Louis L'Amour (17 page)

After a moment, she got up. “An’ just for that,” she said aloud, “I’ll spend me mornin’ cookin’!”

Hours later, Ridge Fenton came down the road, and when he saw the tracks, he stopped, stared at them, then broke into a run. When he was almost at the station, Matty stepped out, hands on her hips.

“What is the matter, then? Is it frightened you are? Come in, then, an’ be safe.”

“What happened?” Ridge demanded. “Woman, what happened?”

“Nothing, nothing at all! Some Indians came by, we talked, and they went on.”

He stared at her. “What happened? Don’t tell me you got by without feedin’ that lot?”

“They all were very nice,” she said, “and they had better manners than some others I know.” She paused. “I just told them when I wanted fat meat, I pinched grizzlies until I found one fat enough.”

“You’re funnin’ me.” He stared at her. “Now see here, woman, I—!”

“Go do your chores,” she said. “You’re late.”

Four days later, Mary Breydon was sweeping the doorstep when she saw two Indians riding up. One of them had what was obviously a haunch of fresh venison tied up in the deer’s hide.

They reined up at the door. “Where is Woman-Who-Pinches-Bears?” one Indian demanded.

Hearing them, Matty came to the door.

“Where papooses?” one Indian asked solemnly.

Matty turned. “Peg? Wat?”

When they came to the door, the Indian very solemnly handed the fresh meat to Wat. Then he glared at Matty. “No for you! Papooses!”

Then they rode away, but as they reached the place where the road turned, they looked back. Matty waved, and they waved in return.

Chapter 19

T
HERE WERE NO days without work, but now the work had fallen into patterns, and each knew what must be done.

“That Wat,” Ridge Fenton said one morning, “if he keeps on the way he’s goin’, he’ll work me out of a job!”

“The lad’s no blacksmith,” Matty said, “although he’s good with horses.”

“No blacksmith, is it? He watches me all the time, helps when he can. That boy’s learnin’ too durned fast!”

Later, Matty asked Wat, “Is it a smith you’re goin’ to be? Mr. Fenton says you are pickin’ it up an’ rarely fast.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t figure to be no blacksmith, but every man should have him a trade, something to fall back on in time of need.”

“What do you really want to be?” Mary asked.

Wat flushed and looked down at his plate. “I’d like to write stories like that Sir Walter Scott you read from.”

“It’s hard work, Wat, and very few writers make a good living.”

“That Sir Walter Scott did. Temple Boone said he did mighty well.”

“Temple Boone told you that?” She was surprised.

“It’s true, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is. He was a very popular writer. So were Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. They all did very well.”

She paused. “How did Mr. Boone happen to tell you that?”

“He was readin’ him. He was reading a book by Sir Walter Scott. He was slow at it, he said, but he was going to get better and read faster. He said a man could be anything he wants to be if he’ll just try hard enough.”

“And what does Mr. Boone want to be?”

Wat looked at her slyly. “He’ll most likely tell you hisself when he gets around to it.”

She exchanged a look with Matty. “We can all improve ourselves, Wat. In these days, with books so easily had, there’s no reason for anyone not to have an education. And if you want to be a writer, you should be reading a lot and not just the sort of thing you wish to write but other things as well.”

After Wat had returned to the stable, Matty said, “He’s a fine upstanding man, mum. Mr. Boone is a man any girl might set her cap for.”

“It is too soon for me to think of that, Matty. I was very much in love with Marshall, and he’s never far from my thoughts. Anyway, I must go back to Virginia when the war is over. After all, my home is there, and Peg’s future.”

“I’ve been wonderin’ about that, mum. You gettin’ more western all the time. You’ve changed, mum, whether you recognize it or not.”

“Maybe.”

“And there’s that nice Mr. Stacy. He’s a good man, too, with a good job, and he’s one who will do well. Folks talk of buildin’ a railroad west after the war, and they say he’s mixed up with it somehow.”

She straightened up from the washboard where she had been washing clothes. “What I like about this country is that nobody thinks anything is too big or too hard. If they want to do something, they just take it for granted they can do it, and then they just naturally go ahead.”

She scrubbed for a few minutes and then said, “Although Mr. Boone says, and I think he’s right, that the railroads will change the country for the worse. They’ll make it richer, but the people will be different.

“Now it takes them a while to get here, and they hear a lot of talk and pick up a certain way of thinking. Western folks have standards. They have a certain way of behaving toward women and toward each other, and when they make a deal, their word is enough.

“When the railroads get in, Mr. Boone thinks that will change. A lot of people will be coming West with different ways and ideas. He may be right. I met some people back East I wouldn’t want to see out here.”

“But all of us came from back East!”

“Yes, mum, we did, but the West has a way of weeding out the bad ones, or they don’t last. There’s a few, like Scant Luther, but mighty few.

“That outlaw Johnny Havalik, the one who gave his boots to Wat, they say he’d never rob a woman. He’d stop a stage and take the money from everybody else but never from a woman.”

When she had finished ironing and folding the clothes, Mary Breydon walked outside. There was a feeling of change in the air, the first touch of spring, probably, although it was a bit early for that.

She stood looking down the valley. How quickly one forgot! She could hardly believe there was a war on and that people whom she knew were fighting and dying. It all seemed so far from here, as though it were another world, yet there was a difference, and it was not only in the air.

Everybody who came West was coming to build, some to build in the West, some merely to get rich and get out, but all were intending to do great things, to grow, to achieve. She heard the talk of the stage passengers while they were eating. None of them seemed to have any doubts; none of them seemed worried by Indians, by deserts, mountains, or the wilderness.

This was their land of Canaan, the land where dreams came true, but here there was a difference, for each one of them seemed sure that he had to make the dreams come true, that it would be the result of something he
did
.

Peg came out and stood beside her. “It’s nice, isn’t it, mama?”

“Yes, it is, Peg.”

How long before the war was over? How long before they could think of returning? And what about Peg? Her memories would be of Cherokee Station, and when she looked back, it would be at these quiet hills, at these weather-worn buildings, at memories of Matty, Wat, and Mr. Boone.

Peg had been too young. She could scarcely be expected to remember the parties, the balls, the beautifully dressed people, the music and the house with its white columns and its vine-covered walls. She would have no memories of the smartly trotting horses bringing the black, varnished carriages to their door and the people getting down from them and her father welcoming them at the door.

All in the past, and they were
her
memories, not Peg’s.

“Matty?” The Irish girl had come to the door to throw out some water. “We must find that land, file claims for ourselves. When the war is over, there will be thousands of people coming West, all wanting land.”

“Yes, mum, I’d like a bit of land, a place with trees and a stream.”

“Maybe we should look further west? In the mountains?”

“It’s like the rest of them, mum. No matter where you are, there is always something else that might be better, just a little further west.”

“It was true, of course. Wandering got into the blood, and there were always those greener pastures that lay over the fence or over the next range of mountains.

Here all was strange and new yet somehow familiar. Western men and women had little time for contemplation, although Temple Boone said he did most of his thinking alongside a campfire or when riding. Western men were thinking of how things could be done; they were used to making do. Since coming to Cherokee, she had heard several stories of men alone who had set their own broken bones, amputated limbs, doing what could be done to survive. Only a few miles away, two sisters had built their own log cabin.

Yet she was hungry for news from home. There were few letters, but newspapers were occasionally left at the station, and a couple of men had left books. She listened hungrily to the talk among the passengers. So much was happening in the world, and she heard so little of it.

Back home, there would be talk, much of it idle chatter, of course, but there would be talk of government and policy, of art, music, and books, of what was happening in Europe and occasionally even in Asia or Africa.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had just published
Tales of a Wayside Inn,
Jules Verne had written
Five Weeks in a Balloon,
and George Eliot had published
Romola
. In Paris, Bizet had a new opera,
Les Pêcheurs,
and people back East and even out here were singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Clementine.” A man in New York had invented something they called roller skates that had little rubber wheels instead of blades. A French firm had begun selling Perrier water bottled at a spring near Nîmes.

An American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had died, and so had the French artist Delacroix. U.S. Grant had been made commander in chief of the Union armies. Mary had never heard of him until some victories were won in the West. He had never been considered among the great generals, like Meade or McClellan. Someone on one of the stages had said that he and Lee had served together in the war with Mexico.

“We’re so far from everything!” she spoke suddenly, impatiently. “We’re missing so much, Matty!”

“Yes, mum, but look about you. We are where so much is happening and where so much is about to happen. I think we are fortunate, mum, because we are among the first. If we look about us, I think we can both become rich women, and I do not mean by simply marrying some man who has it.”

She gestured westward. “They are finding gold and silver in the mountains, mum. There was a man stopped by the other mornin’, a man with a horse and two donkeys, and he was headed west, worried about food supplies and blastin’ powder, mum.”

She twisted the water from a towel. “I grubstaked him, mum.”

“You did
what
?”

“When you put up the money for a prospector’s supplies, they call it ‘grubstakin’,’ and if he makes a strike, a find of gold or silver, that is, then you share in it.”

“How much of a share?”

“One-third, mum.” She dried her hands and took from her pocket a paper. “He signed this, mum. If he makes a find, I get one-third of it all, forever.”

“What if you never see him again?”

“I’ll hear it if he finds anything, and if he does na come to me with it, I will surely go to him. He’s an Irishman, mum, and although the Good Lord knows there are thieves among us, too, I told him I’d go to Cork and look up his kinfolk there and tell them what a blackguard he’d become. I’d also set the law on him.” She smiled a little. “Or maybe Ridge Fenton or Temple Boone.”

“How much did you give him?”

“All I’d saved, mum, but I shall eat here, and there will be a bit of a wage comin’ to me soon, and I’m going nowhere at all.”

She took up her tub to carry to the door. “Here he comes, mum. Temple Boone, I mean, and you’d better fix your hair a mite.”

Mary gave her an exasperated look. “I shall fix my hair, and thank you for telling me, but I am not, as you phrased it, ‘settin’ my cap’ for Temple Boone!”

“You could do worse, mum. He’s a bit on the rough and wild side, but a true man, with it all, and mum, they are hard to come by!”

A quick look in the mirror did show a strand of loose hair here and there. She straightened it with quick, deft fingers. She was not interested in Temple Boone, but nonetheless—

He paused inside the door, hat in hand, giving her a quick, approving glance, and she was glad she had straightened her hair. “Mind if I pour myself some coffee, Mrs. Breydon? No reason for me to disturb you, I’m just sort of passin’ through.”

“Do help yourself, Mr. Boone. Did Matty tell you that the children almost ran upon Scant Luther?”

“He’s been scoutin’ around, ma’am. It’s about time I gave him his walkin’ papers.”

“There’s no need. I still have my pistol.”

He smiled. “Havin’ a pistol and knowin’ when to use it are two different things. Use your best judgment, ma’am, but don’t wait too long. Luther has no business here, and the company does not want him around. If he comes, it is because he is fixin’ to cause trouble. And don’t waste time reasonin’ with him. He knows what the game is. Tell him to get off, and if he makes a step toward you, shoot him. It isn’t as if he was a stranger. You know him and what he’s like.”

Boone sat down with his coffee. “There’s talk around, ma’am. Your station is makin’ a name for itself, and it is being talked of as an overnight station.”

“But we haven’t room!”

“That’s just it. They’d build on some sleepin’ rooms. Add to the place.” He sipped his coffee. “Mean something to you, too, ma’am, because your salary would go up.”

She had not thought of that. It would not be much, of course, but it would help.

“I suppose I must thank Mark Stacy for that.”

“No, ma’am. You did it yourself, you and Matty and the others. Whenever you offer good food, good service, and a bright, friendly atmosphere, you will be talked about. Travelers tell each other, and about the bad places, too.”

He refilled his cup, straddling the bench beside the table. “I’ve been thinkin’, ma’am. I mean I’ve been thinkin’ about you. Now—”