“Then three of your father’s vaqueros came to me and said if I ever spoke to you again, they would horsewhip me.”
“I heard of that.”
“I told them they were fine men, handsome men, it would be a pity for them to die so young.”
“I heard it, Zachary, I heard them talking of it. We women, we cannot speak much, but we can listen, and there was very little we did not hear. They admired you for it I remember one of them saying, ‘He is a man, that one!’” There was silence; then my father asked, in a much lower tone, “Connie? Did Felipe know?”
“I … I believe so. What other reason … I mean, he was a fine old man. He had been with us forever, it seemed.”
“But why that night? What happened?”
There was no answer, and lying in the darkness and listening, eyes wide with wonder, I knew there would be no more talking. Whenever that subject came up, conversation ended. My mother would talk no more. What dreadful secret could there be that so frightened my mother? What was it my grandfather feared to have known?
The wagon went westward in the morning, driving over a hard-packed trail, simply one wagon alone, that might be going anywhere. Only when we neared the lava beds did we begin traveling by night.
After that there were usually no more campfires at night, and those by day were brief, for cooking and coffee. By day the horses grazed and the men slept, always in carefully selected places where they were hidden from observation. One of the outriders was forever on guard. I came to know them both. Jacob Finney was a man of medium height, a man who never seemed to smile, but with a droll sense of humor. He was a slim, wiry man, part Cherokee, and from northern Georgia. “Been huntin’ my own meat since I was frog-high,” he told me. “I was nigh onto seventeen before I et meat I didn’t shoot myself.” He was twenty, he said, but he seemed older. “Pa, he up an’ died, leavin’ the place to Amby an’ me. Amby was fixin’ to marry, an’ that place wouldn’t support the both of us, so I taken out.”
He paused. “Amby’s wife was a Natchez woman. You know about them? They was a difrent kind of Injun. Worshiped the sun. They got theirselves into a friction with the French from Loosiana and those Frenchmen wiped ‘em out. Well, almost. “Them that got away, some came into our mountains, an’ Amby, he taken up with one. She was a rare kind of woman, tall and mighty handsome. She’d been one of their top folks, one of the Suns, as they called them. Amby, of course, he’s a fine-lookin’ man. Tall, strong, and better educated in his books than me. I taken to the deep woods and far country, he taken to readin’, talkin’, and the like.
“Well, seein’ them together, it looked like I was the odd number, so I told ‘em to hold a plot in the buryin’ ground and I taken off west. “Had me some Injun fights then, one led by a man name of Karnes where twenty-odd of us stood off more’n two hundred Injuns. We gave ‘em what-for, we did.” The other outrider, Kelso, was an older, quieter man, a man with dark red hair streaked with gray. He’d made two trips over the Santa Fe Trail as a teamster and was a veteran of two or three fights with the Kiowa and Comanche. Steadily we moved westward, keeping off the skyline but using the high, wide-open country of a night when it was possible. Before daybreak we’d be holed up in one of those hideouts Farley had scouted long before. There we would sleep, read, play cards, or wonder the hot days through, waiting for the blessed coolness of the night.
Inside the wagon we talked little, and Papa least of all. Papa was a sociable man most of the time, but on this trip he kept to himself. Maybe it was his illness, but maybe it was something else, something that worried him more and more as he drew closer to California.
Jacob Finney rode up beside me one day when we were walking to ease the horses.
We’d been on the trail no more than an hour, and it was coming on to moonlight.
“Want a ride, son? You can help me look for Injuns.”
One of the passengers spoke up. “You will frighten the child.” “No, sir,” I said. “I ain’t … I mean, I’m not frightened.” Although I was, a little bit.
He took me up on the saddle in front of him. “We don’t talk,” he said, “we listen. Injuns mostly sleep of a night, but sometimes they are late gettin’ back to their lodges, just like we are. We want to kind of ease by ‘em, like.” “We could fight.”
“Yes, son, we could, but fightin’s something you do when you’ve tried everything else.”
Two
Our wagon was our world. We were six people isolated from all about us as long as the wagon moved. We slept, we read, we stared at the canvas overhead or at one another, and we listened. Always, we listened. Our stops during the day were brief, and always in selected positions where concealment was possible. Our rules had been laid down before the wagon started to roll.
One or the other of the outriders did the cooking. No pans were allowed to rattle, no voices were raised. Our campfires were brief and built from wood that promised little or no smoke. The side walls of our wagon were higher than usual, but the canvas top was much lower than on the prairie schooner or Conestoga, and the canvas itself was browned by smoke and usage. We wanted no glaring white top to draw the eyes of our enemies.
As we drew nearer the Colorado River, our travel periods were shorter and we were in hiding well before daylight.
We saw no Indians. Once Jacob Finney found tracks, but they were several days old.
My father talked little and did his best to stifle his coughing, yet it was a problem. Opposite us sat Thomas Fraser, a lean, tall Scotsman in a gray store-bought suit that was too small for him. Throughout the day he took notes in a small notebook he carried in the side pocket of his coat. Hunched over the notebook, his thin shoulders like a buzzard’s wings starting to unfold, he hovered in scowling intensity over his stub of pencil. I wondered how he could write at all while the wagon moved, but somehow he accomplished it. When we stopped for the day, he wandered off by himself to sit on a rock or log and stare at nothingness.
On the last night before reaching the river, Mr. Farley led the horses to a secret tank where water collected from the rains. “We’ve got to water them good,” he explained, “else when they smell the river they’ll run for it. There’d be no holdin’ ‘em. We’d have things scattered to hell an’ gone, and no end of racket. Bring ever’ Injun in the country down on us.” “Are there Indians close by?” I asked.
“I hope not, son. But they’re about. Not many for such a big country, but they show up when least expected. Yumas can be almighty unpleasant, and they are fighters. Your pa can tell you.”
Jacob Finney came up, his rifle in the hollow of his arm. “Smoke off to the northwest. Thin trail.”
“How far?”
“Six, eight miles. Maybe less. This side the river, I’d say.” He paused. “Want me to scout the trail to the river?”
Farley hesitated, then said, “No, we’ve got it to do, and we’ll move out quietly as soon as it’s dark. No use tipping our hand until we must. With luck we can be across the river before they know we’re around.” He glanced over at me where I stood listening. “Y’see, son, Injuns will come out an’ study the country after the sun goes down. The glare is gone, everything is still, and things sort of stand out. Sound carries further and any movement is easier seen. You put that away in your skull an’ hold it for another time.” He spat. “No, Jacob, we’ll sit tight and take our chances.” It was very hot and the air was still. The wagon was drawn up among some cedars and the horses were grazing on a small patch of grass. Around us was a forest of sandstone boulders, and beyond them a rocky ridge. There was a good-sized pool of water.
“They’ve thought it out,” Papa said, speaking softly. “The wagon’s tight, and if need be we can cut loose from the gear and float all the way to the Gulf.” My father was a puzzle to me. From the start there was a difference in the way Farley, Kelso, and Finney treated him. They seemed to accept him as one of themselves, but the others were not treated so. Why was this so? Of course, my father had been over the trail before, yet even that did not seem reason enough. “How much farther?” I asked.