Janet Quin-Harkin Read online

  “Oh it’s simple, if you’ve got the gift,” Gabe said, turning back to her with a superior expression on his face. “When they say ‘we make trade,’ I guess that they’ve come here to trade.”

  “I’m going back to camp, please excuse me to your friends,” Libby said icily.

  “Wait, don’t you want to see what they’ve got to trade?” Gabe asked.

  Libby pulled the comb from her hair, causing it to cascade over her shoulders. “Here,” she said, tossing the comb to him. “You trade if you want to. I’m getting back to camp.”

  Shortly afterward, Gabe returned with two beautiful wolf pelts. “Here,” he said, flinging them down onto the ground. “They’ll help keep you warm when we pass through the mountains.”

  “You got those for one comb?”

  “I got three,” Gabe said with a grin. “I kept one for myself as commission.” He started to leave. “You’ll be pleased to hear that the chief of those braves now has your comb stuck in his oily locks,” he said. “I thought it suited you better.”

  He laughed as Libby gave him a cold stare.

  She headed for her own wagon. “Look what Mama’s got, girls,” she called. Eden crawled out from under the wagon.

  “Where’s sissy?” Libby asked. “Did she get too hot?”

  “She went to you, Mama,” Eden said. “She wanted to help you.”

  “But I didn’t see her.” Libby had visions of Indians, slipping away with Bliss under one arm. “Bliss!” she yelled. “Baby! Where are you?”

  She stared helplessly at the sea of grass, realizing for the first time that it was taller than a small child. Bliss could walk in and be lost, a few feet from the path. In panic she ran up and down, then sprinted after Gabe. “Gabe, you’ve got to help me,” she begged, grabbing at his arm. “Bliss has gone. Do you think those Indians could have taken her?”

  Gabe ran for his horse. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said. “You search close to the track and keep on calling. Maybe she’s just lost her sense of direction.”

  He spurred his horse into a lope, moving through the grass as if he were wading. Libby tried to make herself search in an orderly fashion, walking through the grass calling, “Bliss? Where are you?” every few steps. She could feel her dress sticking to her back as she ran on. Then she heard Gabe’s shout. He came riding toward her with a little white bundle sitting in front of him.

  “Look, Mama, I found pretty flowers,” Bliss said, holding out a crushed sunflower in her little hand.

  “You’re a bad girl to go away from sissy,” Libby said, taking her from the saddle and holding her close.

  “Don’t, you’re squashing my flower,” Bliss said, wriggling to get free.

  “You must promise Mama you’ll never leave the wagon again without me,” Libby said. “Mama was very, very worried.”

  “Sorry, Mama, I promise. Now can I go show sissy my flower?” Bliss asked.

  Libby put her hand on Gabe’s boot. “Thank you so much,” she said. “It seems that I’m forever to be in your debt.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gabe answered. “You forgot yourself enough to call me by my first name. I can see we’re progressing in the right direction.”

  “You are so infuriating!” Libby snapped, leaving Gabe laughing.

  She had hardly calmed down after her double frights when she felt the earth beneath her feet vibrating. A cloud of dust was heading toward the wagons. Her first reaction was that the Indians had gone back to tell their people that the wagon train was unprotected and had come to attack. She yelled to Eden and Bliss to climb up into the wagon, then rushed to grab a rifle that was under the nearest seat and stood at the ready. But instead of Indians, the dust cloud revealed a brown, moving mass and a herd of buffalo thundered toward the wagons, heads down and packed close in flight. The size and power of the huge beasts was so overwhelming that Libby forgot to be terrified. They came closer and closer to the wagons, then, when it seemed they must crash through the line, they swerved at the last minute. A shot rang out, and Libby noticed that there were men riding alongside. Beside the large beasts they looked puny, like hounds around a stag. More shots rang and one huge bull swerved away from the herd, cutting through between the wagons with the men after him, whooping crazily like Indians. They came up on either side, shooting as the bull swerved and faltered. Finally, he dropped to the ground while the men rode around in circles, screaming wildly and firing in the air.

  Libby was both excited and sickened by what she had seen. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for the bull who had been so majestic and had been taken so unfairly in a hail of bullets. At least when Indians hunted with arrows it was a fairer contest, she thought. The men, however, were delighted, slapping each other on the back, each claiming their bullet had felled the buffalo and their bravery had stopped the herd from breaking away and being lost. In the midst of the chaos Sheldon Rival strolled up.

  “You know how to cut up a buffalo?” he asked Libby.

  “I’ll do it if you show me the way,” she countered.

  “Just make sure I get the best steak for my dinner,” he said, moving past her to kick at the carcass with one polished boot.

  In her diary that night Libby wrote: June 21.1 longed for excitement and change. Today my request was granted a little too well. Now I will be content with many days of boredom ahead.

  CHAPTER 10

  AT LAST THE prairie came to an end. Ahead was a dryer landscape, dotted with strange rock formations rising sheer from the ground like exaggerated sand castles made by children. Dust now replaced mud on the trail. It rose from the plodding hooves and hung as an ever-present cloud in the air, coating faces and clothing and making the men constantly clear their throats and spit.

  Bliss thought this was great fun and practiced until Libby caught her. “Don’t do that, it’s not nice,” she said.

  “Everyone else does it,” Bliss said, “and the dust keeps getting in my mouth and making it taste nasty.”

  “Then hold your kerchief across your mouth,” Libby said. “Ladies don’t spit.”

  “I’m not a lady. I’m going to be a cowboy,” Bliss said.

  “She’s right, Mama,” the normally timid Eden chimed in. “There are no ladies here. It doesn’t matter what we do.”

  “I am a lady,” Libby said, frowning at her daughter. “I will always be a lady and so will you. We were born to be ladies and we will remain ladies, whatever unfortunate surroundings we find ourselves in. Please don’t forget it.”

  “No, Mama,” Eden said, giving Bliss a grin. “Come on, sissy, let’s go see if Mr. Foster will give us a ride.”

  Libby shook her head as they ran off. Sitting alone on the backboard of the wagon, she took out her diary, reading it through as if it were someone else’s life, someone who had lived very long ago and far away from here. Then she wrote, in jerky scrawl as the wheels lurched and bumped: July 2, 1849. The hardest thing is being entirely alone. There is nobody here I can talk to, nobody whose advice I can trust. I think I’d even be grateful right now for one of father’s lectures.

  A picture of the drawing room at home swam painfully into her mind; Father sitting there with his pipe, his gold watch chain stretched across his broad stomach. “Pay attention to this, young lady,” he’d say, wagging the pipe in her direction so that her mother had to look up from her sewing to comment, “Watch the ash, Henry.”

  Such a small life we led then, she wrote in the diary. Our definition of a crisis was if the ribbon on a bonnet broke when you wanted to wear it, or if there were no lobsters available when you had planned lobster for dinner. And they wanted to make me as small as that—to have me married and domesticated and content with so little. A sense of excitement shot through her because she realized that she had come so far on her own, without any help or advice and was her own mistress in a giant world of infinite danger and infinite possibilities. She closed the diary and put it away.

  The danger, unfortunately, was a
ll too real and all too frequent. Every day they passed other parties that had stopped beside the road to mend broken axles, to replace dead animals, or to wait for someone in the group to recover or die. Once they passed the only party they had met so far that contained a woman. They were camped under a canvas awning and the woman looked tired and old, although Libby suspected she was not much older than herself. She was crouched by a makeshift bed on which a small child lay deathly still.

  “He fell off the wagon and the wheel went over him,” she told Libby. “We’ve done all we can but it’s only a matter of time.” She looked up with empty, hopeless eyes. “Such a delight he was too. So full of life and mischief. I put him in the wagon because he would keep wandering off into the grass and I was scared he’d get himself lost.” She gave a deep, shuddering sigh. “We already gave up one child on this trip. My other boy came down with cholera back in Independence. Now there’s just our Alice. . . .” She looked across at a solemn ten-year-old who sat in the corner, staring down at her hands, saying nothing, not moving.

  Libby was shaken and horrified. She brought the remains of the stew she had made to the woman, also a couple of eggs and some brandy. “Maybe some nourishing food would help,” she suggested.

  The woman gave the ghost of a smile. “You’re most kind,” she said. “I think prayer is all that can help us now. I’m sure the Lord knows what he’s doing.” But her voice faltered and the girl in the corner sprang up to run over to her. “Don’t upset yourself again, Mother,” she whispered, putting her arms around the woman as if their roles were reversed.

  Libby came out of the shelter to find Sheldon Rival had walked back to see what the holdup was. He was furious when he found she had given away some of his food. “If you start handing out charity to every beggar along the route, we’ll all die of starvation,” he said. “This is the West. This is every man for himself.”

  “How fortunate that I’m a woman then,” Libby said, looking at him steadily. “There was a dying child in there. I’ll just have bread for the next few days if you begrudge the food.”

  She walked proudly past him as if he didn’t exist.

  “We’re not stopping again for anyone or anything, and that’s an order,” he called after her.

  Now they began to experience the problems of being late-comers to the crossing. Earlier parties had used up all the grass for animal feed. The whole trailside was lined with human debris, everything too heavy, or broken, or spoiled was cast aside and even the dust began to smell of decay. The only source of water was the muddy Platte River which flowed beside them in a wide dusty valley. The water holes, dug beside campsites, were foul and muddy. Cholera was everywhere and the number of graves increased to almost one a mile. Besides the dead humans were the dead and dying animals, oxen and mules that had tried to pull too heavy a load too far with too little food and water.

  “Can’t we do something, Mama?” Eden cried desperately, as they watched an ox lying beside the trail, lifting his huge head in an entreating groan as the wagons passed.

  Libby, suffering with her daughter, took a dipper of water from the barrel and tipped it into the ox’s mouth. She knew it was a waste of water and would not prevent his death, but she felt better as she walked on. She realized how lucky they were to have Sheldon Rival’s supplies with them. The water from his barrels was sweet and pure, while the men had to boil up muddy river water and complained that all their food tasted of mud. Libby encountered the problems with mud when she tried to wash some clothes during a halt. The little petticoats and pantaloons came out browner than they had started. She had just spread them to dry on the back of the wagon when Sheldon Rival came past.

  “Come over to my tent. I’ve got some washing that needs doing,” he said.

  “You hired me as a cook, not a washerwoman,” Libby said indignantly.

  “I also hired you without children,” he said, puffing cigar smoke at her as he spoke. “I can drop you all off right here, if you like.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “I wouldn’t put that to the test, if I were you. These men know who’s paying them. In the end they’d do what I wanted, believe me. The clothes will be in my tent.”

  Seething with anger, yet not daring to challenge Rival too far, Libby went down to his tent to pick up the dirty clothes. She had never washed men’s underwear before and it revolted her to have to handle Rival’s smelly, sweaty undergarments and shirts. She relieved her tension by beating them mercilessly on a rock at the edge of the river, as she had watched the men do.

  When they were finally dry she carried them back to his tent. In answer to his, “Come in” she entered with the pile of clothes.

  “Just don’t complain that they are not white anymore,” she said. “The water here is brown and everything washed in it turns brown too—” She broke off as Rival got up from his chair. He was naked except for a small towel around his waist.

  “Oh, excuse me, I thought . . .” Libby muttered.

  “Bring the things over to me,” Rival said. Then, as she hesitated, “What’s the matter? You never seen a man undressed before?”

  “No,” she stammered.

  “Your husband went to bed in his clothes?”

  “My husband was a gentleman in every sense of the word,” she said. “He always undressed in his own dressing room. When he came to bed he was already in his nightshirt.”

  Rival half stifled a guffaw. “Sounds like a proper sissy to me,” he said. “Did his nightshirt have lace around it too? So tell me, who fathered the kids? The milkman? The candlestick maker?”

  “Your clothing, sir,” Libby said, thrusting it into his hands.

  “Wait, aren’t you curious to see what the rest of a man looks like?” he asked. “Now’s your chance. The best bits are still hidden. . . .” He put down the clean clothes and lowered his hands to his towel.

  “Good day, Mr. Rival. I have to get back to my chores,” Libby said and fled, red cheeked, to the sound of his laughter. She reasoned that he was just having fun at her expense, but she decided that she would take care in the future to keep away from him when there were no other men around. This was not always easy, as the nights were now getting cold and Sheldon Rival spent a lot of time alone in his tent, drinking, eating, and reading. The rest of the men were sociable around the campfire in the evenings, but Rival never joined them, or invited them to join him for a drink, except for Gabe Foster. When she carried in his dinner, he seldom missed an opportunity to taunt her, using deliberately crude language and looking at her with hooded, reptilian eyes.

  “So tell me about this husband of yours,” Rival asked one evening, pausing to refill his brandy glass as she put a casserole down on the table in front of him.

  “My husband?” she asked, surprised.

  “Yes, the one you claim you’re going out to in California. The one with the lacy nightshirt.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “He intrigues me, with his lacy nightshirt. Does he know what to do underneath that lacy nightshirt? Does he enjoy a good poke?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Libby asked.

  Rival laughed coarsely. “You know what I’m talking about so don’t pretend that you’re affronted. I’m talking about a good poke, and I don’t mean the fire—or at least not the fire in the hearth. The fire in a man’s loins, and a woman’s. Does he enjoy it, your husband?”

  “What goes on in the privacy of my bedroom is my own business,” Libby said shortly, her face hot with embarrassment, “and a gentleman would never think of mentioning the subject.”

  Rival laughed. “But, as you’ve said before, I’m no gentleman. There are no gentlemen between here and your precious Boston. We’re now in the land of take-what-you-can-get and shoot when someone else takes it first. That’s the only law out here. I bet that even your husband is pulling off his pants quickly enough with the first bargirl he meets. No more lacy nightshirts out West.”

  “I’m sure I can trust
my husband perfectly,” she said.

  “Then he must be a pansy boy,” Rival said. “No real man can go for months without a poke—no real woman either. Can you look at me and tell me that you don’t miss it? That you wouldn’t, if the time and place and person were right?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not coming in this tent anymore if you insist on being so crude and disgusting. I’ll have one of your men bring your food in the future.”

  Rival laughed again. “You see, I’ve caught you. You didn’t deny that you missed it. What you need is a good poke from a real man. It might make you into a real warm woman.”

  “I’ll let you know if ever I meet a real man,” Libby said coldly and made her exit.

  How dare he! she muttered as she stalked back down to the fire.

  “Hey, what’s the hurry?” Gabe Foster asked, grabbing at her arm as she swept past him.

  “You men are all alike,” Libby snapped. “Why can’t you all just leave me alone and treat me like one of the men?”

  “Very well, if that’s what you want,” Gabe said. “There’s a poker game tonight after supper and Jake’s breaking a new keg of rum. How about it?”

  “Oh, go away,” she said, pushing past him, her anger softened.

  That night she thought about the conversation again. The worst thing was that Rival had been right. She did miss having a man in her bed. But certainly not Sheldon Rival. Not if he were the last man on this earth. She found that her thoughts had wandered to Gabe Foster and the way he looked at her that was so unnerving . . . No! she told herself firmly. Think of Hugh. Think of poor Hugh with a pickaxe in his hand, his palms all blistered, digging gold. Think of how surprised he’d be. How happy. . . . But when she tried to conjure up his face she found that the image was already vague and indistinct, like someone seen through a fog.

  CHAPTER 11

  AT LAST THE broad, dusty valley of the Platte began to narrow and the trail began to climb into a desolate country of steep hills clad in somber evergreens. The river itself swirled and thundered as it was channeled through its narrowed bed and each small stream that flowed into it presented a difficult crossing. Sometimes they had to raise the wagon beds to keep the contents dry, and it was a job to stop the oxen from being swept away in the fast-flowing water. At least they had enough to drink for a while and there were patches of grass which parties ahead of them had overlooked, so that they could progress faster than they had done for several days. The ride was now bone shaking as they jerked over crevices and boulders along the path.