He Rode Alone Read online

  “We got a lot of things to figure out,” Rumsey said He spat tobacco juice, frowning. He rubbed his hand across his beard, and then he pursed his lips like a sucker fish, trying to assume the air of a man with a multitude of important tasks. “Reed, you and John get the bars. Jeff, you get a pick and — ”

  “Ain’t no bars,” Reed said. “Somebody lost ’em.”

  “Borry Ashley’s — I mean Eddie’s,” Rumsey said. “You won’t mind, Eddie boy, will you?”

  “We’d better borry their picks and shovels too,” John said. “Our pick’s all blunted and the shovel’s got a busted back.”

  “I’ll sharpen that pick one of these days. Aimed to at Fort Hall, but I had a power of things to do.” Rumsey walked out from the Cushman wagon and scraped two X-marks in the stony ground with the side of his boot. “Right here. I’ll say when to stop digging.”

  “That’s hard ground, Pa,” John protested. “If we was to go down by the river — ”

  “Right here!” Rumsey shouted. “By God, I’m running things around here!”

  The Snelling boys unlashed tools from the Cushman wagon. Rumsey walked back and forth, giving orders. “Listen at him,” Reed muttered. “He says dig where the goddam ground is mostly all rock.”

  Jeff said, “Eddie’s got to help us. It’s his folks.”

  “I’m the one to say who works!” Rumsey shouted. “Eddie don’t need to help. He’s the bereaved.” He liked the sound of his last word and so he repeated it.

  Eddie felt the need of physical action, of something to take his mind off what had happened. The worst of it all would be when the Snellings finished digging the graves. Maybe it would be best if Kathy didn’t see the last of it; but he knew that all along this trail to California children had stood beside shallow holes at some nameless stopping place and watched such scenes; and parents had seen their children go down into endless silence.

  He was trying to make a decision that he wasn’t old enough to make. He was ready to cry now, but he wouldn’t do it before the Snellings, pecking at the ground over there. Rumsey had come back to the shade of the wagon. He remembered more of his authority and said, “John, did you see about the oxen when you was down at the river?”

  “I didn’t see none bogged down.” John pried at a rock with the pick, cursing the stony ground. “Come to think on it, I didn’t see the Cushmans’ spare oxen down there a-tall.” He took the opportunity to rest and think. The other diggers leaned on their tools, watching him. “By Ned, I don’t think that team was there last night, either. I aimed to say something about it, but I guess I forgot.” He dropped the pick. “I’ll go look.”

  “I’ll go.” It was Eddie’s chance to get away.

  As he passed the Snelling wagon Mrs. Snelling said, “It looks like I’m plumb out of fixin’s for this young one, Eddie. I wonder …” She did not finish and there was a world of shame in her expression. Eddie’s mother had said that Mrs. Snelling was really a decent, prideful woman, and that only the good Lord knew why she had married Rumsey.

  Mrs. Snelling kept stirring in her empty food box. “I wonder, Eddie, if I could …” The baby kept wailing.

  “Help yourself,” Eddie said. He went toward the river.

  The spare team his father had traded for at Fort Hall was gone. Eddie knew it at a glance, but he went on out through the grass and into the river itself, where the oxen could be wallowed down in the mud and water. He walked back and forth, but he knew they were not there. The other team was there and the Snellings’ two oxen, cooling their alkali-rotted feet in the mud. Rock, the Cushmans’ saddle horse, was there too, limping from a pulled tendon incurred while helping haul the Snelling wagon up a hill.

  Eddie took the blame. His job was to watch the oxen. Yesterday and today, when his parents had been so sick, he hadn’t been able to think straight and he hadn’t checked at all to make sure the animals were all right.

  Lizzie and Kathy were wading in the mud, but Eddie did not stop to ask them about the team. He went down-river looking for tracks and then back up the river, and there he found the broad marks of the strayed team, going east. It looked as if they had set in to travel all the way back to the States.

  Eddie went back to the wagons. The Snellings hadn’t made much progress with the digging. “Ben and Cross are gone.”

  “Damn you, John,” Rumsey grumbled, “why didn’t you say something last night when you saw they was gone? Always trouble and hard luck, and you don’t make it no easier.”

  “I forgot,” John said sullenly. “There was too much excitement around here, what with Eddie’s folks getting ready to die and all. Them oxen ain’t gone far anyway.” He threw the pick down. “I’ll take the horse and go look.”

  “I’ll look myself,” Eddie said. Oxen, when they made up their minds to it, could stray plenty far. He wasn’t going to have John or any other Snelling abusing old sore-legged Rock by trying to gallop him. The Snellings were just no damn good.

  “We’ll look in the morning,” Rumsey said. “Maybe they’ll show up before then. Of course, it’ll throw us behind another day, and with the snow due before long … A man don’t know just what to do.”

  Eddie knew what he was going to do; he was going after the oxen. The Snellings might get by with one worn-out team but that wasn’t the way Ashley Cushman had done things. Eddie’s father had traded off worn-down oxen for another pair that had had time to recuperate at Fort Hall after being left there by previous emigrants; and he had figured on doing the same thing again at Big Meadows before striking out for the Truckee and the Sierras.

  Eddie started toward the wagon for his father’s rifle. Indians had been the least of the problems all the way from Independence, but still you didn’t go anywhere without a rifle, not even after strayed oxen. But he stopped before he climbed into the wagon. Once had been enough; he didn’t want to go in there again, not until after his parents were buried.

  “That’s better,” Rumsey said. “No use to stir around so late in the day. We’ll go after them in the morning.”

  “I didn’t change my mind,” Eddie said. “I was going after the rifle, but I guess I don’t need it.”

  A flash of sympathy touched Rumsey’s eyes. He understood, enough to say, “Take my gun there, long’s you got your mind set on traipsing after something that’ll probably wander back tonight.”

  For an instant Eddie wanted to accept Rumsey’s wishful thinking, but he knew that strayed oxen wouldn’t come back again without help; and it gave him a good reason for being away while his parents were buried. He took the bridle and Rumsey’s old rifle and went down to get Rock. The rifle was as disreputable as the Snelling wagon, a converted flintlock with a broken stock that was bound with rawhide.

  The Snellings watched Eddie walk away. One of the younger boys hauled himself up to peer into the Cushman wagon. He dropped back, scared but fascinated by what he had seen. “Their nose holes look funny,” he said, and dared his brothers to take a peek.

  Rumsey squirmed around until he was comfortably seated in the shade of the Cushman wagon. “God-almighty-fried-hooks, you ain’t getting nowhere digging! They’ll be smelling before you get the job done.”

  “Ground’s fearful hard,” Reed said. “Eddie should’ve helped us. After all, it’s his folks that up and died.”

  Mrs. Snelling heard her husband and sons talking. She looked at the pinched face of her youngest child and thought of the twenty years behind her. But there was no use in that. She looked across the vast, brutal land, down the long trail to California, praying silently that when they reached the new place there would be a change in Rumsey and the boys, that this move would do them some good, for it was costing her more than the weariness within her. It was taking the very last of her self-respect.

  She watched Eddie going toward Lizzie and Kathy down at the river. Girl children were a blessing. Already Lizzie was at an age where you could talk to her, confide in her and rest some of the soul-load on her. The Lord should
have given her more girls. The boys, from the time they could walk, had each been another Rumsey Snelling, made in his image and rapidly acquiring his ways.

  But Lizzie was different, and Mrs. Snelling could sense that the baby would be different too. She batted at a green-winged stinging fly that tried to settle on the infant’s face. A fear that she couldn’t allow clutched her as she looked at the tiny features. There were still months to go before they reached California.

  Shadows in the gaunt, fanged mountains on the left had changed a little. There was a faint haze on the desolate land that stretched away forever. Mrs. Snelling knew how insignificant the two wagons were, how old and uncaring the land was, and how far it was to anywhere.

  The boys wrangled about the digging of the graves. Rumsey said irritably, “There’ll be some doin’s if I have to get up and come over there.”

  • • •

  Down at the river Kathy saw the bridle and said quickly, “Where you going, Eddie?”.

  “After Ben and old Cross I’ll be back pretty soon.”

  Kathy ran to him. “I’m going with you.”

  “You stay with Lizzie. I’ll be back pretty soon.” Eddie went to Rock and put the bridle on. The horse was still limping slightly, but it would be all right for a slow ride, staying close to sod by the river.

  “I’m going, too,” Kathy said.

  “You can’t go!”

  If his little sister had cried then, Eddie would have known it was only a temper tantrum. He could have turned her over to Lizzie and gone his way. But Kathy didn’t cry. Her face was set with determination and she was white and frightened.

  “Rock is already lame,” Eddie said. “It’s bad enough for me to be riding him, without — ”

  “I’ll take care of you, Kathy,” Lizzie said. “If Eddie ain’t back by dark you can sleep with me” She took the little girl’s hand again and for a time it seemed that Kathy had listened to her and was going to make no fuss.

  Eddie scrambled up on the horse.

  “Here,” Lizzie said. From somewhere she had produced two biscuits and now she held them out to the boy, looking straight at him.

  They were old, old and hard, Eddie saw at a glance; and yet, something in Lizzie’s face said they were precious, that she was giving of herself when she offered them.

  “How long have you had those?” he asked.

  “Before we ever got to Fort Hall,” Lizzie answered, taking the literal meaning of his question. She held the dabs of hard flour in her slim brown hand, watching him steadily.

  Some instinct told Eddie it would be a great offense not to take the offering. He reached down and took the biscuits, feeling the rocklike hardness of them as he put them into his shirt pocket. He said, “Thanks.”

  Lizzie still watched him with a curiously disturbing expression, as if seeking to see whether he made light of her gift, if he fully understood what she had done. Her hand came down to her side slowly and she said, “Don’t worry about Kathy.”

  Eddie rode away. He went twenty feet before Kathy broke away from Lizzie with a scream that was like mortal hurt. She came running after Rock and grabbed Eddie’s leg when he stopped the horse. “Don’t leave me, Eddie!”

  There were depths in human experience that a boy of thirteen had no reason to know or even wonder about, but this day had opened some of them to Eddie Cushman, and if he did not understand completely what he saw, he was striving to understand. He looked inquiringly at Lizzie and she nodded, a thin-faced girl with dead-serious eyes and a knowledge too heavy for her years.

  Lizzie helped Kathy onto the horse. Kathy put her arms around her brother and old Rock limped away slowly.

  After a time Kathy began to cry and then Eddie was crying too, so that for a while he could not see or did not care about seeing the tracks of the oxen that he was seeking.

  When Eddie twisted to look back, Lizzie was going toward the camp. The Snellings were standing idly around the work they had started. The two wagons were very small and the grim mountains beyond them were very large.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EDDIE did not find his span of oxen that day. Coolness hastened in after the sun went down and with the fading of the light soon afterward there came a quick cold. It was a long way back to the wagons. Eddie wished now he had taken Rumsey’s advice about waiting until morning to start the search.

  Eddie was closer to the oxen now. Tomorrow he would find them and drive them back. Once he was driving the wagon, moving with a purpose again, he would feel much better.

  He and Kathy huddled in a nest of long grass. They had eaten the biscuits, hard and tasteless, and, Eddie suspected, full of dead weevils. Rock stomped around in the higher grass toward the river. Now and then Eddie stood up to peer at him and make sure he was still there, and occasionally he went down to talk to the horse so Rock wouldn’t think he was alone here and go wandering back to the wagons.

  Kathy asked, “Are there many Indians here?”

  “Naw, just Diggers of all kinds.”

  “What are they?”

  Eddie didn’t know, but he had heard two grizzled old mountain men talking about them at Fort Hall, and the two frontiersmen didn’t think highly of them.

  “What’s it like in heaven, Eddie?”

  It was a strange question, especially when Eddie was worrying about Indians. “I don’t know,” he answered. “Pretty, I guess, with lots of clear water and everything all green and warm.”

  “There’s golden streets too. Do people go there as soon as they die?”

  “Right away.” Eddie knew what she was thinking. He wanted to cry again. He said, “I got to look at Rock.”

  It was colder out under the stars. The horse was standing quietly in the tall grass. Eddie patted its neck and talked to it and hurried back to Kathy.

  They went to sleep with Rumsey’s old rifle beside them, capped and charged. Kathy was restless, flailing her hands, twisting. Later on she settled down, holding tightly to Eddie, so that once when he tried to rise to go look at Rock, he had to struggle to disengage her hands. Still asleep, she murmured, “Don’t leave me alone.”

  It seemed colder at dawn. Rock was standing a few rods from where he had been at dark, his breath showing in the pale light.

  “We’ll find the oxen pretty soon,” Eddie said. “Then we’ll go back to the wagons.” Kathy’s face was pale and drawn, with blue smudges under her eyes. “I wish you’d stayed with Lizzie.”

  They went on up the river. Before dark the night before, Eddie had lost the tracks but he was sure the oxen would be somewhere near the water. After a while he recognized a hill where the road turned away completely from the Humboldt. As he remembered, it had taken three or four days to get the wagons through the hills to where the trail touched the river again. Even if he found the oxen in the next few minutes, he doubted that he could drive them back to the wagons before dark.

  “I don’t feel very good,” Kathy said.

  “You’re hungry. So am I. We’ll go a little ways farther and then if we don’t find them, we’ll go back and the Snellings will have to come and help us.”

  “They won’t help.”

  Leaving the general course of the trail made Eddie uneasy. The trail, no matter if it was only two distant ruts sighted on a hill, or the glimpse of a piece of broken wagon, or abandoned furniture beside an old camp site, was something that spoke of fellow human beings, of a home that he and Kathy had once known, and of a home they were to know at the end of the trip.

  The farther he rode from the bleak hill where the trail turned from the river, the more worried he became. One hill was like another. One turn of the river had the sameness of the last turn, and although he thought he could always follow the river back to the wagons, Eddie’s fear of getting lost was growing. He was just about scared enough to go back without the oxen when he saw them grazing in a little swale ahead.

  Finding them was a tremendous relief and a great accomplishment. “There they are! What did I tell you,
Kathy? There they are!” The oxen eyed the horse complacently, twitching their loose hides against flies. Eddie called out their names. He turned to share his elation with Kathy.

  She was pale. She was not interested in Gross and Ben. She slid down from the horse suddenly and began to vomit. Eddie scrambled down and steadied her head. “It’s the heat,” he said, “the doggone sun and going without anything to eat and all.” Kathy shuddered and retched.

  “We’ll make it back to the wagons tonight, Kathy. Mrs. Snelling can fix you something to eat and then you’ll be all right.”

  “I don’t want anything to eat.”

  Eddie took his sister to the river and helped her wash her face. She drank some water and said she felt better. It was a chore getting her back on old Rock and then getting on himself, with the awkward rifle in the way. At last he leaned the rifle against the side of the horse and dragged it up barrel first after he was mounted.

  He turned the oxen down the river and they went willingly enough, their bellies rumbling as they swayed along.

  “You feeling better now, Kathy?”

  Kathy didn’t have time to slide off the horse. She could only turn her head as the water she had just drunk came gushing out, and then the retching started again. Eddie helped her down and let her lie in the warm grass. “It was those biscuits,” he said. “Lizzie carried them around so long, there’s no telling what was in them.”

  The oxen turned and started up the river again. Eddie had to run to head them off. When he got back to Kathy she was sitting up. He got on Rock first this time but when he tried to haul Kathy up behind him she was too weak to help herself, so he had to get down and boost her up and then go through the awkward process of scrambling up with the heavy rifle. He wished he’d put the saddle on.

  During the time it took to get Kathy and himself mounted the oxen turned up-river again. Eddie got them started in the right direction once more and they all went a quarter of a mile without trouble. Then Kathy was sick again and had to get down.

  Eddie was scared cold. He tried to remember how far it was to the wagons, or even how far it was to where the trail came close to the river after crossing the hills. Maybe there was another train working through the hills now, a big outfit like the one his folks had travelled with to Fort Hall, run by competent men, with a lot of women who knew all about the ailments of little girls like Kathy.