The Warriors (43 page)

“Merely in awe of the splendid plumage of you fellows,” Michael murmured.

“One of the boys who was shaving when I woke told me Mr. Stackpole and his wagon arrived in the middle of the night.”

In response to Michael’s blank look, Murphy amplified, “Mr. Stackpole is one of the lads in the U-Pay Photographic Corpse.”

“Corps,” Michael corrected.

Murphy didn’t take umbrage. “I needn’t know how to say it, just enjoy it. Greenup an’ me, we’re going to have our pictures took. Spruce up and join us.”

Michael knew the railroad had a small number of roving photographers whose wagons—traveling darkrooms—followed the tracks to create a pictorial record of the line’s progress. Though the bulky cameras were in fairly wide use, Michael was still in awe of them. He found the science of photography one of the miracles of the century.

“I’d have too sour a mug and spoil the picture,” he said with a shake of his head. When they repeated their entreaties, he continued to say no.

Finally Murphy shrugged and gave up. Greenup frowned—his first overt acknowledgment that he recognized something was awry with Michael. By then Michael was on his feet. He bid the two goodbye, picked up a week-old Omaha paper someone had left behind, and hurried back to the bunk car to razor his face and trim his mustache before going down to the river for a bath.

Much of the joy had been drained from the anticipated excursion. He was fleeing again. Fleeing his confusion over Julia and Hannah Dorn—and his worry about Worthing.

Outside the sleeping car, he did stop a few moments to observe Murphy, Greenup—and O’Dey, who had evidently incorporated himself into the portrait group without permission—fidgeting and posing near the short boxy wagon shrouded with black drapes. Inside, Mr. Stackpole could be heard grumbling and swearing as he coated his glass plates with whatever mysterious chemical mixture caused an image to form on them. In the dirt behind the wagon Michael noticed two padlocked wooden boxes of a sort he’d seen once before. Finished plates were kept in there after being chemically treated to fix their images.

Finally, Mr. Stackpole emerged to deposit his tripod on the ground. He returned for his large camera with brass lens ring. Stackpole was middle-aged and impatient, fussing loudly as he fastened the camera to the tripod. A small crowd was collecting. Quite a few men had dressed for portraits.

“All right,” Stackpole announced finally, “let’s have the first group.”

He adjusted the black drape spread over the camera, then waved at Murphy and his two companions. “No, no, not there! Away from the shadow of the car!”

“Join us, Michael,” Murphy urged again.

“No, thank you. I—” All at once he spied someone lounging up by the tender. Arms folded, the man was facing the crowd and the photographer. Cigar smoke trailed away from his mouth. He paid no attention to the workers swarming past him; Sundays, the engine and tender were uncoupled and turned over to those among the crew who fancied themselves marksmen. But all Michael saw was the distant dark blotch of one man’s face.

Worthing’s.

Watching him.

“No,” he repeated, “I’ve need of a bath.”

And I’ve need to get away because I’ve come over a thousand miles and I haven’t outrun Julia, or the fighting. I wonder if I ever will.

“Come on,” Greenup said to him. “It’ll only take a min—”

“A bath, and that’s that!”

The severity of Michael’s tone brought a frown to Murphy’s face. “Lad, what on earth’s wrong with you this morning?”

“In place, in place!” Stackpole interrupted, manhandling O’Dey and Greenup to the spot he’d chosen. “I have a great many exposures to make while the light’s good.”

“Michael?” Murphy repeated.

“No!”
Michael shouted so loudly Murphy looked hurt. Michael spun away.

With the newspaper tucked under his arm, he walked rapidly toward the end of the track. But in his mind he was running. There was no escape. None, anywhere.

That truth rode his shoulder like an invisible hobgoblin as he cut across the tracks and quickened his step, fleeing toward the bank of the Platte.

He walked almost a mile through knee-high buffalo grass on the north bank of the river.
Osceola’s
whistle shrilled twice—a final summons to those who meant to go chugging east along the line, clinging to the tender, pilot, and running boards while they pinked at any buffalo in sight.

The sky was a muted blue, lightly hazed by thin clouds. A moderate wind blew out of the northwest, setting the long grass and patches of bright red wildflowers to rippling. Michael was conscious of the morning’s surpassing loveliness. It eased his tension a little. He plucked one of the wildflowers and stuck it in the pocket of his shirt. The poppy bobbed in a jaunty way as he tramped along the bank.

The prospect of visiting Dorn’s tent again was palling on more than one count. If he went to call on Christian and the woman, he’d be forced to speak politely to the thick-witted German. And he was in no mood to be polite. The memory of Julia had spoiled his happy feelings of the preceding evening.

What compounded his confusion was a new admission that, in spite of Julia, he
did
have a certain persistent desire to see Hannah Dorn again. She was attractive, intriguing in an odd way. A deep sort, that was the term for it.

Then he admitted another reason for his interest—one which surprised him. Though he didn’t consider himself a religious man, he’d been stirred by some of her remarks last night.

He actually wished she were right. Wished solutions to problems were as simple as she made them out to be. What a blessing it would be if something so direct as a return to the kind of Christian behavior described in her Bible could indeed heal the country, tame the violence that erupted even at the reasonably well-ordered railhead, and overcome the widespread hate and corruption Jephtha’s long letter had described. Although Amanda Kent had never been a practitioner of formal religion, her faith in certain principles reminded him of Hannah Dorn—and of his own woeful lack of convictions.

I am a Kent now,
he reminded himself.
I had better get to work and find something to believe in. Something to work for again
—

The railroad was no longer quite enough. Especially not since he’d realized he had fled to it because it promised escape.

Which he hadn’t found—

That brought him straight back to Worthing.

Caught up in his thoughts, he found himself at the edge of a grassless patch where half a dozen small cones of earth had been clawed out of the ground to form a village of what more experienced men on the U-Pay called prairie dogs. One of the curious, popeyed little creatures was sitting bolt upright in its hole, foreclaws raised, and quivering. It saw or at least sensed his presence and plummeted out of sight.

Michael carefully skirted the burrows so as not to disturb them. He returned the wave of a group of naked men splashing and wringing out laundry in the shallows to his left. He kept walking. He wanted privacy, wanted to be a good distance from fellow workers who might be anxious for conversation.

A rich, loamy smell rose from the sun-drenched earth. Clouds of huge grasshoppers buzzed near him. The land here was slightly more rolling. Ahead, a line of low hills made it impossible to see the far western horizon.

He stopped short of the hills and glanced back. The nearest bathers were a good half mile distant. He tossed the newspaper down and pulled a lump of yellow soap from his pocket. After tugging off his boots, he peeled away every scrap of clothing.

He flung the garments among the reeds at the river’s edge, enjoying the feel of the sun on his bare spine and buttocks. He crouched in the shallow water and began to soap the pieces of clothing.

One by one he rinsed them and laid them on the bank to dry. He flipped the soap after them and returned to the muddy river with the paper.

He got to his knees, then stretched prone in the tepid water. It barely covered the lower half of his body. With his head up and his elbows in the mud, he studied a moving blur—bison—far in the south beyond two tilted, hair-covered telegraph poles. The wind blew puffs of dust from the ruts of the emigrant trail.

He turned to the paper to focus his mind on something other than personal problems. The leading story was a report on one of the featured speeches at the National Union convention in Philadelphia in the middle of the current month.

In ’64, Lincoln and Johnson had run under the National Union banner. The President was again attempting to use it to form a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans opposed to the radicals. Republican Congressman Henry Raymond, founder and editor of
The New York Times,
had delivered the speech quoted—and done so at some risk to his career, the paper observed. As soon as the cheers of the audience faded and Raymond’s remarks were reported to Washington, the capital began to stir with rumors that the traitorous Raymond would be removed from national chairmanship of the Republican party.

But evidently he’d been willing to accept that risk. In Philadelphia, Raymond had unequivocally supported the views of President Johnson. He’d declared that, constitutionally, only the individual states could establish qualifications for the franchise; that the Southern states had never seceded and therefore had to be represented in Congress; and that the fourteenth amendment, worthy though it was, couldn’t be ratified except by two-thirds of all the states—which included those formerly in rebellion.

According to the account, Raymond’s speech had been no anti-Negro diatribe, not even a disguised one. The
Times
editor had declared slavery dead for all time and called for equal protection of the rights and property of every person, regardless of race.

But if Jephtha’s letter was accurate, Michael mused, not even Raymond’s sentiments about human rights would appease the radicals. Whether right or wrong about the Constitution, Johnson was flying in the face of important segments of public opinion. It had not gone down well early in the year when the President had confronted the noted black abolitionist, Douglass, at the White House, and calmly advised him that, in addition to violating the Constitution, immediate Negro suffrage would unleash a race war.

Michael was still unable to decide whether Johnson was courageously stating the truth, then and now, or revealing a prejudice against blacks. The article, however, only reinforced his disheartening feeling that Jephtha was correct about the ferocity of the new political war being waged by men not the least interested in the counsel of Miss Hannah Dorn’s Bible.

Somewhat more enjoyable was a reprint of a piece by an eastern journalist named Bell. He had visited the railhead a few weeks earlier, and written a description of the track-laying operation. Its accuracy was pleasantly surprising, and its conclusion rhapsodic:

It is a grand “anvil chorus” that those sturdy sledges are playing across the plains. It is in a triple time, three strokes to the spike. There are ten spikes to a rail, 400 rails to a mile, 1,800 miles to San Francisco—21,000,000 times are those sledges to be swung; 21,000,000 times are they to come down with their sharp punctuation before the great work of modern America is complete
.

“Twenty-one million times—is that a fact?” Michael murmured. Impressive—though he couldn’t swallow the notion that the “anvil chorus” was grand. Its performance was grueling, prosaic, noisy—and full of sour notes such as the outburst of a Leonidas Worthing. But at least reporters were beginning to write a few favorable items about the U-Pay.

A hail startled him. He rolled over. Saw towheaded Tom Ruffin approaching briskly along the bank, a look of concentration on his face and a thick piece of cottonwood in his right hand.

“Good morning, Tom,” Michael called back. “Heard you singing last night. Splendid!”

The boy stopped. “Thank you, Mr. Boyle.”

Michael waved a wet hand at the grass Ruffin was studying. “Lose something?”

“No, sir. Hunting a fool hen—or whatever you call it.”

“I think the correct name is grouse, or maybe partridge. Not sure. But I haven’t seen any.”

“General Jack told me they were mighty delicious roasted. And so dumb you could walk up and brain ’em with a stick.”

“So I’ve heard. Guess they deserve to be called fool hens.”

The boy shielded his eyes and peered at the low hills ahead. “Might be some up that way.” He waved and hurried on.

Michael rolled back onto his belly, forgetting Ruffin for ten minutes. Then, abruptly, a yelp—almost like an animal’s bark—drifted from behind the hills where the boy had vanished.

He paid little attention until he heard the cry a second time. It was high-pitched and quickly muffled.

Michael raised his head. Not an animal at all, he realized. It sounded like Ruffin—in some kind of difficulty. Perhaps the boy had stumbled into a burrow and wrenched his leg.

He strode up the bank, wiped water from his legs and tugged on his trousers. Barefoot and bare-chested, he went running to the crest of the first hill.

And stopped, openmouthed. In an instant, his heart was beating with frantic speed.

Evidently they’d come from the west. They must have ridden their large-headed, thin-legged calicos—the small but sturdy brown, bay, and white ponies Irishmen called piebalds—all but silently to the low place behind the screen of hills. He had an impression of considerable numbers of riders—thirty at least, every one of them armed with bows and decorated hide shields. Every one of them was watching him.

Most of them appeared quite large in relation to their mounts. That meant Cheyenne, didn’t it? He’d been told the Cheyenne were, on the average, taller than the Sioux.

Out in front of the rest, a paunchy yet powerful-looking warrior of about forty held Tom Ruffin under his left arm as if the boy were an empty meal sack.

The boy’s heels hung down, kicking and making the warrior’s calico skittish. The boy was prevented from crying out by the brown left hand clamped like a claw over his face. The Indian’s right hand held a fierce-looking bow horizontally. The godawful weapon was eight feet long, at least—