Westward the Tide (1950) (3 page)

"We'd better take him," Phillips said suddenly. "We need him."

Massey glanced up impatiently. This man, Matt decided, disliked opposition, was impatient of all restraint. Massey was irritated now, and his face showed it.

A recommendation from Phillips who enjoyed the respect of all these men for his knowledge of the country and the Sioux was not lightly to be passed over, yet Bardoul was sure that Clive Massey intended to do just that, but before he could offer further objections, Brian Coyle interrupted.

"What are we waiting for?" he boomed. "Sign him up!"

Only an instant did Clive Massey hesitate, then he wrote down the name and pocketed the money Matt had placed on the barrel head.

Matt did not move.

Massey looked up impatiently, angrily. "Next man!" he said sharply.

"Not yet." Matt Bardoul smiled down at Massey. "I want a receipt."

Clive Massey's eyes narrowed and temper flamed in his face. "Listen!" he snapped. "Do you intend to...!"

"This is merely business," Matt interrupted, "no offense intended."

"Give it to him!" Coyle said, waving a hand. "Why not? Come to think of it, I'll want one myself!"

Clive Massey let the air out of his lungs slowly, but anger betrayed itself in his every movement. He wrote out the receipt, and then Buffalo Murphy followed. He demanded and got his receipt. Matt's demand had set a fashion and every man who followed asked for his receipt. Even a few of those who had gone through before Matt did, returned, and asked for them.

If ever he had seen hatred in a man's eyes it had been in Massey's when he looked up at him that last time. From now on Matt knew he could expect no friendship from at least one of the leaders of the wagon train. Yet he could not escape the impression that he had been awaited and that Massey had planned to rule him out. Only he had not expected opposition.

A hand touched his arm. "Matt, don't you remember me?"

He turned, and found himself looking into the grinning face of a sun browned young cowhand. "Ban Hardy! I haven't seen you since we came over the trail from Texas together!"

Massey's eyes were on them.He'll remember us, Matt thought,that's certain.

"Gosh, Man! It'll be like old times!" Hardy exclaimed. Then he added, "In more ways than one!"

Murphy nodded. "I'm wonderin' some my ownself. But if there's a skunk up the crick, we'll smoke him out!" He shrugged. "No matter. I was aimin' to head back into the Big Horn country an' this is as good a way to go as any!"

Already, Matt reflected, they were taking sides. Clive Massey, Logan Deane and Bat Hammer. There was more than accident in their sitting together, more than accident that Massey had been so determined to weed him out.

Why?

It was a question to which he could find no answer. One thing he did know, and that was that this was only a beginning, and that more was to come between himself and Clive Massey.

And he still had to face Colonel Orvis Pearson.

Chapter
II

Why had Pearson failed to step forward during the altercation with Massey?

Bardoul puzzled over that the following morning as he sat at breakfast. He knew Pearson hated him and the man would certainly have no desire to see Matt Bardoul accompany a wagon train where he was in command.

Without doubt if he persisted in going along he would be surrounded by men with reason to dislike or hate him. Colonel Orvis Pearson would be in command, and Clive Massey was unquestionably one of the leaders, while Logan Deane and Batsell Hammer had no cause to like him. Yet on the other side of the ledger he had such friends as Buffalo Murphy and Ban Hardy.

Why had Portugee Phillips wanted him along? The two had never been particularly friendly in the past, although each knew and respected the other's ability. Did Phillips know something unknown to the others? Or did he merely suspect something?

Regardless of enemies or danger, Matt knew he was not going to drop out. Jacquine Coyle was going along, and that was reason enough for him.

The tall girl with the red gold hair and blue eyes had upset him more than he cared to admit. Yet when he thought of her now he recalled some words he had heard once: There are in a man's life certain ultimate things, and just one ultimate woman. When a man finds that woman he does not pass on, unless he is a fool.

"And I'm not passing on!" he said aloud.

Murphy turned his head and looked at him, then grinned understandingly. "Talkin' to yourself, huh? I do it, myself. It means you've been alone too long!"

Matt nodded thoughtfully. "Maybe you've hit it," he said, "and I think you have."

He remembered suddenly and turned to look at the burly mountain man. "Buff, didn't you have a squaw back in the Big Horns?"

"Sure did!" Murphy beamed at the memory. "Arapaho, she was an' a durned good un, too! Most ways, that is. Bought her off ol' Bear Paw Henderson! Give a dozen prime beaver for her, an' a spotted pony I took off a Crow whose aim was bad.

"Nearly killed me, he did. Shot at me an' missed. I shot at him an' didn't!"

Murphy nodded musingly. "Yessir! Quite a squaw, she was! Bear Paw, he had her from her Pa, ol' Broken Hand, the Arapaho chief?"

"What became of her?"

"Her?" Buffalo furrowed his brow. "Let's see, now. She was the one just afore the big snow ... nigh as I can recall I sent her back to her Pa.

"Uh huh, that was it! I give her three buffalo hides an' a couple of ponies ... that steeldust was limpin' in the off hind leg, anyway. Gettin' crabby, that squaw was. Wanted to settle down with the Injuns!"

"Only one way to handle a woman, my old man used to say," Ban suggested, "an' that was to whup 'em good with a trace chain the fust time you took 'em home. Then whup 'em good once a week for the fust three weeks, an' after that all you have to do is just rattle the chain!"

Ban Hardy drained his coffee cup and got to his feet. "Got you an outfit yet, Matt? If you ain't, I got me a German spotted who brought five wagons down from St. Cloud, up in Minnesota. He's got good teams, too."

"Let's go then," Matt said, "I'll need a wagon."

"You buyin' oxen or mules?" Ban wanted to know.

"Better git oxen," Murphy suggested. "If'n you have to, you can always eat them. I never did cultivate no taste for mule meat, though I've set up an' et it a few times, an' mighty durned glad to have it, too! Oxen are much better, an' there's more meat on 'em, an' anyway, they pull better on ground where there's no trail."

Brian Coyle was obviously a leader, and an able man. Yet when Matt considered it he was afraid that Coyle's leadership might extend only as far as the boundary of a reasonably civilized town or locality. He was a politician, an organizer, and a planner. He knew how to talk to men, but how good he would be out on the trail when the going got rough was yet to be determined. When faced with violence he might not have what was needed. And he might.

Clive Massey was a dangerous man. There was a reckless fury in him that was easily aroused, and that coupled with his driving strength and natural cunning would make him a man to be reckoned with.

Massey had seemed to sit too close to Logan Deane and Batsell Hammer to be completely honest, and while it was early to form any judgments, his actions and his tempers were unfavourable. The two men had been in Deadwood and this part of the west longer than Massey, and they might have been posted near him to render judgment on men whom Massey did not know.

Thus far there was no reason for suspicion. Nor so far had any visible opportunity for dishonesty shown itself. Nothing had been sold, nothing promised. It was all on a strictly voluntary basis. Yet his instincts and his knowledge of men warned him that something was amiss.

Of course, had he not made his own demand it was probable none of the men would have had a receipt for their money, but such things were of little importance as men seldom resorted to legal practices to make recovery of either money or property. Judge Colt usually presided at such disagreements and his decisions left no ground for appeal.

That a few of the men with the wagon train might be outlaws or the next thing to it was no cause for alarm. The west was not made up of noble, God-fearing heroes. Many of the men and women on the westward trek, and often enough the bravest of them, were criminals or worse. Portugee Phillips, of whom little good could have been said before his almost legendary ride through the blizzard, was one of these.

He had been respected for his Indian lore and knowledge of the country, but disliked for his surly temper and uncertain honesty. Yet in the pinch, when honest men had cowered in fear of the deadly cold, the blizzard and the Sioux, it had been Phillips who risked death to ride for help.

While the men of this wagon train were a chosen group, they were of a part with all those who migrated west. The United States had been settled to a great degree by the economic failures of Europe, albeit the ones with courage enough to attempt a change. The wealthy and satisfied do not migrate, they stagnate.

Even those who offered religion as a reason for migration were also those who were impoverished. Many Puritans and Quakers remained in England, but they were those who had much to lose and little to gain. It was the peasants, the lower middle class, and a few adventurers or impoverished noblemen who settled America.

The thirty men who were to form the nucleus of the new venture were like any such group that might have been chosen from a boom town. They were selected to the degree that they were better equipped physically and in a material way to face the ordeals and trials of beginning a new community in a wild and dangerous country.

Phillips, Murphy, Hardy and himself were all experienced western men. The same could be said of the former stage driver, Elam Brooks.

Aaron Stark, the hillbilly, was a lean and cold-eyed man who feared God and nothing else. He carried his squirrel rifle like an extension of his arm, as indeed it was, and he was the sort of man who would last in any venture. The juices of his hard, sinewy body had been drained away by hard living until he was one rawhide piece of toughness and durability. Improvident in the sense that he would never accumulate much, he nevertheless possessed all the qualities of the pioneer. He had courage, hardihood, and a stubborn will that balked at no problem as too great. In later years, in a tamed down and more civilized world his kind would be wasted, they would become drifting outcasts, scorned and betrayed, drifting on with their eyes forever searching for some new, distant horizon. They would find names for them, and call them "Okies" and "Arkies" and they would be despised by fatter and more adjusted men. It would be forgotten that it was of such stuff that the pioneers were made, the ones who always had the courage to move on.

During the growth and expansion of the nation he was the durable body of the wagon train personnel. He was the man who refused to remain close to forts and so was often killed by Indians, his wife nursed her children with a rifle across her knees, and he tilled his fields with a gun strapped to his plough handles. He dared off Indians, the big cattlemen, the outlaws. He was the nester, the squatter, the man who moved west.

Eventually, thrown back upon themselves, their horizons lopped off by the sea they would circle like migratory birds with no place to light. Yet these were the people who dared, the people who died for their land, but they rarely died alone, and not always in vain.

From the source from which they sprang came an inexhaustible supply. Fatter, weaker, home staying men might deride them and betray them, yet when the Aaron Starks had opened up the land, they would follow on and buy up their land in tax sales or mortgages to grow fatter and weaker on the land these others had fought to win.

Wherever there was a frontier there were men like Aaron Stark, strong, silent, ignorant men who knew only the longing for home and land. The others came to loot, but the Aaron Starks brought their families along, and of all who came west they alone came to build, to remain, not to loot.

Railroads came west on government subsidy and gifts of government land. They never advanced a foot without government land to sell, government money to spend, and the protection of the Army. The Aaron Starks asked no protection from anybody, or if so, not for long, but moved out ahead of the Army wherever their path was not blocked by too tight a line, and where they stopped they put down roots.

Remembering the faces of the men in the store's back room, Matt Bardoul considered this. He had travelled and read enough to possess some historical perspective. He could in a sense see what was coming. He had seen the beaver dwindle away on the streams, and he had witnessed the slaughter of the buffalo under the get-rich-quick rifles of the hide hunters.

This was only secondarily a colonization, it was a huge rat race after wealth, a fierce, dog-eat-dog struggle to get yours before the others did. It was a fantastic, grandiose, brutal fight for wealth, the fiercest tide of greed that ever swept across the continent, and the end was not yet. There could be no end until the land was left a desert, raped and looted by a people who too often built only for now and never for tomorrow.

Nobody had come to the Black Hills because they were beautiful. They came only because there was gold, and they came to get the gold and get out. One of them, writing in his diary in that same year of 1877, expressed the feelings of all. "My intention was to make money, to get rich; at that time no one was there for pleasure."