Colter's Path (9781101604830) (14 page)

R
epair problems with some of the wagons brought the familiar specter of delay to call upon the California Enterprise Company of East Tennessee again even without General Lloyd to cause it, leaving them essentially stranded and “thumb-twiddling,” as Witherspoon Sadler enjoyed saying to all around him. He seemed to find great humor in the phrase, unoriginal as it was, and declared himself the “second-place best thumb twiddler” in the camp, giving the first-place title to Zeb McSwain, who contributed very little to the overall migration. McSwain, who remained so perpetually hidden that some in the party had yet to lay eyes on him, was perceived by most who did know him as a classic example of a starry-eyed academic, out of touch with the “real” world around him that grittier and earthy folk had to live in. He was a freeloader and a tagalong, and the fact that Wilberforce Sadler was open in his disdain for the man did nothing to help the way McSwain was perceived.

Jedd was troubled by McSwain on several levels. He was ever mindful of McSwain's support for him in the matter of the beloved-but-lost Emma, and pitied him for the loss of status he had suffered. But such was life. If
McSwain had suffered loss, it was only because, in an earlier day, he had lived on the other side of the fence as a man who gained much through his life and work. McSwain, at least, had had something of value to lose. Some went through life never possessing anything worth having, like old Ben Scarlett, who seemed to be trying to be the first man to cross the nation in a state of endless intoxication.

By the time the wagon train truly got on the move again, a few things had changed besides the death of General Lloyd. With the support of the Sadler brothers, Jedd had begun obtaining mules to take the place of several dray horses, knowing that mules would endure better once the mountains were reached. The mountains seemed far away to most. The plains were endless, flat yet with a vague upward pitch that made the travelers feel they were moving up a shallow, eternal rampway leading to nowhere. It was a tricky adjustment for those accustomed to hillier terrain. Nothing to do but endure it and go on.

“Don't fret,” Jedd counseled his charges. “Before we're done you'll wish it was all this easy.”

As progress continued, some matters improved. Game became more available, and Jedd, Treemont, and a few other hunters kept busy supplying the camp with meat, wild turkeys for the most part, but later, buffalo and other bigger game. On evenings when the atmosphere in the camp was rich with the heady scent of sizzling buffalo steaks, spirits were high.

The process of meal delivery had changed. O'Keefe, the former restaurant chef, had decided that life as a camp cook was not for him, and had abandoned the enterprise, much to Wilberforce Sadler's disgust (Wilberforce ordered Bellingham to report O'Keefe's desertion in the sternest terms possible, so that his name would be sullied among those he knew back in Knoxville). Had he known of it, O'Keefe would hardly have cared. He was now the new head chef in one of the best eateries in St. Joseph. Without a single main cook, the travelers were divided into “mess groups”—groups who cooked and
shared meals together, each group tending to its own needs and making sure supplies were sufficient. Ferkus Varney, because of his clerking talents and organizational skills, was given oversight and told to look for problems, conflicts, shortages, and the like, in the area of food supply, preparation, and sharing. Rachel McCall, who still admired Jedd Colter while Witherspoon Sadler hopelessly admired her, was assigned to help Varney in the food supply area. It was a sensible assignment, Rachel having joined Jedd's party of hunters who kept the camp in meat. Jedd had figured she had volunteered her services as a way of getting close to him, but she surprised him by proving to be the most able hunter, besides Jedd himself, in the group. She could outshoot Treemont on his finest day, and had been the first hunter from the wagon train to bring down a buffalo. And she proved a capable liaison between the hunters and the cooks of the camp.

Jedd was actually beginning to think he might be able to like the rugged Rachel after all. But liking her was a far cry from loving her. His love was still attached to another, the faraway, married, and out-of-reach Emma.

When Jedd discovered accidentally that three of his scouts and hunters were unable to read, a notion came to his mind that wound up being at least the partial salvation of Zeb McSwain. He talked to McSwain about it while the man sat in the back of his wagon, scratching his dead, stuffed cat behind the ears as he had done while it was still alive.

“Zeb, please, please…put that cat down and quit doing that. You're making folks here believe you're downright lunatic, acting like that with that blasted dead critter,” Jedd told him.

McSwain looked sorrowful, sighed, and put the preserved animal aside. “I know. It's a habit, I guess, something to keep my hands busy, and to keep me in touch with better times from my past.”

“It's a dead cat, Zeb, that's what it is. I know it's Cicero, and I know you cared a lot about that animal. But it remains a dead cat, and you can't pat and scratch on a
dead cat without making folks think you've gone out of your head.”

“Do you think I'm out of my head, Jedd?”

“Not really. But I got to admit that watching you with Cicero like that makes me…nervous, I guess. On edge. It ain't natural.”

McSwain drew in a long, slow breath and resettled himself. He glanced over to where he had just placed the stuffed cat, but he did not reach for it. He gave Jedd a forced smile. “And what is this idea you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Well, Zeb, it's simple. I'd like you to consider setting up some classes to help some of the folk in this group learn to read. There's a goodly number who can't, and you'd be a prime fellow to teach them.”

McSwain said nothing at first but stared out the back of the wagon, thinking hard.

After a while, Jedd asked, “What are you pondering so?”

“Just wondering if I'd be able to do it.”

“You were a professor for years. Even while being president of that college, you were still teaching.”

“Teaching adults who already had the basics of an education. It's very different, teaching something so basic as reading. You'd probably have better luck rounding up a former schoolmarm or schoolmaster out among the people there.”

“Ain't got a former schoolmarm or schoolmaster amongst us. Just a former professor and college president.” Jedd paused, then added with a smile, “One who sits around scratching the ears of his dead cat in the back of an emigrant wagon.”

McSwain looked unsettled, fidgeted, then shrugged and laughed. “When you put it that way, it makes me think that maybe there is indeed some way I could better spend my time.”

“Think what you could do for somebody, teaching him to read. He could read all the great books. He could read his Bible. He could read a dictionary or 'cyclopeeder or whatever that word is, and keep on learning
more and more. You could give that to folks, Zeb, and you could even do it while you were panning gold most of the time, if you've truly got the notion of that.”

McSwain mulled a minute or so more, then glanced toward his luggage and moved as if to dig something out of it. Jedd sat up straighter. “If you're about to start cat-scratching again, time for me to go.”

McSwain chuckled. “Sit tight. No cat this time.” Then he reached behind a small trunk and pulled out a bottle. He held it up with a smile. “Wine. Good wine. I refused to leave for California without it. I'd like us to have a glass in honor of your brilliant idea.”

“I'd be pleased. Does this mean you're thinking of…”

“It means I'm saying yes. I may prove to be the least effective reading teacher ever born, but I'll certainly give it my best try.”

“Obliged to you. Touched, even.”

From elsewhere in the bundles and boxes, McSwain produced a couple of mugs. Jedd worked on the cork in the wine bottle and managed to somehow get it out. They poured and drank, then repeated the process.

Jedd laughed, and McSwain asked him what had amused him.

“Oh,” Jedd answered, “just imagining Ben Scarlett out there somewhere in the camp with his nostrils twitching, knowing that somebody's hid out somewhere, having some wine without him being there.”

McSwain laughed, too. “Do you suppose Ben can read?”

“Believe it or not, he can. I've seen him do it. Stood and read a newspaper once that old storekeeper Baumgardner back in Knoxville had pinned up outside his store, so I know it wasn't just like a sign he'd memorized. He was reading.”

McSwain sipped from his mug, hesitated, and looked solemn. “I despise asking this, but I just realized I don't really know if, if you…”

Jedd smiled. “Yes, I can read. And I ain't offended by the question, for there's plenty of good folks who can't. Treemont can just barely work his way through a printed
sentence, if it's simple, and there's many others who can't do even that.”

McSwain nodded and raised his mug. “To the rolling Zebulon McSwain Academy of Literacy.”

“Hear, hear!” The men clicked their mugs together and drank. Just then someone stuck his head in the back of the wagon.

“What you gentlemen up to?” asked Ben Scarlett, nostrils moving as he caught the smell of wine.

“Come on in, Ben,” McSwain said. “Let me see if I can find us a third cup.”

Five days later, Jedd Colter awakened to the smell of frying bacon, sat up, and saw Crozier Bellingham kneeling over an iron skillet heated over a well-tended fire. The bacon was in the skillet, and given the way Bellingham was hovering in the smoke, Jedd figured he'd smell like bacon for days.

At the moment the smell of bacon was the finest scent Jedd could have asked for. He climbed out of his bedroll and made his way over to the young journalist-turned-cook. “Fine-smelling meat you got frying there, Crozier.”

“I was counting on the smell of it waking you up,” Bellingham said. “I wanted to be sure you had some of it.”

“Well! What provokes this burst of concern for my well-being?”

“I'm a good man, I guess.”

“Crozier, you ain't a man at all. You're a child. A mere child.”

“Bah!”

“Really, though, is there something you need from me?”

“I just wanted to tell you something. Something that happened to me and Ben Scarlett.”

“Ben Scarlett? You running about with him now?”

“I could do worse. He's got a good soul in him.”

“I know what you mean. So, what happened to you and Ben that I'd need to know about?”

“Remember what you said once about that funnel
idea of yours? The ‘narrowing of the funnel,' I think you said?”

“I remember. Why?”

“I'm beginning to think there's something to it.”

“I know there is. I've seen it happen too many times…people running into one another out here on these western trails and in these western towns. These places where the funnel is narrow. Folks you'd never think would have a chance of running into each other by accident. Funnel them all into one direction, onto one or two routes, and it's going to happen, though. Can't help happening. Have you run across somebody you know?”

“Well, not exactly. We did run across somebody, Ben and I, while we were out fishing yesterday—remember that little creek? But we didn't know him and he didn't know us. He knew you.”

“Me? Did he ask after me?”

“He did. He asked if we were part of the emigrant train that had come out of Knoxville. I didn't trust this fellow and was inclined not to answer him, but Ben Scarlett is so kind and trusting toward folks that he just said yes, we were. This fellow, kind of a big, ugly, turtle-mouthed gent with brown hair all curly like it should have been growing down inside his trousers, know what I mean, 'stead of on his head, he grinned big and said he'd heard that an old friend of his, Jedd Colter, was piloting our group. Well, like the first time, I didn't want to speak, but Ben bobbed his head up and down and said, ‘Yep, Jedd Colter is with us, sure 'nough!' And it was like a cold wind blew across that man's face, though he tried to hide it behind a big grin.”

“I'm feeling a bit of a cold wind myself,” Jedd said. “It hit me the moment you described him. Did he say what his name was?”

Bellingham nodded. “You ever heard of a man named Jake Carney?”

Jedd said nothing, just sat unmoving, staring at the skillet of bacon that no longer held any appeal, and his silence said more than any words he might have spoken.

“I'm sorry, Jedd,” Bellingham said. “We should have
kept our mouths shut, not knowing who this man was or what he wanted with you. Though I do want to point out it was Ben, and not I, who gave it all away. But he didn't mean any harm…. Ben never does. And I still don't know who this Jake Carney is, or what he wants with you. But I could tell that, whatever it is, it isn't good.”

Jedd looked woefully at Bellingham. The previously bright morning around and above him suddenly seemed darker, brooding, oppressive. “No, Crozier, it isn't good. But it didn't seem to matter much before. I didn't think I'd ever run across him again, or him me.”

Bellingham smiled bitterly and said, “The narrowing of the funnel, eh?”

Jedd nodded. “The damned funnel.”

A stranger with an odd, backwoods way of talking showed up in camp that night, asking after his old friend Jedd Colter. Jedd was quietly snoring in his blankets at the time, near his dying fire at the edge of camp. The newcomer had ridden close by him without seeing who he was.

Witherspoon Sadler happened to be the man who approached the stranger. What had attracted Witherspoon was the man's hat, a common-variety flop hat that somehow had a cocky aspect to it that made Withers confident it would nicely set off his buckskin outfit, which he wore mostly when he knew he'd be close to Rachel McCall. He was quite sure she was impressed with the sight of him in his rustic garb—he'd seen her looking quickly away a few times when he'd glanced over at her, and had known she'd been eyeing him on the sneak. What he hadn't seen was the half-hidden smile of mirth on her face when she turned away from him.