Текст книги "Boone's Lick"

Автор книги: Larry McMurtry

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"No, but if we settle out here we might get a cow or two," Ma said. "It would be nice to have a cowbell, to help locate our cows with, if we get some."

That was the first any of us had heard about the prospect of settling out west. We had been on the move for a good while now, but none of us kids really knew what all this travel was leading to. Ma wanted to have a talk with Pa, we knew that–but what the talk was supposed to be about had us mystified. It was going to be an important talk, though–otherwise Ma would just have waited to have it next time Pa came home.

"It's for reasons of my own, Sherman," Ma said, the one time I got up the nerve to ask her about it. She wouldn't say more than that.

The band of Pawnees led by old Nose Turns Down never bothered us again, but it was not long before we began to see more Indians, lots of them, mainly traveling in small groups. Five or six would race up to us, feathers fluttering on their lances– feathers or sometimes scalps. All of them were bold when it came to inspecting our goods, a habit that continued to annoy Ma, who quarreled with Uncle Seth about it.

"Why wouldn't they ride right in?" he asked her. "There are no doors out here on the baldies–did you expect them to knock?"

"No, but I didn't expect them to be so familiar, either," Ma said.

"It's their country, Mary–we're the invaders, not them," Uncle Seth said, speaking more sharply than he usually spoke to Ma.

"I don't want their country–I just want to pass through," Ma said, a little surprised by his tone.

"We are passing through," Uncle Seth said. "Us and a lot more like us."

It was certainly true that plenty of people were headed in the same direction we were. Several times we even saw men walking: no more equipment than a rifle, a spade, and a blanket or two. There was a wagon train behind us, nearly as long as the one in front of us, and lots of single wagons.

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"I confess I'm shocked by the lack of game," Father Villy said. "It's only been five years since I traveled the Platte–only five years ago there was plenty of game."

"The same for me," Uncle Seth said. "When Dick and I first hauled freight to Fort Laramie we were never out of sight of critters we could eat.

Buffalo, elk, antelope–when supper time came we just grabbed a rifle and shot whatever looked tastiest. Now about the only meat we can count on is prairie dogs."

Of course, we saw plenty of prairie dogs, but we hadn't killed one yet–

Uncle Seth wouldn't let us shoot at them.

"I don't favor wasting bullets on small varmints," he said.

"The old days have always seemed better to people–I wonder why that is, Seth," Ma asked.

For once Uncle Seth seemed to have no opinion. He took his rifle and rode off to look for the game that he had just said wasn't there.

7 WHILE we were fixing our wagon for about the fourth time in a week, the thing that G.T. used to worry about finally happened: a bear sprang out and went for him. We had been struggling through what Father Villy called the malpais–he said it just meant "bad country," and this country was certainly bad, a land of dips and dry creeks and sharp rocky gullies.

Some of the gullies were so hard to pull out of that we had to hitch all the mules to the wagon. The mules were up to this rough travel, but our old wagon wasn't. The dryness loosened the spokes, and they began to fall out of the wheels. Then one day, as we were easing up out of a steep gully, one of the rear wheels just suddenly came off and went rolling down the gully, in the direction of the Platte River.

When the wheel came off, the rear end of the wagon dropped and the wagon box shook loose and fell out, spilling most of my ma's cooking stuff.

Marcy had been napping–before anyone could catch her she slid out of the back of the wagon and had the bad luck to land right on a little cactus.

"Whoa! Whoa! We're wrecked!" Uncle Seth said to Ma, who was driving. Ma stopped the mules, but I don't think she quite took in what had happened until she noticed the wagon wheel rolling off down the gully.

"Dern the luck, where does that wheel think it's going?" she said. "One of you boys go get it, quick."

Father Villy had just picked up the baby when the bear sprang out–it had been down in the gully, trying to dig out a ground squirrel, when the wagon wheel came rolling along and startled Mr. Bruin.

G.T. had just started to go retrieve the wheel when a brown bear that looked as big as a hill came roaring up toward him. What saved G.T. was Charlie Seven Days's little sorrel horse, which had the bad luck to be nibbling a little growth of bunch-grass on the side of the gully. Before the horse could move the bear whacked it like Ma might whack G.T. if her temper was up. The sorrel horse died on the spot, of a broken neck. G.T.

was paralyzed: he couldn't move. It was his good luck that Uncle Seth happened to have his rifle in his hand, and that he was a skilled 84

sharpshooter, too. You wouldn't think a little thing like a bullet could kill a bear that size, but Uncle Seth killed it with two shots. When the bear first sprang out it seemed to be right on us, but in fact it was a fair way down the gully. Uncle Seth's second shot caused it to sit down and look thoughtful. It pawed at itself for a moment and then flopped over, dead. Once killed, it didn't look half as big as it had looked while it was alive, but it was still twice as big as any bear you'd find in Missouri.

G.T. was so shocked he didn't realize he was alive. He couldn't even talk, for several minutes.

"This solves the vittles problem but not the wagon problem," Uncle Seth said. "If the wheel hadn't come off I doubt that bear would even have noticed us."

I guess Ma hadn't been as impressed by the bear as the rest of us were, besides which she was impatient by nature. Ma hated delays, even delays caused by grizzly bears.

"That bear's dead, G.T.–go on and get the wagon wheel," she said.

G.T. didn't even answer. I think he was still trying to convince himself he was alive.

"Leave him be, Mary Margaret," Uncle Seth said. "He's had a shock."

He and Charlie Seven Days eased down the gully and took a closer look at the bear. They had their guns at the ready, in case the bear was just playing possum.

"It's dead–I can see that much from here," Ma said. "What's everybody lolling around for? My wagon box is broken, my baby's full of cactus, that wagon wheel's probably still rolling, and you're all standing around looking at a dead bear. We need to get this wagon fixed or we'll still be in this gully tomorrow. "

Neva, who was fearless if she was anything, finally went and got the wagon wheel, rolling it back up the gully it had just rolled down. If we hadn't had Father Villy, though, I doubt we could ever have got the wheel back on the wagon. He lifted the whole back end of the wagon and held it long enough for us to wedge the wheel back on.

The task of butchering the bear and the horse was left to Charlie, who was very quick and skillful with a skinning knife. He tried to show G.T.

and I how to cut up a large animal–we were eager to try out our new knives–but we were so slow and did so many things wrong that Ma finally called off the lesson. Her lifelong habit of interfering with whatever happened to be going on irritated Uncle Seth sometimes, and this was one of the times.

"Don't you even want these boys to know how to cut up a bear?" he asked her.

"Not particularly," Ma said. "They might live the rest of their lives without needing to cut up another bear."

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G.T. and I talked about that grizzly bear for the rest of our lives, but it was plain that it had made little impression on Ma.

"Good Lord, it was just a bear," she said. "It's no more inconvenient than having a baby fall on a cactus."

"It would have been if I hadn't been around tn

shoot it," Uncle Seth pointed out. "At the very least it would have laid waste to the mules."

"Why make up notions about things that didn't happen?" Ma asked. "You were along to shoot it, and that's one reason you're along on this trip: so you can shoot things that need to be shot."

"I wish I was as practical as you are, Mary Margaret," Uncle Seth said.

It was plain that Ma's bossy ways had put a strain on his temper, again.

"Well, you ain't, and that's that," Ma said, as if that settled the matter.

Not only was Charlie Seven Days the best at cutting up dead bears and dead horses, he also turned out to be the best at getting cactus thorns out of babies. He soaked them loose in some warm water and then rubbed some bear grease on Marcy's punctures, so she wouldn't be so whiny.

I guess knowing how to cure cactus punctures was what Ma considered a practical skill. She was real friendly to Charlie after that.

8 AFTER that morning when the bear sprang out it seemed like some little thing went wrong with the wagon every day. The rocks and the creeks and the gullies–the malpais, as Father Villy called it–were destroying our wagon a little at a time.

Ma knew it but she did her best to ignore it, waiting impatiently while Uncle Seth and Father Villy repaired the spoke or the hitch or the shaft-whatever went wrong on a given day.

"How far till we're done with this malpais?" she asked the priest. "I've had about enough of it."

"Another week, ma'am," Father Villy said.

Once again, though, it turned out that being a little distance back from a big wagon train was a piece of luck–our wagon wasn't the only con-out with our turd sacks, would spot some little piece of equipment that had been dropped by the big train. Once we even found a whole wagon that had been abandoned. The Indians had picked it over some, but there were still lots of valuable parts that we could scavenge–and we did. Uncle Seth even broke up the bottom and sides, to use to patch the holes in our wagon bed.

"There's no reason for any part of the United States to be this big," Ma said one morning. A rear wheel had just come loose again, which meant a slow day.

"It's even bigger in some places," Father Villy said.

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"I don't see how it could be bigger," Ma said, a position I agreed with.

Sometimes we'd come to the top of a hill or ridge only to have the sky swell out above us and the horizon retreat so far away that it was hard to believe we could ever get across to it. "Montana's bigger," Father Villy assured Ma. "I hope my husband's had the good sense to stay out of Montana then," Ma said. Though the breakdowns vexed her, it was clear that she had no intention of giving up.

Of course, there would have been no advantage to giving up. We were so far out in the middle of nowhere that we would have been lucky to make it home, even if we turned back.

"How much farther to a house?" Ma asked, looking around her at the empty plain. "I've about forgotten what a house looks like."

It was a bright, clear day, but a chilly wind was howling out of the north.

"I guess you'd call Fort Laramie a house, of sorts," Uncle Seth said.

"It's about a hundred miles away.

"I doubt you'll approve it, though," he added.

"Seth, nobody made you the judge of what I approve of," Ma said. "Or what I don't approve of, either."

"Maybe not, but I have spent several months of my life at Fort Laramie and it's a disorderly place, filled with cowards and drunkards and whores and coffee coolers, none of which you normally approve of," he said.

"Don't you talk of harlots around my boys," Ma said. "What's a coffee cooler?"

"It's an Indian who's too lazy to hunt," Uncle Seth said. "By now I imagine those Pawnees have cooled that coffee we gave them." "Oh, you mean beggars," Ma said. Just then Charlie Seven Days touched Uncle Seth's arm. Charlie had been afoot since the day the bear killed his horse, but he seemed just as happy to be walking. One day he killed a big porcupine-

–the meat tasted rank, but Charlie helped Neva pull out the quills, which he said could be used to ornament a shawl.

Charlie pointed to a ridge to the northwest–all I could see were some moving dots, but the dots soon turned out to be Indians, and they were moving our way fast. In fact they seemed to be charging right at us–Ma thought the same.

"Seth, they're charging," she said. "We better get ready to fight."

"It's the Bad Faces," Charlie said. "I see that paint horse that that Red Cloud likes."

"You may be right," Father Villy said. He was as cool as if Charlie had just quoted a verse of scripture or something.

"Seth, did you hear me?" Ma asked. The fact that the horses were racing toward us at breakneck speed made more of an impression on Ma than the grizzly bear had.

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"They're Sioux, Mary Margaret," Uncle Seth said. "They ain't attacking, they're just showing off their horsemanship. The Sioux ain't been cowed yet–they still think they have the right to run their horses, if they want to."

I wasn't as easy in my mind about the Indians as Uncle Seth was, but I had to admit it was a noble sight to see them come flashing over the prairies at reckless speed. I had never seen horses ridden so fast–when they came to a creek or small gully they soared over it like birds, the horses kicking up dust on the other side.

"I've heard the Comanches can outride the Sioux but I don't trust the report," Father Villy said. "Look at them come!"

For a moment I felt a lump in my throat, just from the beauty of the race–but I was scared, too. What if they all pulled tomahawks at the last minute and knocked us all dead? They were riding so low on their mounts that even if we had shot I doubt we'd have hit more than one or two of them, which wouldn't have been enough.

Then, when they were no more than fifteen or twenty wagon lengths from us, they stopped. A few of the horses were so caught up in the run that they pawed the air, anxious to keep going.

"Red Cloud is behind," Charlie said. "So is Old Man Afraid."

We saw that two of the Sioux riders hadn't been quite so swift. They were a half mile back, coming at a slow, easy lope.

"These here's just the youngsters," Uncle Seth said. "They will race their nags."

"Who's going to palaver?" Father Villy asked. We all looked at Charlie, but he declined the position. He just stood close to the wagon, watching the Sioux.

Then the two older men eased to the front of the crowd, waiting for someone from our bunch to go talk to them.

"Seth, go on–talk to them," Ma said. The two older Indians who were waiting to talk to us didn't seem impatient. The one on the paint horse had a narrow face and carried a brand-new rifle–a repeater of some kind.

The other Indian was older–his face was wrinkled, like a melon gets when the sun has dried it up.

Uncle Seth and Father Villy walked out together and began to sign to the Indians. The signing went on for a while, and then the thin-faced man on the paint horse began to talk–and did he talk! He sat right there on his horse and made a long speech–I didn't get a word of it, and I doubt anyone else did, either, unless it was Father Villy.

The speech went on for so long that I expected Ma to get impatient–she didn't enjoy listening to anyone for much of a length of time–but for once she behaved herself and waited for the discussion to be nvpr The minute it was over the young Sioux warriors came crowding around the wagon, just as the Pawnees had done. Uncle Seth gave them a lot of 88

tobacco and plenty of coffee too–Ma didn't complain. Uncle Seth even gave the two leaders hunting knives, like the ones G.T. and I had.

"Why do they call them Bad Faces?" Neva wanted to know, when the Sioux left. They were in sight for a long time, riding north.

"I'd like to know that too," Ma said. "They were the best-looking Indians I've seen–except for Charlie."

I expect she just said that to be polite, since Charlie just looked like an ordinary man.

"It's just a name for Red Cloud's bunch," Father Villy said.

"That doesn't explain a thing," Ma said.

In fact, though Uncle Seth and Father Villy had made a show of being cordial, neither of them looked very happy once the Sioux had gone.

"I hope Dick Cecil's at Fort Laramie," Uncle Seth said. "That would be the lucky thing."

"Why?" Ma asked.

"It's those forts the army's putting up along the Bozeman Trail," Father Villy said. "It's foolish-foolish."

"If it's so foolish why are they putting them up?" Ma asked.

"If you knew anything about the army, Mary Margaret, you'd know that they do foolish things every day," Uncle Seth said. "I doubt myself that the army ever does anything that isn't foolish–and

I was a soldier in that same army for four years."

"There's another point," Father Villy said, "which is that the farther west they go, the less brains the army uses. There's been a gold strike in Montana, which means miners will be hurrying up the Bozeman Trail–

only it ain't their trail! You've heard of the Holy Land, I expect, haven't you, ma'am?" "I have," Neva said. "It's where Cain slew Abel."

"Well, we think of it for other things besides murder," Father Villy said. "But you're right–it's where Cain slew Abel."

"I don't see the application," Ma said. "It's that the army's built these new forts in the Sioux Holy Land," Father Villy said. "That's what Red Cloud was telling us in that long speech he made. What he said was that the Sioux won't stand for it–or the Cheyenne either."

"They're going to go for the new forts–ain't that what you think, Charlie?" Uncle Seth said. Charlie Seven Days just nodded. "A white man in a fever to get to the diggings will always try to go by the quickest way, even when the quickest way means going right through the Sioux,"

Uncle Seth said.

"Yes, even if quick travel means his scalp," Father Villy said.

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"I guess I finally understand you," Ma said. "If Dick happens to be hauling to one of these new forts, then he's in plenty of danger–is that correct?"

"Plenty of danger, ma'am," Father Villy said.

9 AFTER our meeting with the Bad Faces, Ma let all of us know that she was not going to tolerate any lollygagging or needless delays in our trip to find Pa. The Bad Faces had impressed her, but they didn't fool her.

They could have killed us easy–it was just our luck that all Red Cloud wanted to do was make a speech.

It was Ma's frustration that the country we were moving through just wasn't made for hurry. The harder we tried to pour on the speed, the more the country seemed to work against us. One night four of our mules slipped their hobbles–it took Charlie half a day to track them and bring them back.

Then it rained for three straight days. All the way we had hugged the Platte River, to be sure of water, but lack of water ceased to be our problem: too much water was our problem. Every little trickle of a creek became a river; ground that had been hard as flint became mud. If we had not had four strong mules we would never have got the wagon out of some of the mud holes it sank into. At least there were trees here and there again, so we could enjoy a good wood fire at night.

When we first saw the mountains way up ahead, after such a stretch of time on the plains, we didn't really know what we were seeing. The minute the first mountains appeared G.T. wanted to run on and climb one–he had to be persuaded that they were still forty miles away.

Ma was often vexed by the rain and the mud, but she never wavered; she drove the wagon all day, refusing to let anyone spell her–at least, she did until we finally came to Laramie Fork–with the fort at last in sight–and faced a regular flood of water, moving too fast for even a strong mule team to try and struggle through.

"Damn the luck," Uncle Seth said. "We could all sleep warm and dry in Fort Laramie tonight if this little creek wasn't up.

"Most of the time a man can jump this creek– but now look!" he added.

"I see a washtub," G.T. said, pointing into the froth of the water. "Here comes the washboard, too."

"Well, grab it, somebody," Ma said. "We can always use an extra washtub."

The fact was, the little river seemed to be floating lots of goods right past us.

"It's a regular store," Ma said. "Grab that rolling pin."

"That wagon train probably tried to cross up stream," Father Villy said. "Somebody's wagon turned over."

At Ma's urging, me and G.T. partly stripped off and got in the water, which was so cold it turned us numb in a minute. I did manage to grab the wash-tub, though, and G.T. caught the washboard. Charlie reached in and 90

snagged a pitchfork without even getting wet. When G.T. and I finally got out of the water our teeth were chattering like bones.

"So what do we do now, Seth?" Ma asked.

"We do the thing you hate most: wait," Uncle Seth said. "We'll wait for the water to go down."

"When do you expect it to fall?" Ma asked.

"I can't predict," he said. "Maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. What do you think, Charlie?"

"Tomorrow," Charlie said. "Unless it rains more."

"I can't wait that long," Ma said. "We've been traveling all this time to get to Fort Laramie, and there it is. This is not deep water. I believe I can get through it if I push hard."

We could all see that Uncle Seth was nearly to the point of losing his temper with Ma. The big vein on his nose was wiggling like a worm.

"It ain't how deep it is, it's how fast it's flowing, Mary Margaret," he said. "It might push this wagon right over, and then you and the baby and everything else we own will just float away."

It was clear that Ma didn't believe him. She still had the reins in her hand, and it seemed that any minute she might defy his advice and take the plunge.

Uncle Seth was so vexed by her stubbornness that it looked for a minute like he meant to jump up on the wagon seat and grab the reins from her before she could pop the mules. Ma had something in her–something terrible–that just wouldn't be stopped–not by Pa or Uncle Seth or argument or a raging river or anything else; but this time, before it came to a crisis between the two of them, there was a commotion upstream.

"Look, Arapaho," Father Villy said. While we had been dragging washtubs out of the creek what seemed like a whole Indian village had arrived upstream. It was the howling of all their dogs that we finally heard, over the sound of the water. The roaring creek that had stopped us made no impression on the Arapaho: the water was just boiling with them. The women had long poles attached to their horses, with baskets of some kind hung between them.

"I want to see this," Ma said, turning the wagon. We all went up to watch–a stretch of the river was just full of dogs and horses and Indians. Some of the dogs even had skinny little poles attached to them, with smaller baskets between their poles. The large baskets, the ones the horses were pulling, had babies in them, and puppies, and here and there an old man or an old woman, sitting as high in the baskets and bundles as they could get, but not high enough to keep them out of the water. Soon babies were screeching and spluttering at the shock of the icy water.

Puppies were whining, dogs howling, horses whinnying; but the Indian women were mainly quiet. Once I saw a baby pop out of its basket but its mother just reached back and plucked it out of the water. She settled it back in its basket as if it had been a puppy.

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The dogs were having the hardest time making the crossing, especially those with the drag poles attached to them. The current carried some of the dogs down abreast of us, but the dogs kept struggling and all of them finally reached shore.

"It's only women–where are the men?" Ma asked.

"Oh, the men are most likely already at Fort Laramie, loafing," Uncle Seth said. "If not, they might be hunting, or making a little war, somewhere. They wouldn't concern themselves with a little thing like getting their wives and babies through a flood."

So far as I could tell the Indians didn't lose a baby, or an old person, or even a dog, in crossing the raging stream. This fact was not lost on Ma.

"Well, if their menfolk ain't concerned I don't guess you need to be either, Seth," Ma said, and she immediately put our wagon in the water right behind the last of the Indian women. Just before she hit the river Uncle Seth jumped on Sally and grabbed Marcy out of the wagon–he didn't want to risk having her pop out like the Indian baby had.

"Let's go, boys–there's no stopping her!" he said.

Ma had hitched two mules to the wagon, which left G.T. and I each a mule.

Neva was up on the wagon seat, beside Ma–Father Villy and Charlie Seven Days just had to wade it. Ma had crossed quite a few creeks by this time, and knew how to urge on the mules. Soon she was in midstream and doing fine. The only trouble came when one of the last of the Indian dogs took a dislike to Little Nicky and came swimming back to snarl and nip at him.

Little Nicky didn't appreciate this attention–he tried to paw the dog, which, for a moment, threatened to tip the wagon. Uncle Seth was too far back to help. What saved the situation was an Indian woman, who saw Ma's predicament and turned back to help her. She grabbed the snarly dog by its scruff and pulled him off. It looked for a minute or two that the mules might balk anyway, but Ma yelled at them and popped them hard with the reins, which convinced them that the better move would be to get out of the chilly water. The helpful Arapaho woman stayed right in front of them and guided them across. The dog soon escaped her, but he didn't bother Nicky again–he had enough to do just getting on across the creek.

Ma's only real trouble came when she had already reached the other bank–

the right rear wheel seemed to drop into a hole between two rocks, just at the edge of the stream. We all ended up having to wade in and lift and push–it was as if that wheel had taken root in its hole. We had to hitch up the other two mules before that wheel popped free.

"It's a lucky thing those nice Indians came along," Ma said to Uncle Seth. "Otherwise, you and me would still be arguing."

"No, otherwise you would have drowned yourself, the baby, and most of the mules," he said.

10 I THOUGHT forts were for soldiers–all I see is Indians," Ma said, when we were a hundred yards or so from the gates of Fort Laramie.

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"The soldiers are inside, drunk," Uncle Seth said. "The Indians are outside, drunk. It might be different in Missouri, but that's how forts work in Wyoming."

Once we finally got out of the creek and were trying to get dry, it started to snow. By the time we got on dry clothes and started on for the fort it was nearly dusk. Several bunches of Indians were camped outside the fort, on the plain in front of it. The smoke from many campfires rose as the snow fell, so that the lower sky all seemed to melt together, smoke and snow and dusk, making it hard to get a clear look at anything.

Indian dogs were everywhere, nipping and snarling at one another. Two or three of the campfires belonged to trappers, with hide wagons sitting beside them–a few of the trappers were as hairy as Father Villy. Some nodded over their campfires–a few threw dice on a deerskin.

I had never expected to see such a wild sight in my life–neither had Neva, or G.T. I kept a good hold on my mule–I didn't want the nipping dogs to spook him. When we were nearly to the gates we passed the very Arapahos who had led us across the stream–most of them already had their lodges up. We even saw the very mongrel who had tried to bite Nicky–he was quarreling with another dog over a scrap of hide. The woman who pulled him off Nicky and then led us across had just whacked a fat puppy in the head and was getting it ready for the pot.

"Hey!" Neva said, outraged at the thought that someone would eat a pup.

She had tried to rear several puppies, only to lose them to the coyotes-there were so many varmints around Boone's Lick that pets didn't have much of a chance. We all knew that Indians ate dogs, but this was the first chance we had to witness how short life could be for a puppy in an Indian camp.

"Have you eaten puppies?" Neva asked Father Villy–she had come to regard him as her special friend.

"Yes, miss–they're tender," the priest said.

Before Neva could question him further we passed through the big gates into the broad quadrangle of the fort; suddenly we were inside some place, for the first time in weeks. It was a large plenty of animals, but we had had nothing but the broad plains around us for weeks on end. Being inside the fort felt a little close.

A burly soldier carrying a carbine came walking over to challenge us–he wobbled a little, when he walked. Ma pulled up and waited.

"Hello, Ned–have you come to arrest us?" Uncle Seth asked.

Hearing his name called out seemed to startle the big soldier. Then he noticed Ma on the wagon seat–it was snowing heavily enough that he had missed that detail–and he quickly stopped and took his cap off. He opened his mouth to speak but only came out with a big rumbling belch.

"Seth, is that you? It's dim light," the soldier said. He had a glassy-eyed look. When he tipped his cap to Ma he lost control of it–the cap floated down into the mud, which seemed to embarrass the man greatly.

"Pardon me, ma'am," he said. "I believe I've gone and et too much."

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When he reached down to pick up his cap he fell flat on his face in the mud–he didn't move. Ma had to turn the mules just to get around him.

"Dead drunk, I fear," Father Villy said. "It's a frequent failing of our soldiers in these lonely outposts."

"Lonely–I wouldn't say it's lonely," Ma remarked. "There's more people camped around here than live in Boone's Lick, Missouri, I'd say."

She was right about that. As many folks were camped inside the fort as outside–soldiers, trappers, a few people with wagons, Indian women, dogs. Some sturdy cabins lined two sides of the big stockade, but most of the people seemed to be living outdoors.

"Who runs this fort, Seth?" Ma asked. "I want to find him quick and inquire about my husband." "General Slade runs it–Sam Slade," Uncle Seth said. "At least, he did the last time I was here–I suppose he might have been replaced. But I don't know that we can just barge in and get an audience with General Slade, if he's here–we don't need to anyway," he said. "Any of these fellows who's sober enough to stand up will know if Dick's around."