The Vanishing (10 page)

He had always been a restless man, moving far and often, continually chasing opportunity in search of a better life. But Marshall had found that better life here, and he honestly thought that he had finally settled down, that this would be it, that he would live out the rest of his days in the Platte Purchase—and happily so.

His eyes welled with tears as he looked out at his land, and he angrily wiped them away, embarrassed to be showing such feminine emotion. It was foolish to become attached to any one place, to allow sentimental feelings to form over what was, after all, just earth. But the truth was that he had put a lot of himself into this farm, a lot of thought and effort, toil and time, and if it had not been absolutely necessary to leave, he would have chosen to remain here until the day he died.

That was all the time the physician had given him, and James had no doubt that the man was right. For the past five years, he had suffered unduly from fever and ague, maladies that refused to go away no matter what remedies he ingested. And he had tried them all. If there was to be any hope for him, he would have to leave these bottom lands, abandon his farm and his business and set off for healthier climes.

The thought saddened him. Not merely because of the hard work and energies that he had invested in this place, but because he had grown fond of the people as well. Farming was a lonely life, but trading was not, and he had many friends in Leavenworth as a result of his ventures. He would miss the fort and the community of settlers that surrounded it. There was even a woman he had been courting, Susan, whom he thought he might eventually marry, but that was no longer a possibility. She would not leave Missouri, and if he had any chance of living beyond the short time the doctor had allotted him, he could not stay.

He wondered how he would take his leave of her, and how he would say good-bye to his other friends, acquaintances and business associates. Parting was awkward for him. In the other places he had lived, the farewells had been difficult and had not always gone smoothly. More than one friend had been lost and more than one sweet-heart had been hurt as a result of his ungraceful departures. He had no illusions that it would be different this time, and if there weren’t so many threads to untangle, so many items to be sold off or settled, he would have slunk off during the night like a thief, taking the coward’s way out. That was not possible, however, and Marshall tried not to think about what he was going to say to the people he knew as he calculated how much he could get for his cows and whether he would need an extra horse for the journey.

He had decided to go to California.

Even the name seemed magical, conjuring up green hills, fertile valleys and virgin forests abundant with timber and game. It was country new and unspoiled, a place, it was said, where a man could live off the land with ease, where the deer knew nothing of rifles or hunters, where all manner of fruits and vegetables grew naturally and plentifully, where fish swam so slowly in their streams that they could be harvested by hand without aid of rod or net. Some of that, no doubt, was exaggeration, but if even a portion of it were true, Marshall would consider it a paradise.

It was also, he’d been told, a region whose climate might be able to cure his ills and restore him to health.

Might.

He was willing to take that chance, and if he could live out the rest of his days working outside like a man instead of confining himself to beds and darkened rooms, then any hardship would be worth it. Kicking at a chicken that was trying to peck his boot, he walked across the hardened dirt to the barn. The temperature dropped a good ten degrees as soon as he passed through the wide-open doorway. The mare and the geldingglanced up expectantly, and Marshall pitched hay into their stalls. He examined both carefully while they ate, still wondering whether he’d need an additional animal for the trip. The gelding simply consumed his food and allowed himself to be poked and prodded, but the mare was smarter and seemed to realize that there was something unusual going on. She paused in her eating and pushed against him, looking quizzical.

He ran a hand through the horse’s mane, patted her neck. ‘‘We’re going to California,’’ he said.

It took less than two weeks to settle his affairs. He had never been one for procrastination, and once he had decided on a plan, he saw no reason to postpone its implementation. There was a wagon train leaving Leavenworth on the first of the month, and he made sure he was part of it. There was no telling when another might come through here, and he knew both from experience and from talking to other men at the fort that to head out alone, without the safety numbers provided, was a fool’s errand. Plenty of corpses and broken wagons littered the way out West, and he wasn’t about to join their ranks.

The quick disposal of his land and livestock and nonessential belongings did not mean, however, that he did not receive a more than fair price for his property and possessions. His trading skills stood him in good stead, and he came away from the days of negotiations with not only new horses and enough supplies to see him through a monthlong journey, but a tidy sum that would give him a grubstake and enable him to get along and perhaps begin a new trading business in California.

They left before dawn on a wet and rainy Saturday, a caravan of ten wagons and some forty people, including a handful of lone travelers like himself who carried all they owned on the backs of a few horses, oxen or mules. Despite the early hour and inclement weather, most of the community turned out to see them off, a double row of men, women and children lining the street, waving and cheering. It was an odd sight, but such an event was rare in Leavenworth, and Marshall understood the allure. Even he was caught up in the excitement, and as he looked down from horseback at the faces of Billy Treadwell and Sammy Johnson and some of the other boys running alongside the wagon train, yelling and shouting and jumping ecstatically, he knew that they would be replaying this moment in their games for the next two months. He scanned the crowd, searching for Susan, but either he’d passed her by already or she hadn’t shown. He felt sad about that, but it was probably for the best. Seeing her would have put a damper on the day, would have forced him to think about the past rather than the future. Now he was free to concentrate on his new life ahead, with that burden out of the way.

Burden?

It was amazing how quickly he’d slipped off the shackles of polite society and rejoined the rough world of ramblers and rounders, mountain men and pioneers. This, he reflected, was what men were made for: traveling, seeking, exploring. It had been nice to be a part of a community, to put down roots, but heading out of the settlement toward unfamiliar territory with people he didn’t even know, Marshall remembered the reason why he’d always been on the move before this, why he’d never been able to settle down in one place: excitement. The excitement of going someplace fresh, starting over from scratch, making a new life for himself. The uncertainty of the unknown had always appealed to him, and he had to admit that that was part of the allure of California. There was untamed land out West, wild land. The weather might be good for the health of his body, but the wilderness was good for the health of his spirit, and for the first time he was genuinely glad to be leaving Missouri behind.

They passed by the last building in town, waving and shouting their good-byes to the cheering crowd, and the cheers continued long after they had stopped waving and had gone up the rise to catch the first rays of the rising sun on their backs.

The trek was long and arduous.

The Santa Fe Trail, they’d been told, was far too dangerous to travel upon. Indian attacks had decimated the last dozen parties who had set off on that route, and the disappearance of a military unit sent to quell the savages had struck fear into even the bravest pilgrim. The Oregon Trail was impassable due to continued extreme weather that had outlasted the season. But a new trail had been blazed West that took to a more central direction, and it was this course they had decided to take.

The first few days out of Leavenworth were fine. Marshall had hunted this far away from the fort before, as had a couple of the other men, and the landscape was essentially the same as that immediately surrounding the settlement. But after that, the scenery changed. The occasional village gave way to the occasional homestead and then to nothing. Woods thinned, the terrain grew rougher and rockier, and rolling hills were replaced by flat land broken up by rugged outcroppings of forbiddingly shaped boulders.

A week went by.

Two.

They’d been hunting and fishing along the way, gathering berries and digging up edible roots to supplement the flour, beans and dried meat they’d brought along. Now, however, the game and birds were growing scarce, the streams less frequent and more often than not dry. Most of the time they had biscuits for breakfast, dried meat and beans for supper, both washed down with a small sip of warm water.

The land changed yet again, although this time the shift was more subtle and Marshall could not be sure when it actually happened. It almost seemed as though it had altered overnight, while they were asleep, but of course that was impossible. Whenever it had happened, the badlands were gone, replaced by a seemingly boundless plain that stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see, its monotonous sameness broken only by clusters of low mounds or hillocks. Their hope at first was that they’d have more luck finding food and water here, but if anything the plain proved even more barren than the rocky terrain that came before it.

Days passed.

Another week.

Beans and biscuits, beans and biscuits . . .

The animals were tired, more than a few travelers were ill, but still the pace continued unabated. Each day, it seemed, they started earlier and stopped later, spending less time resting though they needed it more than ever. Marshall understood the desire to press on, but to do so at the expense of the horses, the livestock and the people seemed at odds with the purpose of the journey and certainly with his own needs. Many of those about him felt the same, and he questioned Uriah Caldwell, the wagon master, about this unsuitable pace, but the man refused to give him a straight answer, promising only that the speed of travel would change soon, that once they reached the next river they would be able to slow down.

The plain was haunted, came gossip from the front of the wagon train.
That
was the real reason they were attempting to move through here so quickly, and while Marshall refused to believe in such nonsense, he did find this grassy region with its endless expanse of mounds and hillocks quite strange and more than a little unsettling. For one thing, the directions here were often wrong. They shifted and changed of their own accord, as if the plain itself were attempting to fool them, trap them, make them stay. Twice now, he had ridden to the front of the train to tell Caldwell that they had drifted off course and were heading north instead of west, only to find when he arrived that they had been moving in the right direction all along. He had no doubt that were he riding alone through these lands, he would find himself lost and confused, unable to escape, and would die here on this hellish plain.

There was also a nagging sense that they were not alone. Marshall had no idea how many others felt the same, because it was a thought he was too embarrassed to share. But for the past three nights he could have sworn that others were moving stealthily through the land surrounding them, hiding behind hillock and bush, scrambling about beneath the cover of darkness. Even in the daylight hours, it seemed to him that they were being spied upon, their progress carefully monitored. It wasn’t Indians or other native savages that he suspected of watching them, nor other sojourners heading West, but . . . someone else.

Some
thing
else was more accurate, because his mind was possessed of the irrational idea that those who lived on this plain were not human. He was not even sure what he meant by that, but he had a lot of time to think on the trail, and no matter how he examined the situation, he could not conceive of any way that the watchers could be people.

They were there, though.

He knew it.

And still they pressed on.

Beans and biscuits . . .

They had not thought to encounter such a long stretch with no water or game. Dried meat was a luxury now, and water was rationed severely. Supplies were running low, particularly for some of the larger families, and if they didn’t replenish their stocks soon, they would have to start slaughtering the animals—which would devastate most of the travelers, nearly all of whom had invested every cent they had in the world in what they were bringing along.

And then, water.

They were passing through an area of hillocks and saw, in the basin between two mounds, a pond. It was small and muddy, to be sure, but it was water and, judging by the bugs flying about it, fresh. Marshall happened to be riding near the front of the train and was one of the first to spot the watering hole. Late-afternoon sunlight glinted off its mottled surface, creating dancing shadows on the shallow slope surrounding it. Excitedly, he slowed his mount, but when he saw those before him continue on without pause, he rode up to the wagon master. ‘‘Uriah!’’ he called.

The other man turned slowly.

‘‘Where are you going? There’s water here, fresh water.’’

‘‘No!’’ Caldwell stated flatly. His voice was firm, almost angry, and it was clear that he would brook no argument.

‘‘The horses need water. All the animals do. Hell,
we
do.’’

‘‘No!’’ Caldwell repeated. He glared at Marshall with something like hatred. Or fear.

Marshall looked over at some of the other men riding nearby, wondering why none of them were arguing, standing up for themselves.