Bendigo Shafter (1979) (6 page)

When I looked surprised, she smiled at me. Mr. Shafter, you must remember my husband was an army officer, and I lived much of my life on army posts. I know all the language.

We all got out of sight then, except Ethan, who put his horse between himself and the open and commenced fussing with his saddle. We were ready none too soon.

They came down off the ridge in a tight bunch, sixteen or seventeen by count, spreading out a little as they came but not as if expecting trouble. They would have a fair idea of our strength, judging by the number of cabins.

A tough bunch! Sampson commented, watching them through his glass. Bendigo, Lutrell is among them!

Lutrell had been with the wagon train and had followed my sister Lorna to the creek when she went for water. When I came upon them he had grabbed my sister by the arm, and I straightaway knocked him down.

My fist is a hard one, toughened by many a day's work with axe or blacksmith's hammer, but he got up and came at me with a thick club he had laid a hand to.

Clubs were not a new thing to me, and I went under his blow, throwing my left arm over and under his right and grasping his shirt front. Forcing him back to his right, I clobbered him good with my right fist.

Anger comes to me seldom, but this man needed a lesson. I gave him such a thrashing that two weeks later he had to be helped from a wagon at Fort Laramie, and he stayed there, refused permission to continue with us.

When they were fifty yards off, Ethan lifted a hand. Hold up there! he ordered.

They drew up, but a big, hairy man in a dirty buckskin shirt yelled back at us. What's wrong? We're just aimin' to visit a mite. He had kept moving, but slowly, as he spoke.

We've nothing to talk about. Be off now. Webb and I had moved up alongside Ethan when talking started, although keeping a bit of distance between us. Suddenly Webb swore and turned sharply around. From the corner of my eye I saw what he'd guessed. While those in front held our attention, others were closing in behind.

Stand where you are! Webb shouted. Then in a lower tone he said to us, Take those in front. I will handle this.

He walked quickly away from us, his gun muzzle down. Backing a step, I tried to keep an eye both ways in case Webb should need help.

John, I said, speaking just loud enough for Sampson to hear, the back window.

There was a scurry of movement from within the house, and the renegades pulled up, seeing their trick was revealed to us. Yet it was plain they were amused rather than otherwise, for they outnumbered us three to one or more and fancied themselves tough men.

Go ahead, I heard Webb say, if you feel lucky. And then he pushed it hard. God damn you! he shouted. Try it!

With his rifle muzzle down I guess the man thought he could take him. He, like all of us, had a lot to learn about Webb, the trouble was that man had just run out of time.

He made his move, and Webb flipped a six-shooter from beneath his shirt with his left hand and fired.

It opened the ball.

From the back of the house Sampson's big Spencer .56 boomed, and Ethan fired with almost the same sound. Dropping to one knee I shot three times as fast as I could work the action on my rifle. A man at whom I fired tumbled from his saddle, and the hairy man at whom Ethan fired fell, one foot hanging in the stirrup. His horse ran away, dragging him over the frozen ground.

From the Macken house a bullet caught a man who was riding at me with a pistol, and he dropped his gun, grabbed the pommel with both hands and rode away, blood all over the front of his shirt.

As quickly as that, they were gone. Most of them.

Three men, their leader included, lay sprawled on the icy grass and the frozen snow.

Out back Webb's man lay dead, a bullet through the skull. Another lay on the ground, trying to crawl, one leg almost torn away by Sampson's second shot.

Cain came from the house and stood beside me, an odd expression in his eyes. We could have warned them off, he said. There needn't have been a fight.

Better to get it over with, Cain. They would have come back, and next time we might not have been ready.

Webb tricked that man. I think he wanted to loll him.

Well, I replied, we taught them a lesson.

Do you be careful of him, Cain advised. I think there's a hunger in him.

Ethan was speaking. Take their guns and what ammunition they have, and we will bury them, although the ground is frozen. He turned to Cain. Will you read over them?

Webb indicated the man Sampson had shot. Wait for him. He'll go with the others.

Fully conscious the outlaw stared bitterly at Webb. Give me a gun, he said, and I'll ...

His voice faded out as Sampson came from his house carrying a small kit of medicine and bandages. The man was dead, stiffening in a pool of his own blood. Others emerged, shocked and pale from the sudden violence. The women held the children within the cabins that they might not look upon death, yet fascinated and fearful, they strained to see.

We should find out who they are, Mrs. Sampson suggested, and write to their families.

Nobody wished to go into their pockets. We did not want to know who they were, or if they left anyone behind, as some of them must have. It was easier to be impersonal about the anonymous.

Their rifles and ammunition we would need, for we had too little of either, and each morning we looked upon the hills with fear.

Black Lutrell was not among the dead. In the melee that followed Webb's shot he had blurred among the others, and we had not seen him again.

We gathered guns and belts, catching up the horses that had not run off. Fine, handsome animals they were, stolen no doubt from folks killed.

We from our town stood together, and Cain read the service of the dead. We buried them upon the small knoll, the first to die there in our time, and when it was over we had drawn a little closer together.

Once more we had met with fear and emerged a little stronger than before, a little more tightly knit.

Yet we stood a little further apart, too, I guess, because some of us had killed, and we were not used to killing, nor to violence.

Only Webb, I think, looked upon what he had done with satisfaction, and I, who knew what was happening out there with a land of instinct, knew that what Webb had done had saved us all. His sudden action had destroyed their timing. They had planned to begin it, and his move, for whatever cause, had caught them short.

When I finished reading Nelson Lee's book I started on Washington Irving, and followed that with Commerce of the Prairies. Sometimes I talked about what I read to Ruth Macken, and she shared ideas with me.

Her talk stirred all of us to restlessness, I guess. Neely Stuart did not like her talking to Mae, and said it gave her notions, which no doubt it did.

When Neely spoke to Mrs. Macken about it, she merely smiled at him. Mr. Stuart, I have no doubt that she has ideas, and she should have them. Nobody got anywhere in this world by simply being content.

What about Bud? I asked. Why do you want a school but for him?

I want the school for the town, as well as for Bud. I want him to like it here, but I want him to help it grow. I want him to understand what is happening here, then go on to something bigger, better. Happiness for a man usually means doing something he wants to do very much, something that gives him a sense of achievement.

She turned to me. What about you, Mr. Shafter? What do you want to do? What do you wish to become?

It shamed me to say I had no idea. I loved the life, but the feeling rode with me that it was only something passing. Maybe we all had that feeling about wherever we were. We were not like the Europeans from whom we had sprung, we were not settled in villages or classes where we would stay, generation after generation. We were a people on the move, and whether that was good or ill, only time would tell. Many of those who came west came to get rich and get out, but some of us came to stay, and most of us had the idea of enriching the country somehow, although many had no notion of how to go about it.

What I wanted to do, I did not know. I had wanted to come west, but now that I was west I was not sure. I wanted to help Cain with his smithy and his sawmill, but even as I planned the building of it I knew I'd no idea of staying on. The country was too big, there was too much to see.

And then what, Mr. Shafter? What happens when you have seen most of it, and you are no longer a young man, and you take stock of your life?

She had a way of worrying a man, and I left her almighty discontented with myself. She had asked me some dangerous questions. Such questions were like a loose tooth or a nail in the shoe, the mind kept worrying about them, unable to leave them alone.

The books were opening the gates to a wider world, and in part I read for the love of learning and discovering. There was little time for it. To live was to struggle, and to keep our homes supplied with food and fuel was an unending task, allowing little time for considering things beyond the range of our daily lives. What we did not possess we had to make for ourselves or learn to do without, but the little I learned helped me to build a defense against the change that time would surely bring, to teach me that to live was to change, and that change was the one irrevocable law. Nothing remained the same.

Ours was a land of movement. My people had come from Wales, Ireland, and France at different times. My own parents had come front Pennsylvania to Illinois and Wisconsin, and my mother's grandparents had come from Maine and Virginia, but the love of new lands was deep within us all.

It was no static world that waited upon decision, it was a world where only a few positive virtues were required, and where the rights and wrongs of things seemed sharply cut and clear.

Much as I loved reading I was wary of it, for I soon saw that much that passed for thinking was simply a good memory, and many an educated man was merely repeating what he had learned, not what he had thought out for himself.

Of those with whom I lived only Ruth Macken had spent time among cultivated people. I envied her this, and longed to sit among people who were traveled and who had read and conversed.

Yet our town had begun as many of the first towns began, established by a nomadic people, and often when swinging an axe in the woods I wondered if in time man's brain might not become smaller, for as more knowledge was preserved in books or by other means, he might have to think less and contrive less.

We who lived upon the wild lands looked much at the sky, told time by the sun and our directions by the fall of shadows, the flow of streams, or the way the limbs grew upon the trees.

Ethan Sackett knew most about such things, and much of what I came to know was learned from him. His senses were finely attuned to the wilderness, and tracking a man or an animal was never simply a matter of following signs left on the earth or on brush, but of knowing the mind of the creature he was following. He often came with me into the woods when timber cruising, and we hunted together.

Felling timbers for the mill was more than simply dropping a tree, for once it lay upon the ground I would mark off regular intervals with the adze, then square the timbers into beams with a broad-axe. This was a short-handled axe with a level on one side and sharp enough to shave with.

We had no long stretches of continuous forest. The ridges were crested with timber, and there were extensive patches elsewhere scattered with meadows until one got up into the Wind River

By the end of our first month I had felled and hewn ten great timbers besides hunting and doing daily chores. The timbers were placed upon sticks to hold them free of the ground to season rather than rot.

The days of cold and heavy snow had cut deep into our supplies, and without Ethan's hunting we would have seen hunger and grief. He butchered his meat and divided amongst us all.

We were sitting about the fire in Cain's place. We've enough, Webb remarked, if we take it easy. If it's an early spring, we can make out.

We still got to think about waiting for a crop, Sampson commented.

That's more'n those folks over east will do, Ethan said.

You never heard such a silence. Ethan had just come in, empty-handed, from a hunt. I wondered at it, for there was dried blood on the cantle of his saddle where he'd carried meat.

What do you mean, Mr. Sackett? Ruth Macken asked. What folks over east?

Passel o' folks headed for Salt Lake. I never did see such a played out bunch. They're Mormon folk, come from the old countries to join up with Brigham.

They're hungry?

Starvin', ma'am, an' sick.

Let 'em eat their stock. I et horse a time or two, Webb said, and it wasn't bad.

They haven't any stock.

We just looked at him. No stock? That was impossible. They're afoot. Pushin' handcarts and the like. Many have died, but there may be thirty of them left. I guess they heard about those who came west that way years ago and decided to try it.

Did you tell them about us? Cain asked.

Didn't figure I had the right. Settin' back like we are they could pass right by and never see us. I figured if we wanted to do anything we should all make the decision.