Two in the Field Page 12

  Had they visited the Elkhorn settlement?

  Nobody had.

  Hard on the heels of the land peddlers were agents pushing mining claims that offered a bewitching assortment of ore-bearing titles. Custer’s ’74 expedition had brought back the first definitive word of gold flakes on exposed rocks and nuggets visible in stream beds. The Black Hills region was a treasure trove.

  But hadn’t the best claims already been staked?

  Not at all. Last winter’s ignorant and ill-provisioned gold-rushers had discovered only a few sites, certainly not the most lucrative ones, and their claims were worthless anyway. The U.S. Army was presently driving them out because by law the land still belonged to the Sioux.

  In that case, why should I buy in?

  Because it was widely known that the Indians were ready to sell. Negotiations were proceeding even as we talked. Once title cleared, prospectors would be allowed in, this time legally. Those with the resources for placer or pit mines would come away with vast fortunes. And those sorts of operations were, of course, precisely what they were offering shares in.

  It was from one of these agents, a plump, derby-topped Oliver Hardyish sort of gent, that I finally got a bit of concrete information about O’Neill’s settlement. “It’s mainly a provision stop for prospectors,” he told me. “Men of a rougher class than yourself.”

  As we crossed Iowa I’d been seeing more of the pick-and-shovel crowd: young guys in jeans with prospecting gear.

  “You’ve actually been there?”

  He nodded. “ ‘O’Neill City,’ they’re calling it. Way up in Holt County, on the Elkhorn. Lovely spot. Not much there yet in the way of buildings, but they got smart and laid in mining gear to peddle to the goldbugs. Now it’s all the General can do to keep his Irish boys from running off to dig up the Hills.”

  “Any women there?” I held my breath.

  “Some few.” He winked. “One’s quite the goods.”

  Interpreting my happy grin as a sales breakthrough, he riffled through his claim forms. “Now here’s the stock company you’d want, located not too far from O’Neill City.…”

  Ironically, as soon as I encountered decent food in Omaha, I got deathly sick. Maybe the strain of everything caught up with me. Dysentery laid me flat. Bone-shaking chills wracked my body. As if that weren’t enough, I developed a gum-imploding toothache. And to cap everything, the bedding in my room in the fleabag hotel I’d barely managed to reach from the U.P. depot gave me a nasty body rash and a big ugly boil on my butt. I’d come this close to Cait only to be brought to a dead halt.

  The days blurred together.

  A stout German maid finally insisted on bringing a doctor, who, reeking of liquor, “prescribed” a heavy dose of brandy fortified with pepper.

  “That’s nuts,” I protested, but drank it to get rid of him.

  Next day the runs and chills were gone. Go figure. The toothache stayed longer but I gutted it out. No way I was letting some nineteenth-century butcher inside my mouth.

  Finally on my feet again, I set out on the Omaha & Northwestern for Blair, only twenty-nine miles away. It took a whole day to get there.

  The reason: ’hoppers.

  I’d never seen anything like the whirring mass that dimmed the sun. The papers said afterward it was a mile high and six miles square—and not that big a deal as grasshopper invasions went. Some swarms had been estimated at 175 miles in width and 350 in length. Still, they were so thick that our wheels spun on their mashed bodies, and there was real danger of going off the rails. The train halted and we got out to rubberneck at insects stripping whole trees bare of their greenery.

  “They’ll eat most anything, even sumac,” a weathered old-timer said, “although they’re partial to what costs labor and has value. See that stubble?” He pointed to a barren-looking plot. “A few days ago that was foot-high corn. These ’hoppers are working their third and fourth crops this season.

  “Cattle and horses cain’t find nothing to eat, not even buds,” he went on, plucking a tangle of insects from his sleeve. “Hard to kill the little bastards. You can rip off their wings and legs—and they go on eatin’.”

  I brushed some off my neck. My skin felt crawly. “Can’t they be trapped or something?”

  “We tried everything you could imagine, including settin’ fire to trenches filled with coal oil.” He spat. “Might as well use a bucket to hold back the Missouri. Farmer name of Rib-Eye Jacobs got hisself caught out amongst the ‘hoppers tryin’ to fight ’em off—and they ate him up, too!”

  I looked to see if he was serious and couldn’t tell.

  “Folks are puttin’ in new crops—rutabaga, sugar beets, millet—hopin’ the bugs won’t take to ’em. Others are sellin’ off their hogs in case they don’t get no corn this year.”

  Nebraska agriculture seemed a nightmare. “What about up along the Elkhorn?” I asked. “Things as bad there?”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “ ’Hoppers seem worst here along the Missouri.” He scratched a welt on his arm. “But you cain’t never tell.”

  Signs in the Sioux City & Pacific cars out of Blair forbade shooting through the windows at buffalo. I didn’t see any, and figured what I’d heard was true: the great herds had already been decimated. In Fremont I switched to the Elkhorn Valley R.R. Just seeing its name speeded my blood.

  The smaller lines didn’t have uniformed conductors, which sometimes led to hassles. One hot-tempered Southerner nearly came to blows with a ticket-taker, saying he wasn’t surrendering his stub to any “goddamn Yankee sharp.” We narrowly avoided another civil war.

  The tracks ended in Wisner; from there I’d travel by stage line. By the time I arrived in Neligh, sixty miles farther on, my tailbone was so bruised from washboard roads and lousy springs that I vowed to hike the rest of the way to O’Neill. But next morning, in Neligh’s ramshackle inn, where I was trying to wash down brick-hard biscuits with coffee that would have thinned crankcase oil, I learned that I still had forty miles to go.

  “Why not buy a horse?” said the Texas cowboy who’d informed me of the distance. His name was Suggs and his twangy tones sounded disconcertingly like those of a president I’d left in the future. “In fact, why not buy my horse? I’m leavin’ for the East.”

  “Wouldn’t know how to take care of it.”

  “Well, hell, he’ll let you know when he’s tired or thirsty. There’s grazing and water along your route.”

  I thought it over. Suggs struck me as honest and my last equine experience had gone well enough, when a mare I’d dubbed “Plan B” carried me safely away from an escapade that had turned very nasty. I remembered her fondly.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Shorty,” he said. “He’s a mite stunted. Got some Indian pony in him, strong little critter. Come out and take a look.”

  Face to face with Shorty, I realized I was clueless as to what to look for. “Let’s see his teeth,” I said, remembering a scene in an old western film.

  Lester gave me a look—Your hands don’t work?—and pulled Shorty’s lips apart. His gums looked pink and healthy. I wasn’t wild about owning him, but almost anything seemed better than another stage trip.

  “He’s only four,” Suggs said. “A gelding, as you can see. Got lots of years in him.” His tone grew more persuasive. “If you don’t want him once you reach O’Neill City, hell, sell him to a settler or a goldbug.”

  He brushed his hand along the mane drooping over the gelding’s brown eyes. Suddenly Shorty resembled Mr. Pribble, my diminutive sixth grade teacher, who’d peered through thick glasses in exactly that myopic way as he read Ray Bradbury stories to us. We’d affectionately called him “Mr. P.”

  “He’ll cost you less than a mule,” Suggs said. As if buying a mule would have occurred to me. “Mules are damn expensive—and out here they come down with mud fever.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The prairie soup gets caked on their bellies and prevents ’em from
sweating, then mud fever cripples ’em.”

  “Oh.” So much for mules. “How much you asking?”

  After some dickering I paid twenty dollars. Suggs threw in Shorty’s blanket and saddle, and told me I’d gotten a good deal, but I had no way of knowing. More than half of Twain’s money was gone now, and I had a new partner to feed. But at least I wouldn’t be walking into O’Neill City carrying my suitcase.

  “So long, Shorty,” Suggs said.

  “He’s Mr. P. now.”

  Suggs made no comment, though his expression suggested that my priorities could stand some rearranging.

  I was about to mount when the station foreman sauntered over. “Since you’re heading up to O’Neill,” he said, “how ’bout totin’ their mail? Scheduled carrier won’t be around for a week.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He tucked a sealskin parcel into my saddlebag.

  Mr. P. handled easily, as advertised. Once out of sight of the station, I rifled through the mail parcel for letters to Cait.

  There were none.

  Trying not to let that little sliver of anxiety cut into my euphoric sense of closing the distance to Cait with every step, I let Mr. P. set the pace. He was content to mosey along. Rain showers had moved through earlier, and the morning air was mild. Tomorrow Cait and I would be together. My spirits soared until I felt like we were gliding along. I ignored the bottles and other litter along the road and gazed out at the rolling grasslands and towering cloudscapes. The warming air was crystalline. Wild-flowers studded the earth. Birds chirped in bushes and in the occasional trees standing solitary on hills or clumped in creek hollows, where Mr. P. liked to stop. The sun rose higher. I grew drowsy from the rhythmic clopping, the jingling harness, the creaking saddle, the hum of insects.

  Ouch!

  A small rocket strafed my ear and hit my neck. Mr. P. cocked his ears with a certain amount of curious sympathy, tail twitching to keep the attackers at bay. I became uncomfortably aware of crawlers working their way up my legs and invisible dive-bombers coming straight at my eyes. To defend against the latter, I tied my extra shirt over my face.

  The sun became a molten ball. Sweat ran off me. My wrapped head felt like it was encased in a baking pastry, and Mr. P.’s slow canter no longer seemed so pleasant. I tried to urge him faster but without spurs or whip—not that I would have been inclined to use them—I could only jiggle the reins, rock forward in the saddle, and yell. At which he merely twisted his neck to glance back—then continued at his chosen pace.

  In the afternoon the clouds darkened and welled up into thunderheads. Lighting split the sky and a rolling peal of thunder sounded. I didn’t like the idea of being out on the prairie in a thunderstorm. Was it safer to hunker down in a low, open place, as during tornados, or among sheltering trees? I chose the latter when I spotted a stand of willows flanking a stream bed. Mr. P. finally got the idea that we needed to move with some urgency.

  The rain came while we were still a quarter-mile away. Within seconds I was drenched. Visibility was negligible, but fortunately Mr. P. seemed to have the direction fixed. Hail started to fall, tiny frozen droplets at first, then jagged chunks of ice, some nearly an inch in diameter. I bent low over Mr. P.’s neck and put my arms over my head.

  At the edge of the willows I wanted to push farther in, but Mr. P. refused. I understood his reluctance moments later when a portion of the bank suddenly collapsed into the creek, already a seething current. The channel’s sides were a gumbo of mud. Even if we’d escaped drowning at the outset, it would be impossible to climb out. I silently granted Mr. P. veto power on all our travel decisions.

  The downpour left in its wake a cooling breeze that kept the bugs away. We headed along the road again, now a series of soupy ruts in which Mr. P’s hooves made slogging sounds. We began to pass groups of failed prospectors coming the other way. I must have cut a comical figure with my long legs dangling down Mr. P.’s sides. The men ventured a number of opinions, few of them flattering. I took it good-naturedly, aware that I was far outside my element.

  A lot of them, it seemed, had come out for adventure. Too young to have fought in the war, their choices limited by hard economic times, they’d taken off on the great gold lark. It hadn’t worked out, but they probably weren’t much worse off than when they started. The canvas side of one wagon was painted, Black Hills or bust! and in fresher letters, Busted, by God! Another bore a cartoon of a fat Indian sitting before a herd of fat horses, a U.S. Cavalryman feeding him with a spoon. The caption read White Man Heap Damn Fool!

  More sinister types were intermingled, too: lean, wolfish men who eyed me as if calculating the risks of direct assault. One yelled something I didn’t catch, but I sensed he was looking for an excuse to come at me. I waved cheerfully. Once he was safely past, I pulled from my saddlebag the navy revolver that Slack had left with me and tucked it prominently in my belt.

  During a watering stop I shared cold coffee with a youngster driving a two-mule rig. His partners lay snoring beneath the canopy as we talked.

  “Find any gold?” I asked.

  “Maybe so,” he said coyly.

  “Well, if so, why are you leaving?”

  “Goddamn army’s run us off six times. We’re headed for Omaha now to find backers. Soon’s the negotiations with the Sioux get done, we’ll go back.”

  I asked about the O’Neill settlement. He laughed and said they’d tried painting that name on their wagons last winter so the army would leave them alone. “Didn’t do us a bit of good as a name,” he said. “And the place ain’t much neither.”

  Clearing a rise late the next day, I finally saw O’Neill City. From one point of view, it indeed wasn’t very much: a collection of small sod houses on high ground clustered around a larger structure, several outlying log cabins and two frame buildings under construction. Modest, to put it mildly.

  To me it looked like Shangri-la.

  The sun was shining on the Elkhorn, a broad, bending channel of light on which a few stands of trees cast rippling shadows. Hawks circled lazily along the banks. Smoke curling from one of the chimneys carried cooking odors to us, and Mr. P. promptly increased his pace.

  Several men were hoeing weeds in a field of two-foot-high corn. No ’hoppers here, I gathered. The men wore coveralls and looked considerably less wild and adventurous than the prospectors I’d seen. They watched me silently as I rode in, their faces coppery from the sun. Suddenly afraid even to think about Cait, I swung stiffly down off Mr. P.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi’dy,” one answered, and the others nodded.

  Silence.

  “Good to be off that saddle,” I offered. “I’m Sam Fowler.”

  No discernible recognition of my name.

  “Got business here?” asked the one who had spoken.

  “Mail delivery, for one thing.” If that news was supposed to break the ice, it didn’t. They stared in silence as I took the mail pouch from my saddlebag. “Man in Neligh asked me to bring this. Who should get it?”

  “The General, rightly.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “You don’t.” The talker spat in the dirt as the others chuckled. “He ain’t here.”

  Patience, I told myself. “Okay, where is he?”

  “Off recruitin’.” Then, sarcastically: “Or maybe finally fixin’ our titles. Your name’s Fowler?” He moved up close to me, followed by the others. “Any kin to Fly Speck Billy?”

  I tensed, wondering what was going on. “No idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “What I asked was, who gets the mail?”

  “We think,” he said slowly, “that first you oughter take that pistol outen your belt and let us keep it till we know you better.”

  Now I understood why they stood so close. If I reached for the gun, they’d reach for me. “Okay.” I raised my arms. “Go ahead and take it. Now who’s the one I see?”

  “Devlin.” Holding the pistol by its barrel, he gestured toward t
he largest sod structure. “Over at Grand Central. Come on.”

  I took Mr. P.’s reins and walked with him. “What’s that Fly Speck business?”

  He explained that it was the name of a road agent fond of holding up stages; one of his aliases was James Fowler. “But you don’t fit his type,” he said. “He’s a sawed-off runt. We just gotta be careful. There’s a lot of miners coming back from the Hills mad as hornets. Some of ’em ain’t above trying to relieve us of our possessions. Anyhow, Fly Speck’s got freckles all over his face—it’s the cause of his nickname—so you probably ain’t him.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  We passed a store with signs advertising rubber boots “for placering,” a “complete camp chest” with food for fifteen days, and Murray’s Famous Homeopathic Remedy for Rheumatism, Catarrh, and Chilblains.

  “Looks like business is good,” I commented.

  He shrugged and said nothing.

  I took a breath and got ready to ask what I’d been afraid to ask. Before I could get the words out, a voice called, “Sam!” I turned and saw a dark-haired boy loping toward us. He looked vaguely familiar.

  “It’s me … Tim!”

  At first I had trouble matching this lean, scratchy-voiced teenager with the little boy Cait and I had nursed through typhoid fever. That Tim had played with toys and looked up to Andy and me with consummate hero-worship. This Tim seemed unrelated to him. But then I began to see traces: alert hazel eyes; hair that was dark like his mother’s but not so curly. His shoulders had broadened, and he was probably taller now than Andy. Still a boy, though. Cait’s boy. And then it hit me with stunning force why he looked familiar.

  He was the very image of Colm O’Neill.

  “It’s you, isn’t it, Sam?” A worried frown crossed his face.