Novel 1978 - Bendigo Shafter (v5.0) Read online

  Sackett, he talked for a while, but before the old man could reply that young buck busted in with a furious harangue, gesturing now and again toward the other lodges, like he was about to go for help.

  “We’d best take the youngsters and light out,” I suggested. “This shapes up to trouble.”

  Ethan never turned his head. “Mae, get up and come over here and bring the young uns with you.”

  When that young buck saw what was happening he started to yell, and I belted him in the stomach with my fist. When he doubled over I sledged him across the skull with my gun barrel.

  Not one of the others so much as moved, but the old man said something I didn’t catch. They didn’t seem much upset by what had happened.

  Ethan took out his tobacco sack and passed it to the old man, with a gesture implying it was to be shared with the others. Me, I took out my Shafter-made axe, the best there is, and handed it to the old man.

  “Friend,” I said. Then indicating the axe I said, “It is a medicine axe, made from iron from the skies.”

  “The youngsters first,” Ethan said, “then you.”

  “I’m holding the gun. You go ahead of me.”

  We floundered through the snow, which was growing deeper by the moment, and made slow time until we got to the crest of the ridge. My heart was pumping heavily when we topped out, and far off, behind us, we heard shouts.

  Ethan led the way, but not toward home. With the youngsters to see to we were in no shape to tackle a trip home through the night and the storm. So Ethan took us into a hollow downwind of the Indians. It was a place gouged out by the fall of two pines whose roots had torn up great masses of earth that clung to a frozen spider web of roots.

  When Ethan waded into the hollow he was shoulder-deep, but he floundered around, tramping down the snow. When I saw what he was about, I helped. We tramped down an area five or six feet across, but with snow walls five feet high facing the triangle made by the roots, it was all of eight feet high.

  Scooping out a hollow big enough for the kids in one snow wall, I packed the snow tight with my hands.

  Ethan found some heavy, broken limbs with which he made a platform for our fire, then he dug under the fallen trees for broken twigs and bark. Soon we had a small fire going, using the mass of earth and roots for a reflector.

  We broke off evergreen branches and made a roof across the corner of our hole, and with the falling snow to cover it we soon had a snug snowhouse.

  We were much too close to the Shoshone camp, and it was a worrisome thing to be without rifles. We had six-shooters, and each of us carried a spare loaded cylinder to be slipped into place if we emptied our guns.

  Ann fell asleep in my arms, and Mae put her head on my shoulder, snuggling closer, I thought, than need be. Ethan fixed a bough bed for Lenny Sampson, and he was off to sleep, a mighty tired little boy.

  Ethan looked across the fire at me. “We got us a family, Bendigo. Likely the only one I’ll ever have.”

  “You’ve got no kin?”

  He added sticks to the fire. “I’ve kin-folk aplenty, although I don’t recall seeing any of them for years. One was a mountain man like me, a Sackett from the Cumberland River country of Tennessee. Ran into him at a rendezvous on the Green.

  “I don’t lack for kin-folk. There’s Sacketts all over Tennessee and Carolina, but I lacked somebody of my very own. When I was shy of fourteen my pa was killed by Comanches on the Santa Fe Trail. Since then I’ve fetched up and down the country from Missouri to the shores of the western sea, but I hunger for a place of my own and somebody to do for.”

  Cain’s daughter Ann had gone right off to sleep like Lenny, but that Mae was making me nervous, acting like she was asleep but snuggling like she was about to crawl into my lap. If Ethan noticed he paid it no mind.

  Folks thought Ethan had eyes for the Widow Macken, and it needed no thinking to guess why. She was a mighty pretty woman and some years shy of thirty. Taller than most, with dark hair and gray eyes, she had skin that was clear and smooth.

  Little things never disturbed her very much, and she had a quick, easy smile that pleasured a man. Along with it she had an honest, straightforward, no-nonsense way of looking at things.

  She was one of us, but she held to herself, going her own way with quiet assurance. She was the real leader among us.

  Riding with Ethan one time, I had said as much. “Yes and no,” he’d said. “Mrs. Macken is a thinking woman who knows her mind, but you watch and listen, Bendigo. You’ll see she starts things. She opens the ball but nothing moves unless Cain says so.”

  Now I hadn’t noticed that before, but when he said it I knew at once it was the truth. Cain was not a talking man, preferring to work with his hands, and he was sure and cunning at his craft. Perhaps because of that he was a thinking man, for working with the hands helps a man to consider. Cain was never stirred by passing waves of excitement, never took off on tangents. His judgments were arrived at quickly enough, and he was wrong as rarely as any man I knew. I had learned something about my own brother, and from a stranger.

  “A woman needs a man, Bendigo, even a woman like Ruth Macken. No woman, however strong, should have to stand alone. Believe me, she’s a stronger woman because Cain is there and she knows he’s there.”

  As I sat there in the cold, my face roasting, my back half frozen, trying to keep those youngsters warm and feeding sticks into the fire, I thought about the men of our town.

  John Sampson, who came from the same town as Ruth Macken, had probably undergone the greatest change. As he gathered respect for his abilities, he also added a dignity, or perhaps we had only then begun to notice it.

  As some men quailed beneath the awfulness of sky and plain, he grew taller, and his eyes held on the far horizon.

  Far as the eye could reach and day after day, there was nothing. We traveled seven, eight, maybe on a good day as much as twelve miles. A time or two we camped within sight of our last night’s camp, but to John Sampson it was more than a journey, it was a rebirth.

  I thought of the men with whom we shared the town and wondered if the town would change them as much as the plains had, for even then I had become aware that it is not streets and buildings that make a town, but men and women. I began to be glad we had John Sampson, Ruth Macken, and my brother Cain, and to wonder if I had it in me to meet the demands the town would make.

  At last morning came, a dead gray sky above the white hills of snow, the trees somber against the sky, and to the north, towering mountains, white, sublime, and still. We climbed from our shelter, circled wide the valley where the Indians stayed, and at last came to the ridge above our town.

  The wind had gone down in the hours before the dawn and the cabins lay white in the morning’s still cold, slow smoke rising from the chimneys like beckoning fingers that promised warmth and security. We stood there a long moment looking upon it, lumps rising in our throats. It was all so new, and yet it was ours, the place we had built with our hands.

  A door opened and closed, and I saw my brother walking toward the corral with a bucket for the morning milking. A horse whinnied, and Cain took a pitchfork and began forking hay to the stock. Something made him look up.

  We saw him stop, stare, then drop his fork and start on a run for the house. Sound carried well in that still air, and we heard him plain. “Ma! They’ve come back, and they’ve got the children!”

  Doors burst open, and folks ran out upon the snow, shading their eyes to see. And then they started to run, floundering in the deep snow, and we started down the hill, running, too. All but Ethan Sackett, who had no one to run to.

  Cain scooped Ann into his arms, and Lenny ran to his father.

  Neely ran to Mae. His eyes searched her face. “You all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. Mr. Sackett and Bendigo fetched me.”

  Neely turned on Ethan, mighty uncomfortable. He thrust out a hand, but he was almighty stiff about it. “Thanks, Sackett.”

&nbs
p; Ethan brushed off the thanks with a gesture. “When folks are making a fresh start they have to tolerate.” He indicated me with a jerk of his head. “It was Bendigo more than me. If he hadn’t come out with that pistol when he did we’d probably never have got out alive.”

  We started walking back through the snow and my eyes went from one to the other. They were talking and happy, victorious over the first trouble that had come our way.

  Maybe this wasn’t how a town was built, but it was a beginning.

  Chapter 3

  OUR TOWN BEGAN with five log cabins and a dugout faced with logs. This was built by Ethan Sackett, and as you might expect, it was the warmest, snuggest place in town.

  When snow fell we were in no shape to face the winter. We had the walls up and the roofs on, and we tacked canvas from our wagon tops over the windows until we could hang shutters. As the ground was frozen and we could not bank our cabins with earth, we banked them with snow, pitching it as high as possible against the walls to make a cushion against the wind.

  As we worked we watched the ridge and the trees for Indians, for we were few, and by now they must have taken a measure of our strength.

  Yet there was another thing that had begun to show itself in our town, and my brother Cain put it into words. “There is determination, there is the will to survive, the will to endure. We have that, and few as we are, and no matter what trials we must endure, when spring comes we will be here to greet it.”

  Neely Stuart scoffed, yet he himself listened, and I know he profited by Cain’s words, for about Cain there was something indomitable, something immovable as a mountain. It had taken Ethan Sackett to open my eyes to my brother’s worth, but once opened I could see how much we all depended upon him and somehow waited for his leadership. He had the ability to impart strength to others, and even Neely stood a little straighter because of what my brother had said.

  Most of our time was devoted to the never-ending task of finding, cutting, and hauling fuel. We were cutting brush on the fringes of the forest to deny hiding to Indians when Cain commented, “It is no wonder the Egyptians could build pyramids.”

  “What do you mean?” Croft asked.

  “It was an easy land they had, with a warm sun, no fuel to find, and a river that each year brought them fresh soil and always carried water in aplenty. I doubt not it gave them time to think on other things.”

  “There must be time for thinking here,” John Sampson said. “We must give our children more than meat.”

  “What is it you have in mind?”

  “A school with desks and blackboards. On the hill yonder I saw some sheets of slate, and we can find chalk somewhere about.”

  “A school and a church,” Cain agreed.

  “You are building a town before you have finished a cabin,” Neely protested, but he was listening, and he was interested. Lately he had talked less of California.

  There was a longing in me when they spoke of school, and regret, for I was past the age for school and had little learning, precariously come by. Ours had been a Bible-reading folk, and I’d spent time mulling over what the Bible had taught me. Mostly I’d read the stories for the wonder of them and less for the Lord’s word than was proper, yet the sound of the words was a rolling music to my ears, and I longed for a command of them so that I might speak and write with wisdom.

  There was much history there, too, and it worried my mind that I did not know more about the lands of the Bible. Those ancient people spoke of things I knew, of flocks and shepherds and watches by night, and I wondered if those who reared up the mighty walls of Babylon had once begun as we now did, from a few simple walls, a stream, and a few cattle.

  The longing was in me for books other than the Bible, which was the only book we had brought west. Back at home I had read Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will, which had been left at our house by a traveler when I was a child. It was that same traveler who’d left us William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude.

  My father, who died when I was very young, had been a follower of the Reverend John Witherspoon, a Scottish minister whose philosophy of down-to-earth common sense appealed to him. Vaguely I remembered some supper-table discussion of this, and no doubt it had more to do with shaping Cain’s thought than mine.

  Often when our wagons were rolling westward I would sit by the fire and listen to the talk of men, and especially, in the days before he died, to Ruth Macken’s husband, who was an educated man. He was a tolerant and thoughtful one as well.

  He talked much of writers long dead and of the thoughts they had left to us, and I longed to know such men, men who had painted, composed music, or written books. Once when I had said as much, Macken commented, “Often they are fine men, enough to be admired, but often they are sadly, weakly human, too. Remember this, Bendigo, that it is the work a man does that matters. Many men who have made mistakes in their own lives have created grandly, beautifully. It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does in this life, by what he creates to leave behind.”

  Ruth Macken knew of my longing for knowledge, of my longing for a larger, brighter world somewhere beyond the distance. She was a woman to whom a boy might talk of things dreamed. There was understanding in her, and sympathy. Also, I thought, there was a longing in her for the same things. An Indian arrow had taken away her husband only a few days out upon the plains, and he was one who had none but kindly thoughts of Indians. A woman less strong might have turned back, but she had little money, nothing to return to, and a son to rear.

  She listened when I told her of John Sampson’s talk of a school. “Of course, we must have a school, but the building is less important than the teacher. It is the teacher who makes the school, no matter how magnificent the building.

  “A school is wherever a man can learn, Mr. Shafter, do not forget that. A man can learn from these mountains and the trees, he can learn by listening, by seeing, and by hearing the talk of other men and thinking about what they say.”

  Most of us in those days were pleased to have a roof above us and a solid earthen floor, but not Mrs. Macken.

  “Mr. Shafter,” she said, when I was counting my work finished, “is there a way you can make planks for a floor?”

  She was educating me in more ways than she knew, and from her I was beginning to learn the wiles of women and how they work upon a man’s pride and vanity to get things done. Her phrasing was a shrewd thing, for it was a challenge to my show-off.

  “Planks can be made,” I admitted warily. “They can be split from logs, but I’d say flat stones might do as well.”

  “I would prefer the plank, Mr. Shafter, and ‘as well’ is never good enough. The plank, if it would not be troubling you too much.”

  Each day I worked for her she would stop at midafternoon and sit at the table to drink tea or coffee. We would eat small cakes and talk. She told me in confidence that Bud needed the rest, but it was the custom she liked, something left to her from another life. It was not long before I realized how shrewdly she guided me along the path of my wishing. It was from her that I learned much of the world beyond the limits of our wilderness. I learned from her that a man’s world need be no smaller than the mind of the man who scans it. And I learned from her and from Cain the beauty of building, and a hatred of all who destroy, of all who are heedless of the work of others.

  The village people called me “Ben” or “Bendigo,” but to her I was always “Mr. Shafter,” and when I spoke she listened as if every word were important.

  Eighteen I was, and a man grown these three years, but I had worked my life on an Illinois farm, and only gone to school a few months at a time. I had learned to read, to write, and to cipher, and the books of which I have spoken I had read over and over again. Ours was a house where people stopped, and when my chores were over I listened to the talk of the travelers.

  When Ruth Macken spoke of the floor I knew I was in for it, and there would be more hunting and exploring to be missed, yet she was not one to sett
le for anything but the best, so I set to work splitting planks from large logs, using wedges and a beetle, which was a heavy wooden sledge borrowed from Cain.

  One day when the floor was half completed she went to her chest. Now Mrs. Macken’s chest had been a much talked of thing while the wagons rolled west, for it was heavy, and there were some who believed it was filled with gold, one of them being Neely Stuart’s wife.

  A time or two when her wagon bogged down we’d had occasion to lift it down, and four good men were needed for the lifting, unless one of them was Cain. Nobody had seen the cover lifted, although Ethan Sackett surmised what it contained.

  That day in my presence she opened the trunk and what lay within was better than gold, for it was lined with three layers of oiled-cloth and tightly packed with books and a store of paper for writing.

  “There are fifty of these books, Mr. Shafter, that would give you an education if you read them and no others. Many who consider themselves educated have not read so many or so well.”

  She took several books from the chest. “Some of these books my husband brought because he thought they might teach him something of the land to which we were coming.

  “The rest were chosen carefully because of weight and because he wished to bring those books that would prove the greatest value to Bud and to himself.

  “He often said he might have chosen another list that would be equally valuable. However, I am going to let you read first the books about the western lands. They may prepare you and help you.”

  She handed me books I’d not seen or heard of before, and I’d no idea people had written about the lands to which we had come, or those similar. She handed me Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies, the Journals of Lewis and Clark, A Tour of the Prairies by Washington Irving, and one but lately printed, Three Years Among the Comanches, which was the personal story of Nelson Lee, a Texas Ranger. This had been published in 1859, so was very new.