VII

NOW THERE WAS A STORY to tell up and down the railroad and off beyond the Platte valley, a laughing story that somehow didn’t make people laugh but only grow quiet at the thought of any money at all loose here.

It had been a hard ride into town the evening after the pay out at the bridge. Hard, perhaps, for everybody. The hitch racks around the depot, at the livery stable, and across from Emigrant House were practically empty. Nobody was aiming horseshoes at the new stakes out in front of Mrs. Gatewood’s store, not one grease lantern bobbed—nobody returning from picketing the horses, it seemed, or the milk cows, or coming for thread, perhaps, or tobacco from the stores whose windows and doorways threw patches of light upon the dusty road that was the street.

When Robert came blinking into Emigrant House he saw his family still at the end of the bare table, waiting. No one scolded or looked up. When he returned from the wash bench and slid unhappily into his chair beside Johnny, his father passed him his plate and all began to eat, mostly poking at the food, the cold corned buffalo beef that Julia Gatewood did so well, with the new little beets and tender leaf lettuce. Even the green wild grape pie got little attention. Nobody really seemed hungry, late as it was, except John Cozad, his eyes even deeper in their sockets, as though turned inward, and yet he took a second helping of everything. Nobody came in, and all down the table the plates and cups were still there, turned upside down waiting. Not one of the regular customers had been in, all probably making a little cheese and crackers do. Once a cowboy did stomp up to the open door, but seeing no one but a family there, he mumbled something and went back into the darkness.

Afterward Robert lay silent and quieter than in sleep beside his brother. He thought about the day, the empty supper table, and the question that he had to face. Would they be leaving Cozad now as they left Cozaddale back when he was small, too small to understand what had happened there, or even knew?

In the morning John Cozad was gone again.

 

The next week or so Robert Cozad heard the word “Copperhead” used several times for some of the other Ohioans, when he had never thought of it at all except back in Cincinnati, where it was a dark thing, like the hovering shadow of a chicken hawk over a pullet, a word meaning some kind of treason, it seemed.

Many of the August excursionists went back in anger and in sorrow. “Nobody can really blame them,” Theresa told her mother afterward. “All they see is the earth that was described so wondrously fertile only baked and bare.”

“Yes, and those hateful little clouds against the hot sun aren’t rain or fog but more hoppers,” Julia Gatewood said in unaccustomed anger. The excursionists also knew that the greasy bodies not only made the railroad tracks slippery but turned the rough wooden steps of Emigrant House, even the step of the spring wagon, into something slick and treacherous to the foot. In addition they had seen the hoppers creep in everywhere, into the sugar bowls of those who had them, between the sheets, even into the pocket handkerchief and the purse.

But other homeseekers kept coming, running into strings of wagons and loaded railroad cars heading back east. They came any way they could, often with barely the money to be dumped off at the depot, money usually borrowed. They even came afoot and somehow they were fed for a day or two.

Gradually little rains started some late grass, and the railroad conductors once more recommended Cozad as a stopping place to the uncommitted. Young Robert took to meeting every train again, wondering about the people who got off as he watched their faces.

By September, the year after Black Friday, many city workers who wanted no familiarity with the plow were heading for the west too, for the far towns and stations, hoping for a new start. One of these was A. T. Griffith, who got off the early local with a little round-topped trunk, a carpenter’s chest of tools, and $12. Robert Cozad saw his uncertainty as he glanced all around and finally shouldered the trunk and the tools. Plodding past the two boxcars now used for depot and freight station, he started up between the two little rows of houses, mostly sod, that were really the town. He was young and seemed to have a sharp eye out, particularly for Goodyear’s lumberyard, the hardware store and McIntyre’s tinshop. He stopped to look off toward the half-finished school building and the barny Emigrant House where, the conductor had told him, five, six substantial families generally were living until they could be sheltered by their own roofs. They would be crowded even though the hotel was two stories and around thirty by eighty feet, weatherboarded against the winters, but unpainted, graying.

After a while the young man set his burden down and asked the boy slowly strolling up from the station where he could find this Mrs. Gatewood, who kept boarders. Robert was happy to show the unexpected, unheralded homeseeker the place. “Really the only one, sir,” he said.

That day John Cozad and Dave Claypool, real estate agents, went out with two wagons and the spring wagon to show the accumulated fourteen landseekers the country. Griffith went along, interested in the town’s prospects. Next morning he asked what he owed Mrs. Gatewood and was told that supper, lodging, and breakfast at the hotel cost $5, which left him $7 and his ticket back to Cincinnati. Disheartened, he shouldered his trunk and tools once more and went back to the depot.

The eastbound train was late and in the meantime Matthews, the buffalo hunter, came up to offer him board at $3 a week. The old lady’s cooking was nothing fancy—the meat mostly wild game, but hearty. With two weeks for his $7, young Griffith moved his belongings once more, this time to an unsold lot.

“Nobody’s going to touch it there,” the man assured him. “We got no little thieves. Big fellows that run off with horses, a herd of cattle maybe, or grab the entire range, but not anybody what calls for locks on the houses.”

Griffith managed to pick up a few little jobs before his money ran out and finally he located on a place he liked, off east, near enough to town for his carpentry, although just now work was mighty scarce and had to be spread around, the family men getting first deal.

At schooltime the new building wasn’t done and so classes opened at the Gatewood home for the Cozad boys, the Claypool young people, and a few others. With the poor equipment and the $35-a-month teacher it was plain that Theresa would have to supplement the education of her sons. They were accustomed to the best, with special classes in music, art, and dancing, all even more important now that her husband had such fine plans for them, for himself.

At last the hated sheet, the Dawson County Pioneer, the voice of the county-seat gang at Plum Creek, as John Cozad called it, carried an item on grasshopper relief. Traber Gatewood had tried to get more definite and complete information for the town’s new paper, the Hundredth Meridian. He got plenty of rumor but no more than the same very general promise of seed help in denuded regions given to John Cozad long ago, although the adjoining counties were already on the relief list. Perhaps the ranchman influence on Plum Creek and the county officials was responsible. Every settler who had to desert his claim was a victory.

Now that the brace was off his jaw and his goatee grown out, John Cozad was off again. He took his grip, the gold-headed cane, and the big diamond stickpin so unsuitable for a senator and headed east for some faro where he hadn’t been barred. The summer, with the building expenses of the town, his injuries and the work on the bridge, had gone through his ready cash like a Platte River flood through a dry wash.

“He will bring some information about seed and other relief, you’ll see,” Sam Atkinson, the calm, the judicious, predicted.

As the nights began to freeze a little, hunters brought antelope, deer, and elk to the Cozad butchershop when one was open or peddled it from door to door. Buffalo meat from the west was dumped off in great lots and very welcome because it was so cheap and considered excellent for those with stomach trouble. Many of the settlers had been sent west by their doctors to live closer to nature because there were reports of almost miraculous cures. Even bleeding stomachs, with the patients gaunt as boards cracked across the middle, bent over upon their misery, seemed to be recovering if the wild-game diet, was fresh enough, particularly with some of the animal heat left in it.

While Robert was interested in every landseeker, Johnny liked to pick out the ailing ones as he looked them over at the depot, kept them under his eye if they stayed in the region.

Once one of these settlers complained to the colonizer, “That Johnny boy of yours keeps watching me like a buzzard on a stump, waiting for an old nag to die!”

But Johnny Cozad was watching for something else—for the first sign of a pound or two put on, the rise of a little ruddy color.

 

Along in the fall Theresa Cozad came to her mother and her aunt, the wife of McIntyre, the tinsmith, with sad news from the North Platte paper. It was a bare mention of the death of Mrs. Anna Mosby, “granddaughter of Governor Derceling of Virginia.” She had recently married Colonel Mosby. Ten days later she threw herself under a train.

“Oh, how sad!” Julia Gatewood exclaimed, and hurried to make a cup of tea, Irish strong.

“Like newspaper stories, even this bit seems mixed up,” Theresa said, a little sourly.

“Oh, I guess they printed what was sent out,” her mother replied mildly.

“They wouldn’t have printed it at all if they hadn’t thought this was Mosby, the raider.”

Perhaps not, yet how stupid and embarrassing, with the raider, Ranger John Singleton Mosby, married long ago, his house full of stairstep children. But it was very sad about Anna, the women agreed, carried back by the tragedy to the Virginia before the war, before their part of the state broke off as West Virginia. They talked of the Gatewood Hotel at Malden when the gay, vivacious Anna and her first husband came as guests to Theresa’s wedding. They had all been so interested in the bridegroom, a dashing world traveler with visions of a better society, of building a perfect community somewhere. Many knew John J.’s father, Henry Cozad, born in Upshur County, Virginia, and the Cozad neighbors there, some of the Jacksons of Stonewall’s family. “That was where John J.’s middle name came from, his father once told me,” Julia Gatewood recalled. He had hoped that the boy might have a little of the Jackson staunchness and courage. That, added to Henry’s own vision of a better life, which led him to build a community in the wilds of Ohio, might stir young John to a larger dream, give him the power and the vision to build in greatness.

“We all believed it then, at the wedding,” the aunt said.

Theresa did not look at her mother, but as always Julia Gatewood admitted no doubt about her son-in-law. “We believe it now,” she said.

Yes, yes, of course, but it had all seemed so close, so real at that gracious wedding seventeen years ago, and with the infare, attended by a most important and elegant company. But somehow tragedy had come to so many, not only during the war and the Reconstruction in Virginia, but since, and now Anna’s tragic end.

Julia Gatewood shook her gray hair back and looked into her teacup, at the little nest of wet leaves clinging together in the pattern of a shovel, a gravedigger’s implement that some called the warning of great danger, even death.

“I hear John Singleton’s turned Republican, and after all his raiding,” she said, and washed the tea leaves around in a swirl of the cup.

Yes, and strange that he should, with so much of the South still under Northern troops, their boots still pretty hard to bear in places.

Big Alex McIntyre, coming in, stopped in the doorway. “Colonel Mosby is a politician as well as a raider. Now that raiding has been taken over by the politicians in power, switching parties opened a lot of rich territory to his well-known tactics.”

 

As fall stopped garden, field, and bridge work, practically everybody who wasn’t too busy, including any settlers in town, went to meet the trains. Everybody except Theresa, who never appeared there except to greet a friend or relative coming in. John Cozad stayed away too, unless some special homeseekers were expected. He usually sat behind the curtains of their second-floor-living-room window, where he could see everybody who came up the street from the station.

“Watching for homeseekers,” Traber Gatewood explained once when a bolt of night lightning showed, in that one whitened moment, a tall man, not sitting but standing staring down into the street. Traber knew that for some reason, perhaps for several, his brother-in-law was always there around traintime, but not to be noticed, not to be seen.

One warmish fall evening the colonizer, in shirt sleeves and waistcoat, looked out upon the street for over an hour, waiting for the belated local to pass. Patches of light reached out from the windows, others came and went as doors opened and closed. The spreading glow of a lantern hung to a post lit the horseshoe pitching in front of Mrs. Gatewood’s store. There was a shimmer of fall insects and dust through it as Traber, Sam Atkinson, and a couple of others tossed at the stakes, with several, including young Robert, standing watching. The only sounds were the thump-thump of the heavy railroad windmill and the occasional ring of iron on iron and an exultant exclamation, or a voiced regret in the game below the window, all formless sounds to the man watching.

Finally the train whistled in, and almost as soon as the brakes stopped grinding a man came stalking up through the lighted spots to Emigrant House. From the first glimpse John Cozad suspected who it was. Even with the soft hat instead of the plug of the old days, the man much grayer and older, he recognized King O’Dell, said to be a cousin of the other gambling O’Dells, and out now, after around twenty years in prison. Swiftly John Cozad ran his hand inside his vest to assure himself of the set of the small pistol, and then slipped into his frock coat, pulling the tail down over the gun in his back pocket. Then he stroked his hair back from his ears with the flat of his palms, smoothed his goatee, shot his cuffs, felt his cravat, and waited, facing the door to the little hall, standing so his right hand was on the outside, and free.

There was a murmur of talk downstairs, a screen door slammed, and steps went away on the hard-packed ground. The watcher jumped to the window but could see nothing beyond the light for the horseshoe pitchers. As he peered out, Julia Gatewood came running up the steps.

“Oh, John J.! A man was here for you. I sent him over to that meeting the Odd Fellows started.”

The man nodded his approval, his gratitude, and met the woman’s eyes in a moment of mutual understanding, of abiding affection. “I’ll come down when he returns,” he said.

“Theresa may be back any minute—” her mother said doubtfully.

Yes, he knew that, but he would come down. With his gold-headed cane tucked under his arm, John Cozad waited at the head of the narrow stairs. When O’Dell returned, Julia called and the colonizer came down slowly, confidently, the steps noisy under his solid tread, under his casual greeting, “Well, how do you do, sir!”

“I come for Kitty,” the man announced loudly. “Last time I shot the wrong man. Now I got you, so trot Kitty out—”

“Kitty? Which Kitty? I seem to recall several.”

“By God, Cozad, don’t you mush-mouth me!” O’Dell shouted, jerking a pistol from his pocket. “I saw Kitty with you—last thing, twenty years ago—and me giving you, a scart kid, a start!”

John Cozad seemed not to notice the gun. “No,” he said softly, his eyes very black in the sudden whiteness of his face. “No O’Dell started me. That was my old friend, strung up—”

“I come for Kitty—” the man shouted again, trying to make it a roar.

John Cozad smiled a little, his gaunt cheeks drawn back as none in his town had ever seen. But there were some who saw it now, men peering in at the door, even his two sons pushing their heads through between shoulders. The news of something on the wind had spread very fast, and as people came running up, Traber had hurried around through the back door, to be on John J.’s side, backing him up, facing those jamming the door and the windows too, all ready to duck but daring the chances of a bullet to see the two gamblers standing against each other in the bare little pine lobby. Both were armed, one with his gun ready, the other very fast—both still, silent, John Cozad’s cane in his powerful left hand, the right ready, swift as a rattler. But something seemed to hold them both, O’Dell’s ear tilted up a little, as for steps above him, the colonizer apparently preoccupied with some inner matter, perhaps some far sound, the angry King O’Dell before him almost forgotten.

Then Theresa came running in from the night, pushing through the doorway, her skirts held aside, blinking from one man to the other, her eyes black-deep from the darkness.

Quietly she stepped to the side of her husband. From that instant John Cozad was once more the confident man of the faro tables. “Pardon me,” he said, with a bow. “I have been waiting for my wife.”

Taking Theresa’s arm, he started up the narrow steps behind him, turning his back upon the man with the pistol hanging in his hand.

A moment King O’Dell stood there staring after the woman, then he turned and with the gun still out, but foolishly, he pushed through the people in the doorway, past the unrecognized sons of the gambler. They watched him go, young Robert taking a step or two after him as he went down toward the depot and off into the darkness of the tracks.

But he might be back, he or his kind, be back any day or night.