We crossed the line into Nebraska at a place called Fairburn, keeping to the Oregon Trail until we reached the South Platte. Nothing much happened on the way through Nebraska. A few years before, Nebraska had been full of hostile Sioux ready to take on the Army or anyone else who trespassed into their territory. The grassy plains of Nebraska had been nourished by the blood of red men and white.
It had taken a merciless campaign by Colonel MacKenzie, a merciless man himself, to enforce an uneasy peace on the Sioux. Feared even more than the Indian-hating Custer, MacKenzie’s cavalry, supported by infantry, swept through Nebraska like lire and sword, burning and killing without discrimination. MacKenzie vowed to pacify the Sioux even if it meant wiping out every man, woman and child. Now, a few years later, Nebraska was peaceful.
Now and then a small band of Sioux would come to trade for salt or sugar. I told Claggett to let them have the salt for nothing. Buffalo were getting scarcer all the time, and they needed salt to preserve what meat they had.
Whenever such a band came to the train, they let it be known, well in advance, that their intentions were peaceful. They always, or most always, carried a flag of truce and kept out of rifle range until we waved them in. But even then, no doubt thinking of MacKenzie, they approached warily and were elaborately polite. They were fascinated by a whole wagon train of women with just a few men to protect them. I doubted that they had ever seen anything like it before.
They were peaceful, but I watched them just the same. One band larger than the others wanted to know if we had any whiskey. I was firm about that. No whiskey, I said, now or later. Not for gold, not for anything. I explained to their leader, who spoke halting English, that Reverend Claggett was down on whiskey and wouldn’t be caught in the same territory as it. I guess one look at Claggett’s Old Testament face convinced them that I was telling the truth. We gave them salt, and they rode away into broken country. That night I doubled the guard, thinking they might decide to come at us in the dark, but the night passed quietly.
It was good to have Jake Steiner along; at last here was a man I could talk to. I liked Culligan better than I had at the start of the trip, but we had no words to trade. At some point in his life the Irishman had decided to live as a loner, even in a crowd. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been born that way; something had changed him, but what it was I had no idea. It must have been something bad, because most Irishmen are friendly enough. Culligan worked and drank and slept. I can’t say honestly that he ever got completely drunk. If anything happened in the night, he could rouse up as quickly as any man in the train. Sometimes I thought it was odd to be with so many people I knew nothing about.
Jake Steiner was the only one there who didn’t seem to lie. Of course, maybe everything he told me was a lie, but I didn’t think so. He sure as hell hadn’t lied about being a crack shot with a rifle.
I paid passage for Rita in a wagon with two hard-faced young women. They needed Rita’s money—my money—and they took it, but didn’t talk to her. Rita didn’t give a damn. She had a one-track mind, that girl. She was going to get rich in Frisco, and nothing was going to stop her.
I guess Steiner and Rita were the only real friends I had in that train. Steiner was the most talkative son-of-a-bitch you ever met, yet I never tired of his stories. He never repeated himself, and he had been a lot more places than I had, and that’s saying something because I’ve been all over. I’ve been a drifter all my life, but Steiner had me beat hollow. He had spent two years in South America looking for emeralds.
“They called them Green Fire, but they didn’t burn for me,” Steiner said. “One time some old Indian fraud told me about a place far back in the jungle where the green rocks were thick as fleas on a mongrel. I gave him money and other things, and indeed there were green rocks when I finally got there. Unfortunately, that’s what they turned out to be—green rocks. By then I knew what emeralds didn’t look like. Then, one morning I woke up and decided that God hadn’t intended for me to find emeralds of any size. If he had, I would have been born with emeralds in both baby fists.”
So far, that had been the story of his whole life, always coming close to what he thought he wanted, then having it slip from his grasp at the last moment. There was some bitterness in him, but not much. He took life as it came, and mostly it was hard.
“I don’t know why I can’t make a go of something. I know I’m smart enough, and some of my ideas aren’t bad.”
“Maybe what you need is a partner,” I said that night as we watched for Sioux. “Don’t look at me, Jake, because I’m not the partnering kind. Don’t need to be, the way I make a living. I can make my way with a gun and a deck of cards. You, you’re different. You’re a born businessman, only you get it wrong somehow.”
Steiner sighed. “I know you’re right, but good partners are hard to find. I had a partner once in New Orleans, the coffee business, and he robbed me blind before he took off for parts unknown. Since then I’ve been wary of partners.”
Somehow my idea of a partnership got into Rita’s mind. I know I didn’t mention it to her, and I’m pretty sure that Steiner didn’t. Rita liked the tough, fat Jew right from the first day they met on the road from Junction City. Back in the old country, Steiner had gone to a good school before the army grabbed him. He spoke German, French and English; his years in South America made him fluent in Spanish as well. All this impressed Rita, who had never been out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania until she went to Kansas. Jake had read a lot in rooming houses all over the world, and there wasn’t much he didn’t know.
Little by little, it came out that Rita could barely read English. She could struggle through a printed page, but for her it was rough going. To make up for this, Steiner elected himself president of a one-woman academy, and at night when he wasn’t working or standing guard, he huddled by the fire with her, going over her spelling and grammar. The hardest job he had was to make her stop talking dirty. Rita was a foul mouth. Every other word was “fuck” or “shit” or “balls.” Steiner stopped her every time she came out with a mouthful, and he kept on doing it.
Everybody except Culligan regarded them with suspicion and hostility. They were having a good time together, and that annoyed most of the ladies, Maggie O’Hara most of all. It bothered Iversen, too, that he couldn’t seem to get Rita interested in him. Lord knows he tried, and her indifference must have come as a slap in the face, for he was sort of a handsome fellow, kind of dumb, but handsome. I knew that many of the other ladies would have welcomed the chance to get in bed with him. But he wasn’t horny enough to go against Claggett’s orders. No sex with the “saved” women was the preacher’s rule, and Iversen obeyed it out of fear.
The fact is, there was good reason to be afraid of Claggett. Claggett was a fierce man and probably more than a little crazy. Anyway, Iversen, a sailor by trade, was no kind of gunslinger. He wouldn’t stand a chance if he crossed the preacher, though I had no doubt that he was handy enough with his fists. But there would be no fisticuffs with Claggett. Iversen would get a bullet in the heart, and the train would move on.
Trouble between Steiner and Iversen was inevitable. I saw it coming, but there was nothing I could do about it. Both were big, tough men with hard lives behind them. It wasn’t my place to tell them what to do. Claggett was the chaplain of the outfit, not me, but he didn’t seem to be aware of what was developing. I couldn’t take sides in it, though I liked Steiner a lot more than Iversen.
Steiner did his best to keep out of Iversen’s way, not an easy thing to do, the way we were thrown together day and night. Sometimes Iversen would mimic Steiner’s accent, making it sound a lot more Dutchy than it was. In fact, Steiner spoke the best English in the whole train. When Iversen made fun of his accent, Steiner pretended to take it as a joke. But that didn’t work.
The homier Iversen got for Rita, the more hostile he got towards Steiner. The poor, dumb son-of-a-bitch did everything he could to make her notice him. He was good with his hands and worked like a bastard to make a braided rawhide belt for her. I’d see him working at it, late at night by the fire. In the end, it didn’t get him a goddamned thing. One morning, while Steiner was sleeping in Culligan’s wagon after standing the last watch, Iversen presented Rita with the belt. His sea tanned face flushed red when she said thanks, but she didn’t need a belt.
Iversen had been a lot of places, but that hadn’t taught him manners. He flung the belt in the fire and said, “You’d take it quick enough if that fucking foreigner Jew gave it to you.”
Rita gave him her sweetest smile. “Yes, I probably would. But he doesn’t have to give me a thing. Look, Mr. Iversen, there’s no need for this. We’re going to be traveling together for a long time.”
“That we are,” Iversen said, watching his present burn and curl into ash in the fire.
By now we were well out on the Overland Trail and making fair time. There were some delays, mostly caused by broken wheels. But our luck was holding, and it continued to hold as we moved along just north of the Wyoming line.
The worst delay came when it rained for two whole days and everything turned to mud. Winter was over, but the rain came down in cold, gray sheets that chilled the body and numbed the mind. There was nothing to do but keep on going—because that’s the principal rule in a crossing of the Plains—keep moving, no matter what. Finally, the rain let up and the sun started to dry the land again. It was good to see the sun shining on the wet grass early in the morning.
Our destination, for the moment, was Fort Bridger, in the southwest corner of Wyoming, the last army post we would come to before we reached California. For hundreds of miles past Fort Bridger there was nothing but desert and mountains and semi-arid plains. Out there was where the real danger lay.
Past Bridger the Overland Trail took a slant to the southwest, rough traveling all the way. I still figured Nevada as the place for a possible attack. The Army patrolled the northern part of Utah, so that made Nevada the logical place for Kiowa Sam to come at us. I felt it in my bones, the way an old man feels his aches on a damp day.
Some of the women could shoot, but most of the foreign and city women had never handled a gun of any kind. I went from wagon to wagon, talking to the women who said they could shoot. I warned them not to waste time bragging and lying. It could get them killed; it could get us all killed. If they couldn’t shoot, it was best to give their weapons to the women who could. I found a few Southern mountain women who knew rifles and was glad to get them. I divided up the weapons, giving the nervy city women the handguns.
That evening, still about forty miles from Fort Bridger, I told them what they could expect if they were captured. I couldn’t tell them to end their lives with their last bullet. People cling to life as long as possible, even if the only way to do it is being chained to a bed in a dirty whorehouse in Chinatown or Juarez. Steiner and Rita sat together listening to me, while Iversen stared at them from the far side of the fire.
Claggett prayed for divine guidance. I would have settled for a Gatling gun or a troop of cavalry. Claggett’s praying did nothing to cheer us up. He said the important thing was to die with a clear conscience and love for the Lord in your heart. He urged the wicked amongst us to repent while there was time. I guess that meant Rita, Steiner, Culligan and me. It was strange, and somehow heartening, to see Steiner and Rita exchanging smiles in the midst of all this gloom.
I had given up any ideas about Rita and me after she became friendly with Steiner. I had been looking forward to some good nights with her. Now, somehow, that didn’t seem right. I could manage until I found another woman, a safe woman who wouldn’t bring on a showdown with Claggett. That was the last thing I wanted, and I was ready to go womanless for the rest of the trip, a horrible thought though that was. I just wished Iversen would take the same attitude; but he was doing no such thing. The stupid son-of-a-bitch wanted to poke Rita and meant to do it.
Except for those who had to stand guard, the women drifted off to their wagons to sleep. I could have slept before my watch, but I didn’t feel like it. Instead, I sat by the fire and poked at it with a stick. Rita had gone to her wagon, and Steiner was guarding the cows. We were in high plains country, and the night was cold. I put more wood on the fire, wondering how many of us would have to die. Some of us would. That had to happen, and there was a fair chance that none of us would make it to California.
Claggett’s preaching hadn’t put me in a gloomy mood. I was already in one before he started mouthing off to God. I knew God would get good and sick of Claggett, if ever he got to heaven. I felt there ought to be something I could do to get these people through. Right then I couldn’t think of a goddamned thing, though. I sat there until it was time to stand my watch. As I sat in the darkness, I felt the restlessness of the women sleeping uneasily in their wagons. Nothing happened during my watch, and I was gloomy as ever by the time it ended.
I was bedding down for the night in a sandy hollow near the wagons, when something happened to cheer me up.