopped abruptly. Looked down at her. In the light of the rising moon the planes of his face were sharp-etched, his expression somber. He nodded to the slope of the bank, which was steeper at this point than at their hiding place downriver. He climbed up high enough to be able to toss the sack over the edge, then moved back down and offered her a hand. She accepted his strong clasp gratefully, didn’t protest at the harsh squeeze he gave her or the rough tug that got her up and over the top of the slope.
Once again on her feet, she brushed her skirts off at her knees. He picked up the sack, shouldered it. They were looking out over the valley of the Platte, an enormous table of land that rolled away and merged with the whole of the darkened horizon. By day she knew the land was tufted with green and yellow grass. At night it looked to her more like the surface of the moon, cratered with every shade of gray, or a paradoxically dry ocean, whose dips and rises had been made solid.
When she noticed the direction of his gaze and followed it with her eyes, she saw two patches of white, not far off, crowded up against a slight rise in the landscape. The patches looked like the broken sails of two shipwrecked vessels. Her heart caught at the implications of that pathetic scene.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at her. Nor did he immediately move. It was as if he was allowing her to come to terms with the possibilities of the scene that lay ahead before actually confronting the reality of it.
After several long moments passed, he said quietly, “It’s as I thought. Back at the wagon site, I saw the two white dots in the distance and suspected something like this. Tell me when you’re ready to go over there.”
She summoned strength from the General, the father she had never known. She straightened her backbone, squared her shoulders. “I’m ready now.”
Together they crossed the open expanse. She feared. She hoped. As they approached the pitiful remains of two covered wagons, she experienced a kind of death herself. Resisted it with every particle of her being. But she didn’t resist looking upon the brute scene of the bodies of her former traveling companions, which littered the ground around the two disabled wagons. There were five, stretched this way and that. Some facedown, some faceup, caught in their scattered, equally ineffective paths of flight. Without blinking, she looked at each body in turn. Every moment that passed brought her new life and new hope.
She made the gruesome rounds twice, just to assure herself that hope and the moonlight weren’t playing tricks with her eyes.
She pronounced, “So far, so good.” Then she laughed at what she had said. “Of course, nothing good has happened to these poor folks, but at least none of them are from my family! It’s awful to say such a thing aloud, but I’m happy that if misfortune was to visit our wagon train, it has fallen on others.”
Powell didn’t reply. He had put his sack on the ground and climbed into one wagon wreck, then the other.
On a hope and a prayer she repeated, “So far, so good. At least as far as I know for now.”
