Far as the Eye Can See (6 page)

Joe Crane couldn’t talk, he was so out of breath from running and laughing. He lay there on his back, in the moonlight, his belly rising and falling. Preston stood up and brushed his trousers off with the hat. “Dad-burned fool,” he said.

They rode out early in the morning heading north—Preston and Joe Crane and Treat, with about twenty others that Turley recruited. Two of his recruits was Crow Indians who promised to lead the way and scout in advance of the column. They tried to get Big Tree to go with them, but he wouldn’t have none of it. I watched them cross the Smoky Hill River and disappear over the horizon.

A few weeks later, Theo announced that he had joined our train with the one that Treat’s family come in. That made twenty wagons. “They’re going to Oregon, so they can travel that far with us, then we’ll continue south to California,” he said. “We’ll be safer if we all travel together.” So they spent most of that day loading provisions and getting ready to set off. I helped Theo shoe a couple of horses, then went to the post store and bought more coffee, sugar, ham, and hardtack. I bought beans, too, and a slab of sowbelly.

Theo still wanted me riding out front with Big Tree. I had to look up at him as we rode along because his horse was at least two hands taller than Cricket and he was so tall hisself. It was like riding next to a great moving statue. He wore yellow leggings and low-cut boots and a yellow leather jacket with fringe down each arm and across the back of it. His hair was black and long, tied back with a length of twine tangled around a single long, white feather with a black tip. He wore one of them fur hats with bull horns on it.

For the first day he didn’t say a word. We crossed to the south side of the Smoky Hill and stayed alongside of it most of the day. We made about thirty miles and quit at dusk, setting up camp near the river. We was still close enough to the fort that it didn’t feel like there could be much danger, but Theo had us circle the wagons when we stopped. He was still in charge. The other wagons joined us, in other words, and plighted their selves to our fate rather than the other way around.

We made about ten to fifteen miles a day. Each morning we set out just as the sun come leaking over the ground behind us. Eventually Theo turned us away from the river and we followed the trail further and further north and west. Then a few days after we turned directly west again, Big Tree said his first word to me. He suddenly pulled his horse up and said, “Death.”

“What?”

He pointed off to the right a little. In the distance was a clump of trees with dark trunks and hanging branches, low and slightly moving in the breeze.

“Over there?” I said. Then I smelled it. The breeze was moving in our direction and the smell it carried was unmistakable. “Oh,” I said. “Death.”

Big Tree nodded, then he turned his horse in that direction and trotted off. I signaled to Theo what we was up to and then followed Big Tree.

It was a body hanging in a tree. The head was almost pure black from burning, but the hair piled only on top of it told the story. It was Preston. His hands was tied behind his back, and he wasn’t wearing no boots. Big Tree got down off his horse and untied the rope at the base of the tree and then lowered the body down until it laid on the ground. He was almost gentle with it. Preston looked like he blew up to three hundred pounds, his body was so swollen, and the smell was so strong it cut into my nostrils.

When Theo got there, he said, “Indians don’t hang folks.”

“What’s that mean?” I was kind of sick. I felt awful for Preston. I liked him and it didn’t bode well for this trip that he ended up like that only a few weeks or so after he started out.

“Wasichus,” Big Tree said.

“He must’ve done something to piss off those fellows he was traveling with,” Theo said.

“What happened to Joe Crane? He wouldn’t stand for this peaceably.”

“You don’t know,” Theo said.

“Wasichus,” Big Tree said again.

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

Theo said, “White men.”

I walked over and got back on my horse. “It’s a hell of a thing,” I said. Then I started circling around that place, looking for Joe Crane.

Maybe I should of seen Preston’s death as one of them portents of things to come.

Chapter 3

Me and Big
T
ree buried Preston right next to that tree where we found him. We worked fast. The wagon train moseyed on by while we worked, and when we was done, it was almost ahead of us. I didn’t find Joe Crane anywhere around there, but I did find one of Preston’s boots. It had the sole ripped out of it, so it was useless. There wasn’t no blood on it but it was sure his boot. Preston was a big man, and he wore them high-heeled pointy-toed things Texans wear.

When I got back to the train, I went right out front again, next to Big Tree. I talked as we rode along, trying to see if I could get him to say whatever thing. He didn’t say a word the whole time we was a-digging that grave. Riding next to him, I hated looking up so high to see his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was listening to me or not. We rode most of the day, and Big Tree held that nose of his high in the air, looking for more “death,” I guess. At one point I said, “Do you speak American?”

He nodded.

“When?”

He didn’t look at me, just kept staring at the horizon. The sun begun to gleam off his eyeballs as the day wore on.

“You know,” I said, “I sure hated to see Preston hung up there like that.”

Nothing.

“I wonder how that happened.”

“Wasichu,” Big Tree said.

“But what could have caused it? I mean, you think he committed some sort of crime?”

He looked down at me and I felt like a small child.

“He must of committed a crime,” I said.

Big Tree made that harrumphing sound. Then he said, “Wasichus kill for gladness.” I couldn’t tell from my position below him, but I thought he might of smiled a little.

Theo ordered a halt near dusk at a place on the Smoky Hill River in Kansas called Fort Hays. We had to get permission from a Colonel Harding to set up outside the fort for the night. Theo put the wagons in a big curving U around the front gate. We formed a good perimeter with the fort in the open end of our encampment. The colonel seemed to like that arrangement. He was a short, dark-haired, muscular fellow with great black whiskers that curled all the way down the side of his face and up over his nose. His eyes was dark as a cow’s eyes and almost as big. His uniform was a little too tight, and with all them gold buttons and yellow striping down his legs and medals on his chest, he looked like he ought to be the emperor of something. He suggested a pig roast, and that was something everybody in the train was happy to take part in. Two of the Indians that lived around there butchered a hog in no time and then we got several fires going. Some Swedish fellows from one of the new wagons built these Y-shaped structures, then hung a spit in the middle of them and turned the meat as it cooked over the fire. You could tell the Indians never eat a whole pig, but they liked it enough.

When darkness come, with all the fires, and the children running wildly—with the smoking meat and pots of stew, and lots of whiskey and beer—we really had a high old time. But watching that pig meat turn black and crispy, I couldn’t get the look on Preston’s face out of my mind. That rope made his jowls stick out, but his eyes looked out in sightless wonder, and his mouth a little round hole—like he was getting ready to whistle a tune. He was just talking to me not more than a month ago. I seen guys drop next to me in the war, but you expect that because you’re in battle and ain’t nobody trying to do nothing but kill you, and you’re trying to kill them. If I’d of seen Preston on the ground with a bunch of arrows sticking out of him, I’d of thought,
Well, he went looking for that.
But to see him hung up there in that tree, and not knowing what could of put him there . . . It was a mystery that made me sick.

Sometime near the end of the night, Theo come over to where I was getting ready to bed down.

He said something as he approached, but there was still enough noise from the revelers that I didn’t hear him. When he got to me I said, “What?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“A few of the families want to press on.”

“How many wagons?”

“Nine.”

I waited.

“So, can you take them out?”

“What? No. I mean, why me?” I was fairly shocked.

“You seem to know where you’re going, and you got that repeater.”

“I’m completely new in this country,” I said. “I have no idea where I am half the time.”

“You found your way back when you went looking for Joe Crane,” he said. “Most new folks would’ve got lost.”

“I know how to find north and south,” I said. “East and west.”

“Just take them west,” Theo said. “Follow the river until you get to Fort Wallace. It’s about a hundred miles directly west from here. They got somebody waiting for them there that will lead them the rest of the way. You can wait at Fort Wallace until we come along.”

“How long?”

“We’ll probably be leaving here in a week or less.”

“Why don’t we just all go now?”

“I want to buy more horses and a few more head of cattle,” he said. “The army’s bringing in rations for the Indians and the troops and there’s plenty to be had for our trip.”

I didn’t like it a whole lot, but then I got just a little bit impressed with myself too. “Why can’t you send Big Tree?”

“He stays with me.”

“I don’t know none of them folks,” I said.

“Just keep the river on your left as you go along.”

“And I ride out in front.”

“It’s not hard,” he said. “You been doing it for us.”

“I been doing it with Big Tree,” I said. “Next to a target like that, I’m pretty invisible.”

“You can pick whichever body you want from the train to ride with you. A few of them Swedish teamsters grown up a fair size.”

He stood there waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he turned and started back toward his wagon.

Two men, both bald, both carrying their wide-brimmed hats in their hands, passed him and approached me.

“You agree to take us out tomorrow, ya?” one said. I never heard nobody who sounded like him. I nodded.

The other one said, “Ve don’t vish to be any
trobble
.”

“We’ll gather in the morning,” I said. “Have your wagons in a train and we’ll cross to the south side of the river at dawn.”

“You say the south side? Ve take the vagons across the river?”

“We do.” They both nodded and bowed as they backed away from me. It was good to see that they would trust me and follow me. I figured I’d lead them the way Theo seemed to lead us—quietly, and like I had firm knowledge of both the terrain and our destination, even though I had no such thing.

What Theo said was “Keep the river on your left,” but I remembered that he said I should stay to the left of the river, so the next morning, before the sun was above the horizon, I started out to find a place to ford the river. I rode for about a mile upstream and found where the water run only a few inches above a gravel bed. It was perfect. By the time the sun was fully up, I’d led the train across the river and we swung to the right and started our journey west to Fort Wallace. I had the river on my right.

I picked a man named General Cooney to ride with me. He was not a Swede, as it turned out, but most of the others was. Cooney was much older than me—probably in his forties. A great, drooping Confederate hat on his head shadowed his face and especially his eyes. He had a full head of dull brown hair that hung down both sides of his face, and a dark brown mustache under his nose. He was not as tall as Big Tree, but that part of his body above the waist seemed elongated and way too big for the short, bowed appendages he called legs. Riding a horse was painful to him. He complained a lot about his tailbone and he clutched the reins in one hand and held fast to the saddle horn with the other. He had a musket over his shoulder and wore a pistol on a belt around his waist.

He was proud of the way he could shoot his pistol. He’d been with Braxton Bragg in Tennessee, then Joe Johnston; commanded a infantry brigade. For most of the war he’d been on foot. “I guess now I’m cavalry,” he said.

“You a general?”

“Not really. A brevetted brigadier general.”

“Ain’t that a general?”

“Only for a while,” he said. “When the war’s over, you go back to being a captain. But folks are kind enough to keep calling you ‘General.’ ”

We rode along quietly for a while. It was a windy morning, but it come mostly from out of the east, so we had it at our backs. I don’t mind wind if it ain’t cold. This was pleasant and felt like it helped us along. The wagons squeaked and groaned, the horses and oxen rattled their bridles and clip-clopped along the flat ground like they was cobblestone streets, and the leather of my saddle creaked with every step.

To be twenty-nine years old and leading a entire wagon train, including a former Confederate general, made me more proud than I thought possible. I don’t think I ever felt stronger in the big West. I resolved to let General Cooney do most of the talking and I would remain as quiet as I could until we got where we was going. One commands respect by their silent leadership is what I always say. And I intended to earn respect.