Tucket's Travels Page 5

  NOON FOUND THE TWO RIDERS almost ten miles from the Sioux village. They were on the edge of a small stream, and Francis was only too glad when Mr. Grimes called a halt at a clearing.

  “While you're stripping and taking a bath,” the mountain man said, “I'll scout up ahead for some meat. There's a mesa about two miles on down where there's usually an antelope or two.”

  Francis nodded. They picketed the mules, and Mr. Grimes rode off.

  Warm, with little or no breeze dancing through the cottonwoods along the stream, it was truly a day made for swimming. Francis hit the water before the mountain man was out of sight. It was cold-spring fed in the hills somewhere—but the cold only made it all the more refreshing. He played around for a while, diving and splashing in a deep pool, and then scrubbed himself, using his shirt for a washcloth.

  He climbed out of the stream and let the sun dry him as he lay on his back. He'd come a long way, he thought. Not in miles—he doubted that he was much closer to Oregon than when the Pawnees had captured him. But in time and knowledge, he'd come what seemed like a thousand years. He'd seen and done more than most people did all their lives, and he was only fourteen.

  Presently he was dry, so he unwrapped the buckskins from one of the mule packs on the ground. They were plain, like Mr. Grimes's, and for the same reason. You could hide easier without a lot of colored beads to give you away. Actually, the buckskins had been made as a hunting suit for the boy he had wrestled. But they were new and hadn't been used yet and they fit Francis. The pants stopped at his ankles and fitted tightly to his hips and legs—following the principle of most Indian dress that a belt was good for nothing but cutting into your stomach when you bent over. The buckskin shirt had one set of fringes across the chest, was open at the throat, and its bottom fell almost a foot below his waist.

  Mr. Grimes had thought ahead. There were no pockets in the buckskins, so he had procured for Francis a “possibles” sack to hold his flask and shooting equipment. This hung from a strap over his shoulder. Mr. Grimes had also picked up a pair of plain, ankle-high moccasins for him.

  When Francis finished dressing, he looked nothing like the boy who had left St. Louis with the wagon train. The buckskins, even new, gave him the appearance of belonging more to the plains than to a settlement. His face was weathered and tan, and his hair—usually kept short by his mother—fell well below his ears.

  He smiled, thinking of how he must look. It's too bad I don't have a mirror, he told himself. I probably look like a young Mr. Grimes. The idea strangely pleased him, and his smile widened as he carried his old clothes across the stream and buried them beneath a rotten log. He felt as though he was burying his past life.

  He came back across the stream just as Mr. Grimes returned. He stopped the sorrel but did not dismount.

  “Well, well, Mr. Tucket. I near mistook you for Jim Bridger. Probably would have if you didn't have brown hair. Jim is turning gray at The temples.”

  Francis felt a blush sweep over his face.

  Mr. Grimes didn't miss it. “I was going to ask you to shoot an antelope for me—but now I don't know. A red face stands out just a mite, and you might scare them away. Howsomever, if you can pull yourself up on The mare one more time, maybe I can offer you a little sport.”

  Francis wheeled away, glad for the chance to do something. Mr. Grimes had the darndest way of noticing everything. Francis untied the mare, slipped her war bridle up tight, and with his rifle in one hand, jumped on her back. He took the reins in his other hand.

  Mr. Grimes loped out of camp and Francis jabbed his heels into the mare's ribs to catch up. They rode side by side for twenty minutes, and then pulled up sharply on the edge of what Francis first took to be a cliff. Below them lay an immense level plain, as green as a hay field and twice as flat. Far out on the opposite side of the mesa Francis could see fifteen or twenty brown specks.

  “Antelope, Mr. Tucket—or dinner, depending on how you look at it. I'd like you to shoot me a nice young buck—”

  “From here?” Francis interrupted. “Why, they're at least two miles away.”

  “Nb-ah, Mr. Tucket. Not from here. You leave your mare up here with me and you climb down there. Then you hide and”—he dug in his saddlebags and produced a piece of white cloth—“and wave this around for a while. It's an old Indian trick. They get curious about what you're wiggling and come to see what it is. Then you shoot one—and make sure he's a young buck. The old ones get old by running a lot—and that makes them tough.”

  Francis took the rag, slid off his horse, and looked down the cliff. Actually it was a steep slide, and could be descended fairly easily.

  “Why are you sending me down?” he asked. “I've never shot an antelope …”

  “That's just why, Mr. Tucket. That's just why. Now you'd better get going—we've only got about seven hours of daylight left.” His voice was sarcastic.

  Francis looked across the mesa at the antelope and shrugged. He was sure asked to do a lot of funny things. He started down the slide.

  Going down was easy, and it wasn't as far as it looked. In fifteen minutes he was at the bottom, in back of a small rise, and lying on his stomach waving the rag in the air.

  Francis couldn't see the antelope, and as the seconds turned into minutes, he wasn't completely sure that the antelope could see his waving rag. He raised carefully up on his elbows in the grass, but could see nothing. Turning, he looked up at the slide—hoping to see Mr. Grimes calling him back. Again, he saw nothing.

  This is silly, he thought. I don't even know what's happening. The antelope probably ran off when I started down the slide. He raised up again. Still nothing. The grass was so high—it was like a wall around him. He started to get up, then fell back. The only thing keeping him still was fear of ridicule by the mountain man. Francis's orders had been specific: bring back a young buck. Getting up now could ruin it, but if the antelope had run off, it was stupid to stay down in the grass all afternoon. He waved the rag again.

  That's when the thought hit him: this was all a joke. Mr. Grimes was a great one for jokes. Like sending him down to wave a rag around in a bunch of grass, telling him, of all things, that the antelope would come to him. And he'd fallen for it—lock, stock, and barrel. He shook his head. Wouldn't he ever learn?

  Again he started to get up, and that's when he saw the antelope. There were two of them. One was quite a bit larger than the other. They were both males, and they had seen Francis move.

  Even so, they stood still, absolutely still, not even blinking their eyes.

  Francis took in a shallow breath, held it, and leapt to his feet, swinging up his rifle. But as fast as he was, the antelope were faster. In the seeming twitch of two white tails, they were doing close to forty miles an hour, dead away from Francis.

  He fired, remembering at the last second to aim at the smaller buck. It wasn't a particularly difficult shot, but Francis was rattled, and he felt certain he'd missed. Yet the young antelope pitched forward and fell.

  Francis couldn't believe his eyes. He reloaded at once and walked up to the buck. No second shot was needed; the antelope had been hit in the back of the head, just below the horn base. Francis grabbed him by the horns and began pulling him toward the slide. It was a long haul up, and he was sweating by the time he reached the top where Mr. Grimes was waiting.

  “Well, Mr. Tucket. You seem to have done all right down there.” The mountain man was grinning, and he fetched a knife from his saddlebag. He made one neat cut down the middle of the dead buck and removed the entrails. He saved the liver and heart and left the rest. “The coyotes will get the leavings. I wasn't sure how you'd do. You can tell a lot about a man when he's hunting antelope. It's the waiting. A lot of ‘em get nervous and start fidgeting around. I've known grown men to actually stand up and scare ‘em away.”

  Francis blushed again. “Well,” he began, “I can see how something like that could happen. I mean, I almost …”

  “Generally speaki
ng, though,” the mountain man went on as though he hadn't heard, “if a man makes it through once, you don't have to worry about him. He'll pull his load when the time comes, and that's all you can ask of any man.”

  “I was a little nervous,” Francis said quiedy.

  “Well, it didn't hurt your shooting a lot,” Mr. Grimes said, pointing toward the antelope's head. “I'd call that a right smart shot.”

  “I thought I'd missed.”

  Mr. Grimes nodded. “That happens sometimes. You never know till the smoke clears.” There was something about his voice; he seemed to be talking around something. Francis caught it but didn't say anything. By that time Mr. Grimes had a small, smokeless fire going and had spitted the liver.

  They ate it when its edge was just turning brown, cutting it in thin strips with Mr. Grimes's knife. Francis thought he had never tasted anything so rich and delicious.

  After eating the liver, they returned to the camp by the stream and roasted a whole rear quarter of the buck. Then they spent most of the rest of the afternoon and evening cutting off slices and eating them. By dark, they had consumed close to twelve pounds of fresh meat. Air. Grimes wrapped the rest in the main part of the antelope's skin and put it in one of the mule packs.

  “It doesn't really get good for two or three days,” he said. “And if it's well wrapped, it'll keep for more than a week.”

  They doused the fire and turned in early. Mr. Grimes was asleep as soon as his head hit the saddle.

  Francis lay for a time thinking. There was something bothering him and it took him almost five minutes to realize what it was. Then he got up, quietly, and fished one of his rifle balls out of his “possibles” sack. He found the antelope's head where Mr. Grimes had left it, and in the moonless dark he turned it over and put the ball in the hole in the back of the head.

  As he suspected, it was much too large a hole to have been made by his rifle. He dropped the head and returned to his bed. From now on, he thought, if that man says up is down and day is night, I'll believe him. Anybody who can make a shot like that, timing it to go off at the same time as another rifle, and hit a running antelope at two—no, three hundred yards, can't be wrong.

  It was a comforting thought. Francis went to sleep smiling.

  FOR A WEEK they rode at an easy pace, saving the horses. Still they made close to a hundred miles before Mr, Grimes pulled up on the seventh evening.

  “How do you feel about a little night riding, Mr. Tucket?” he asked.

  “All right,” Francis answered. “Why?”

  “I sort of figured we could make Spot Johnnie's before turning in. Be nice to have a decent meal and sleep loose for a change.”

  Francis had no idea what he was talking about. Not once had he mentioned this Spot Johnnie, but Francis decided not to question the mountain man.

  “And we can grain the horses. Especially that mare of yours.”

  So they rode on. There was half a moon to furnish some light and sometime toward midnight Mr. Grimes pointed down at a light in a shallow valley.

  “Spot Johnnie's,” he said. “Now when we go in, you stay right out to the side of me—so's it doesn't look like you're sneaking. Okay?”

  Francis nodded. They started down, angled across a flat meadow, and approached three log buildings. When they were still a hundred feet from the cabins, Mr. Grimes stopped.

  “Ease that hammer down with your thumb, Spot,” he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “It's Jason Grimes.”

  Francis hadn't seen or heard a thing, so it was to his utter and complete surprise that the figure of a man arose suddenly beside him—not five feet away. He jumped.

  “Dang it all, Jason,” the man said, laughing and shaking his head. “You sure do ruin a man's fun. I was planning to let you get all the way up to the building, and then take that pretty hat of yours off, feather and all.”

  “That's why I stopped,” Mr. Grimes answered. “Got me a friend here who doesn't understand that kind of fun. He might just put a ball in your gizzard by mistake.”

  Rather than stop to talk, they kept on riding slowly, and Spot Johnnie walked between them. They pulled up at the front cabin. Light was leaking out around the hide windows, and in its glow, Francis got his first look at Spot Johnnie as Mr. Grimes introduced them. There wasn't really much to see. He could have been fifty or a hundred. He had a gray beard and long hair that hung well past his shoulders, and he wore beaded buckskins. There was no hat on his head; instead he wore a beaded headband to keep his hair out of his eyes. His rifle was a Hawkens. Francis liked him at once—there was a nice sound in his speech, a sort of easy confidence, and his eyes looked merry all the time.

  “Figured you were always pretty much of a loner, Jason,” Spot said, eyeing Francis. “How'd you come by picking up a cub?”

  While Mr. Grimes explained about Francis, a boy of perhaps ten years of age came out of the cabin and took the horses around back. Then the three of drem went inside.

  At first, the inside of the cabin made Francis homesick. It was all so warm and cheerful. Two children were playing on the floor beneath a huge wooden table. There was a fire in The fireplace, although it wasn't at all cold. On one side of the cabin there were beds, arranged in bunk fashion, and all around the walls hung blankets and jackets and old moccasins. It looked like a home. And then, suddenly, he wasn't so homesick anymore—leaning over a big kettle near the fireplace was a large Indian woman.

  It starded him to see the woman, not in a lodge, but in a house. She must be Johnnie's wife, he knew, but he caught himself staring just the same. She made him think of the Pawnee village.

  As if reading his mind, Spot Johnnie suddenly spoke up. “And this is my family, Mr. Tucket. That's my wife, Bird Dance, over by the fire, and under the table are Jared and John, and the boy you saw outside was Clarence.”

  The boys under the table didn't look out. But Bird Dance turned from the fire, smiled, and said in perfect English, “How do you do. I'm sure you must be hungry after riding all day. Please sit down and have some stew and biscuits.”

  Francis managed to hide his surprise. He smiled —he liked her at once—and turned to The table. Mr. Grimes was already sitting there with Spot.

  “How've you been making out, Spot?” Mr. Grimes asked.

  “Fit,” came the answer. “Pure fit and prime. Got me a full warehouse of furs and a wagon or two due next week from St. Louis to pick ‘em up. Been a good year, and it might be a better one next. And you?”

  “So-so,” Mr. Grimes answered. “Found me a new hole last winter that I figure on trying before snow comes. What you giving for near-prime pelts this year, Spot?”

  “You mean in money or trade?”

  “Money.”

  “Two dollars—if it's a big one.”

  “Seems kinda low …”

  “I might go three, if I knew the trapper and knew he wasn't out just to give me his culls.”

  “Fair enough. You got yourself a deal. Now, about provisions. You got everything?”

  “All but sugar. It's running three dollars a pint —wholesale. So I've put off ordering it, hoping it would go down a mite.”

  “Fine. We'll need the usual. Your oldest boy can put it together tomorrow. In the meantime, I've got some questions that need answering.”

  They had to stop talking to eat the stew and biscuits, which proved to be worth at least a ten-day ride. Francis ate four bowls of stew and half a dozen fresh biscuits before Bird Dance cleared the table.

  “Now,” Spot said, lighting a pipe and propping his legs on a small three-legged stool. “What kind of questions you got, Jason?”

  “About Indians, Spot. There's something downright funny going on and I can't pin it down. Take Braid, for instance—”

  “You take him,” Spot cut in. “I've had enough of that skunk to hold me for all my days.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing—to me. But Braid's thinking of taking over the whole Pawnee nation, wa
y it looks, and for nothing but war. He was here a while back asking for things—powder, mostly, and caps. Only he didn't ask for ‘em the way a man might. He said, ‘The Pawnee want powder and The Pawnee want caps,’ just like he was talking for the whole tribe. I don't like it.”

  “I thought he was getting a little feisty,” Mr. Grimes said.

  “It's not just things like taking this boy,” Spot said, gesturing toward Francis. “That's bad enough. But Braid's also been raiding. There've been two wagon trains through here, and they both lost some people to Pawnees being led by Braid.”

  “Those two trains,” Francis said, interrupting, “did any of the people in them mention losing a little girl?”

  Spot scratched his head. “No … mostly they didn't want to talk about those they'd lost, so they didn't talk about the Indians much at all. One woman—I think it was a brown-haired woman— asked me if the Indians always killed captives. She was pretty broken up about losing a boy—”

  “I'm that boy,” Francis said. “She's my mother.” He sighed. Then at least his mother was alive, and most likely his father. “She didn't mention a girl named Rebecca?”

  “Nope—at least not that I recollect. But as I said, the people mostly didn't talk about the raid.”

  They were silent for a while, thinking. Francis was imagining the muscled figure of Braid nestled just over his rifle's sights.

  “Braid's stupid,” Spot continued after a minute or two. “He's talking about making a clean sweep, or so I hear, and driving all whites from Pawnee territory.”

  “That's a bit strong,” Mr. Grimes said. “He might hit a train or two, but I don't think he'll bother us—I mean you and me. It would only hurt him to put us under—he'd get no more trade.”

  “All the same,” Spot said, “if I were you, and I knew Braid was around somewhere, I'd make sure I had my shoulder blades covered by a tree.”

  Mr. Grimes shrugged. “I do that anyway—just natural. But I don't like this other thing much. If there's anything worse than one mad Pawnee, it's a hundred mad Pawnees. Braid's stirring up a war, maybe. Not so good …” His voice trailed off.