Wind Walker

TEN

“Wagons coming!”

Titus Bass turned at the cry from his son’s throat. Wiping sweat from his eyes with a scrap of scratchy burlap there beneath the shady awning, he squinted at the front gate, both sides flung open for the day. At that moment Flea burst into view, reined his racing pony to a dust-stirring halt, and leaped to the ground near the fire pit.

“Wagons coming, Popo!”

As the barefoot boy came racing up to him on foot, yanking the spotted pony behind him, Scratch smiled and said, “Your American talk is gettin’ real good, Flea. Real good.”

Then he raised that grimy hand clutching the scrap of burlap and shaded his brow, staring beyond the boy and through the gate at the thickening cloud of dust to the northeast in that valley of Black’s Fork.

Bridger stepped from the store and glanced his way before he slapped his hat on his head, and he too regarded the distance. “That boy of your’n got the eyes of a hawk, Titus Bass!”

Looping his arm over his son’s bare shoulder, he proudly said, “That he do, Gabe. You want he should go with you to greet ’em?”

“Hell, his American is good as can be. I’ll tag along, but why don’t we let Flea lead ’em over to that southwest meadow where the grass ain’t awready been cropped down.”

He gazed at his son and asked, “You understand Gabe?”

Flea stared up at his father and nodded. With a gulp he said, “I go ride. Tell wagon men follow me. Meadow camp, good grass.”

“Can you tell ’em why we don’t want ’em to camp near the fort?”

“Bridger’s grass is Bridger’s grass,” Flea said, mimicking a stern tone. “Bridger’s grass for all year round, grass for Bridger. Not for wagon men.”

Patting the lad on the head, Titus said, “Get along with you now, son. You take them folks to the meadow on up the river two mile.”

The boy’s smile could not have covered more of his face as he wheeled away in a scurry of dust. Seizing a double handful of the pony’s mane he heaved himself onto its back, settled, and brushed some of his unbound hair from his eyes as he yanked the reins to the side. With excited yelps, Digger and Ghost suddenly appeared from the side of the stockade, already racing at full gallop as they sprinted to catch up to Flea’s racing claybank.

“I ’spect Shadrach bring his kin back here any day now,” Bridger said as he stood there a moment longer.

Titus asked, “Figger they’ll tag along with a train on their way down from Green River?”

“Could be,” Jim replied. “Been two weeks since I sent up them four coons to take over at the ferry.”

Fifteen days ago it had been. Barely a week before that four more former skin trappers from the old American Fur Company days showed up at Fort Bridger, men who had served in Jim’s brigades during those last half dozen years of the beaver trade. Each of them had a woman along, two with children in tow, and a third squaw so swollen with child she waddled about like a melon ready to burst. Shoshone gals, they were. The old friends weren’t looking for a handout, just a way they could manage to live something resembling the old life and still buy a few geegaws for their women. Jim offered them work at the ferry.

All four leaped at the opportunity handed them by their old booshway. One claimed he’d even worked a rope-and-pulley ferry across the Wabash back in the Illinois country. When Gabe dug in, he found out the former beaver man did know his stuff. Hiring the quartet to help out the three there already would allow Shadrach to bring his family back to the fort, turning over the operation at Green River to that party of old comrades. The four were to pass along Bridger’s request for Sweete to return as soon as he could get packed up. The big man’s help was sure to come in handy around the post while the emigrant season wound down, now that they were nearing the end of that summer of ’47.

“Better get on that ol’ horse of your’n, Gabe!” Bass cried as Jim shuffled away toward the gate, heading for the second, smaller stockade that served as a corral. “You figger to tag along with that lad o’ mine, you best be quick about it!”

In that moment of watching his oldest son rein his pony around and around Bridger playfully, Bass felt an immense pride in the lad. What a figure he cut upon this three-year-old claybank Jim had given him as a gift to train several weeks back, right after the trader returned from Fort John with the first train of the season, piloted by Joseph Reddeford Walker himself. Seemed the former Bonneville man had gone east to the mouth of the La Ramee earlier that summer to see if he could stir up any work guiding emigrants through to Oregon. By the peak of the summer season there had been seven parties already come by Fort Bridger, not including those Mormons with Brigham Young on their way to the valley of the Salt Lake.

Such pride he felt for the youngster as he watched him take off at a lope beside Bridger for the northeast. Flea wore his long, brown-tinted hair loose and unfettered in the hot breeze, floating gently as the pony bounded along to match its young rider’s exuberance. Flea twisted around slightly and waved his arm one time before the two of them were gone beyond the edge of the gate, into the trees, following the much-scarred pattern of ruts where little of the dry, browning grasses grew any longer. In turn he waved to the boy, then clucked to himself and turned back toward the shady awning, where clung the heavy stench of cinders and fire smoke, white-hot iron and half-burnt coffee.

“He’s a good lad,” Titus said with a stirring in his breast for the child quickly becoming a young man. “No man could want for any better.”

Come this winter, Waits-by-the-Water might well give him another son. Or, perhaps another daughter. Gawd, but it did not matter—long as Waits was delivered of the child with ease and the babe was whole in body and mind. He had seen a few of those infants born not quite whole: missing fingers, perhaps a clubbed foot, maybe their eyes sightless or they were unable to hear the sound of rattle or whistle when a grandparent gave them a naming ceremony. It was his only prayer—that this child and its mother would come through the birthing whole. He picked up the leather-wrapped handle of the hammer and looked at the shady doorway of the store. Thinking of her. Waits was not a young woman any longer. Her scarred, pockmarked face was much fuller than it had ever been. Three youngsters given birth, along with so much loss and sadness since she became his back in ’33. Older than most Crow women when they customarily took a husband, she had preferred to wait for the husband she wanted—wait to have children and raise a family with him.

Twice he’d almost lost her.

Bass dropped the hammer on the anvil again and stepped to the fire hopper, stirring the glowing coals with the tongs, digging out the hottest of the short strips of repair metal he was fabricating. He plopped it down on the anvil and took up the hole punch in his left hand, the hammer in his right.

The first time, he had believed she was taken from him by Josiah Paddock, that winter after he and Josiah returned from lifting the scalp From an old white-headed friend. Finding the pair of them together beneath the robes, Waits as naked as she got when she lay with him, Titus tore off to the west, plunging into the dead of winter and danger, spitting in the eye of death as he undertook a mission so risky that only it could come close to easing the pain of losing her to his best friend. Losing them both at once was almost more than a mortal could bear. …

With the punch crafted from a solid spike of oil-tempered iron positioned a few inches from the end of the strip of band iron, Titus slammed the hammer down on top of it, jarring both of his forearms. If nothing else, he had mused nearly every day of this hot summer, his hands and arms, shoulders and back, were all the stronger for this smithy’s toil.

Years later the Blackfoot had ripped her from him and the Crow. Warriors already grown sickly with the smallpox that ate up their flesh as it sucked away their life with an unquenchable fever. That deadly illness had consumed her brother, but Titus dared his damnedest to keep her alive. The scars it left on her face could never diminish the beauty she remained on the inside, although it took long seasons for her spirit to heal after that lonely walk she had taken with the ghosts along the edge of the sky.

It took more than two dozen strikes with that hammer against the flared top of the punch before he finally pierced a half-inch hole through the strap iron. He laid the punch aside and picked up the tongs, returning the strap to the fire for reheating before pulling another strap of iron from the glowing coals. With a series of holes punched in these short strips of iron, most every repair could be made to a cracked yoke, tree, or running gear, even hold together a wagon box itself. He could bind up what was broken with iron strap and coarse bolts, work everything down tight with the muscles in his back so the emigrant could move on to Fort Hall beside the Snake River. Follow the twists of the Snake all the way to the Columbia … and the sojourners found themselves in Oregon country.

With a repair to this or an exchange for that, Titus Bass would get those farmers a little farther on their epic journey. Fix up a busted axle, trade for a proper-sized wheel. Maybe even refit a tire to the wood shrinking in this high, desert climate … if the farmer relented and gave Titus enough time to do a proper repair during a brief layover at Fort Bridger, heart of the Rocky Mountains.

The sweat beaded down the bridge of his nose, hung there pendant for only an instant, then landed on the glowing iron with a faint hiss.

Twice before he thought he’d lost her. Old as he was now, Titus didn’t figure he could live through losing her again.

“Titus Bass?”

He quickly turned at the unexpected sound of a woman’s voice. She stood framed in a splash of bright sunshine, her fingers knitted together before her. A poke bonnet shaded her sunburned, weathered face as she peered at him standing in the shade of that brushy arbor, where he was plunging a new iron tire into a narrow trough of water with a resounding sizzle.

“That’s me,” he replied after a cursory glance—these settlement women all ended up looking pretty much the same—then turned back to his hoop of iron. With his empty left hand he scooped up a dribble of water and smeared it down his face grimy with cinders and smoke, streaked with rivulets of sweat. “You’re from the train camped over west what come in yestiddy?”

“Yes. Just before noon yesterday.”

“The store’s off that way,” and he pointed.

“I was just there,” she confessed. “That’s where I happed to overhear your name.”

Squint-eyed, he turned his head to peer at her again. “Oh?”

“Major Bridger was speaking of you to some of our leaders,” she explained, inching a step closer, but stopped again, her hands still clenched in front of her apron. “One of the men, he’s needing some blacksmithing work done. That’s when I heard your name.”

“You said that awready, ma’am.” Sensing some impatience with the woman, he dragged the heavy iron tire he had fitted for a front wheel out of the trough and carried it to the outside wall of the Bridger cabin, where he hung it from a wooden peg.

Quietly she explained, “I suppose there are far fewer chances of bumping into a Titus Bass out here in the Rocky Mountains than there are chances finding a Titus Bass along the Mississippi, or running onto him back in St. Louis.”

He slowly turned toward her and snatched up that small scrap of burlap. He wiped it down his sweaty neck and across his bare chest, smearing more of the blackened cinders across his reddened skin. “St. Louie?”

“Where you and I first met,” she said after another step that brought her right to the edge of the shade.

“W-where was that?”

“Emily Truesdale’s sporting house.”

A memory long submerged beneath the layers of seasons, miles, and a thousand other faces. But not near forgotten.

His heart misstepped as he searched for words his dry tongue could speak. “Did you … work for the woman?”

“Of a time, I did.” She stepped beneath the awning, her hands kneading one another now, anxiously. “If you’re the Titus Bass I later saw at Amos Tharp’s livery back in the late winter of thirty-four, then I am … your daughter, Amanda.”

Instantly he felt a twinge of shame—for his sweated body, smeared with dust and blacksmith grime, stinking no less than a horse would at the end of a long day’s ride. “You’re Amanda?” He quickly turned for the wall of the cabin, where his cotton shirt hung on a wooden peg. As he got it over his head and began to smooth it over his sticky frame, Titus asked, “Marissa’s daughter?”

“Your daughter,” she said, finally moving toward him without stopping. As he flung open his arms she pushed back her bonnet, letting it fall to hang suspended from her neck with her long, ash-hued curls. “Father—”

Scratch folded her into his arms, unable to utter a sound, feeling his legs going as weak as they had when she had declared her existence to him back in Tharp’s St. Louis barn. Every bit as quickly he brought her away from him to gaze down into her face. No longer did she possess the pudgy, childlike face of her mother the way she had when she confronted him so many winters ago.

“H-how long’s that make it?”

Shaking her head slightly, she made a tally. “More than thirteen years, Father.”

“F-Father,” he repeated. “Sounds so … starchy an’ high-backed to me.” He rubbed the top of her shoulders. “How ’bout you callin’ me Pa.”

She grinned, and it lit her whole face. “Pa. Yes, yes, I can call you that, Pa.” Then the light in her face was gone, replaced with one of concern as she stared at him intently. “Your eye. What’s become of it?”

“Don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug. “Happened that same spring I rode back to St. Louie. After I come back west. At Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas River. Ain’t see’d wuth a damn from the eye ever since.”

“It’s gone cloudy,” she said, inspecting it closely. “I’ve known some folks that’s happened to.”

Hopeful, he asked her, “They ever get better of it?”

“No, Pa,” and she shook her head. “Wish I could tell you different. But I never knew of a person, their eyes got better after they got cloudy such a way. Yours no better since?”

“Can’t say it’s got worse neither,” he admitted. “Allays made do with the one.”

Leaning close, she studied his one good eye. “I didn’t remember till just now—but your eyes are green. Like mine. They’re green like mine.”

With a self-conscious swallow he realized his tongue was so dry it nearly clung to the roof of his mouth. “Talkin’ is dusty work—lemme get a drink.”

Releasing her, Scratch leaped over to his drinking bucket and pulled an iron dipper from it. A lot of it sloshed on his dusty moccasins as he brought it to his lips and slurped what he hadn’t managed to spill. Then he suddenly thought of genteel manners. “You want some?”

“Yes, I would like that,” she answered, coming over and taking the ladle from him after he had dipped her a drink. “I never knew there could be heat like this.”

“You think it’s hotter here’n it gets hot back to St. Louie?”

Wiping the back of her hand across her lips, Amanda said, “A different heat. Back there is so heavy, sticky with misery. But the farther west we’ve come, the drier it got. Like the sun’s been sucking every drop right outta me … Pa.”

He smiled at that, hearing her use that special word. “You come west with that wagon train?”

“Yes, all the way from Westport.”

“That’s a long way for a gal … for a woman on her own.”

She laughed easily at that. “I ain’t alone, Pa. I’ve had a family for some time.”

“A-a family?”

Leaning toward him, she asked, “Lookit me, real close. I ain’t the young gal you met back to St. Louie all them summers ago. Lookit these lines I see when I look in my mirror every night. Can’t stand to look in it the mornings when I rise, what for all the aging I see. It’s better to see my tired ol’ wrinkles by candlelight when the children are put to bed and I have a few minutes—”

“Children? Y-you got young’uns?”

“Land sakes, Pa! I said I come west with my family—children and a husband too.”

“You married and started your family,” he said, on the verge of wanting to believe it. “Wh-where are they?”

“Back at the wagon camp,” she confided. “After I heard your name early this morning in the store, and looked outside the door to find you pounding on that anvil—I bided my time.”

“Didn’t come right over an’ make yourself knowed to me?”

With a wag of her head, Amanda confessed, “I wanted to be alone when I came to talk. So I walked back to the camp with Roman and the children. Told him I was coming back to wrangle a deal for some calicos at the store from Major Bridger’s wife. He’d have to watch the children while I came back to the post.”

“Gabe … Jim Bridger don’t have a wife no more,” he explained. “She got took givin’ birth to their last child.”

Her eyes filled with consternation. “But … it was an Indian woman.”

“Which’un you talk with?” he asked. “Which Injun woman?”

“She was a taller one. Had a long face, not the round-faced woman—”

“You met my wife!”

“The … same one you were … with when you came back to St. Louis in thirty-four?”

“I got back to her down in Taos just afore she birthed our first child, a daughter.”

Amanda’s eyes widened. “She’s here too? Your daughter … your other daughter?”

“Magpie,” he said. “My boy—he come with Bridger to lead your train down to the south meadow to camp. You see him yesterday, spy him with Bridger?”

“Our wagon was so far back in the train,” she explained. “The dust and all—we never saw anything happened up front.”

Bubbling with enthusiasm, he said, “He’s a great boy, more’n ten years old now.”

Amanda dabbed a fingertip at a bead of sweat that was collecting in the hollow under her lower lip. “So you have two children?”

“Actual’, there’s three. ’Nother boy. Four summers old now. An’ there’s one on its way this comin’ winter.”

“Your fourth?” Then she caught herself. “I mean, that would be your fifth, counting me—of course. I was your first!”

“That’s some, for a ol’ fella like me.”

“Pa, I’ve got four of my own,” she declared, glowing with pride. “My oldest, a boy, he isn’t as old as your … Magpie.”

He took a step back and regarded her with a big grin. “Your whole family’s here? Goin’ west?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Where away—California or Oregon?”

“Oregon.” She said it with a special reverence. “Roman’s been wanting to come west for almost three years now. They been hard years.” The softness in her eyes melted away with what he took to be a sour-tinged remembrance. “Roman, he was gonna get to Oregon, or kill himself back there in Missouri.”

“Kill hisself?”

She wagged her head dolefully. “First years of our life together, things went good for us. We lived on his daddy’s farm, worked it together, one big family. Then his pa died, took by the lung sickness, coughing up blood till he got so weak he couldn’t fight off the fever anymore. Next year Roman’s ma was taken by cholera. They kept her in to town, in an old chicken coop an’ away from folks so she wouldn’t make no others sick. It near tore Roman apart. But, everyone said it was the best for our children. We had two who could walk by then, and one just born too.”

“Losing your family ain’t good on a body’s heart,” he said. “Your mother, Marissa, how’s she now?”

“I haven’t seen her in over five years,” Amanda confessed. “Wanted to see her one last time before we started to Oregon, but by then she was married to a river man and moved east to Owensboro. On the Ohio. I pray she’s been well—there’s so much sickness back there. I hope we can keep on going to Oregon without losing any more folks.”

“You ain’t lost some of your own young’uns?”

“Mercy, no,” and she shook her head. “Others. People we came to know as the train was forming up outside of Westport. Lost friends on the way here. All along the Platte, they took sick, one after another. A child here. A mother there. A father on down the trail a few more miles. Seemed like every Sunday morning we had another person already ailing so bad for us to pray over them. By the time the week was out, we’d have us a funeral. Wasn’t till we got to Chimney Rock that we wasn’t burying folks along the way.”

“Air got drier,” he explained quietly. “Maybe some of that ague an’ tick-sicks got dried up.”

“Yes, it does seem we’re all healthier now,” she agreed. “Thank God for His blessings.”

“Yes, Amanda,” he agreed as he pulled his daughter against him again. “Thank God for all His great an’ many blessings.”

She raised herself on the toes of her dusty, cracked boots and planted a kiss on his grimy cheek. The black soot she came away with around her mouth made him laugh. Dipping the cuff of a sleeve on his shirt into the water bucket, he dabbed it around her cracked lips.

“You ought’n keep some tallow on your mouth,” he advised. “Won’t get so sore like it is.”

“I’ll be fine,” she claimed. “We’ll all be fine once we get to Oregon. Everything Roman’s read says it rains plenty there. Crops grow nearly by themselves, all the papers say.”

“It’s a good place for to raise crops, Amanda,” he confirmed. “Raise up your family too.”

“C’mon, Pa,” she prodded him, pulling on an elbow toward the edge of the brush awning. “I want you to introduce me to your wife, to all your children.”

He stopped in his tracks. “How’m I gonna meet your family?”

“I don’t think the company’s moving on for two, maybe three, more days,” she declared. “I thought I’d see if you wanted to meet them tomorrow.”

“Want to meet ’em?” he exclaimed. “Hell, I want you go fetch ’em right now and bring the hull clan back here a hour or so afore suppertime.”

“T-today?”

“So we got some time to talk afore an’ after supper both!”

That seemed to strike her speechless for a moment. “Is this an invite to supper with your family, Pa?”

“Damn right—er, ’scuse me, Amanda,” he apologized. “Bring that husband of your’n, and those four young’uns over for supper. I’ll tell Waits-by-the-Water to put another hindquarter to roast over the fire for supper—”

“Waits-by-the-Water,” she repeated. “Ever since St. Louis, I’ve punished myself for not remembering her name. All these years, I wished I could have remembered your wife’s name.”

“S’all right now,” he said. “I hope you two take to each other.”

“When I was walking back here from camp alone to see you, I kept thinking that she must surely be used to white women, since you two live here at Major Bridger’s fort where so many white folks come through all summer long. But I was afraid too that she’d look down her nose at me for being a silly young white woman.”

“I don’t think Waits-by-the-Water could look down her nose at anyone,” he stated. “She’s the kindest, most gentle an’ loving person I met in my whole blamed life, Amanda.”

“Wouldn’t want her thinking any less of me because I’m younger than her, white and all.”

“How old are you now?” he asked her, failing to recall.

“I turned thirty-two on the trail, Pa. Back in June, along the North Platte.”

His face screwed up a minute as he did his best ciphering right there in his head. “Thirty-two? Why, you ain’t much younger’n Waits is. She’s in her thirty-second summer.”

“Sh-she’s the same age as me?”

He nodded. “Can’t be more’n a few months older’n you, at the most. Why, that alone’ll give you two so much to talk about.”

“She speaks English?”

“Waits talks real good American. Magpie and Flea too. Jackrabbit, now he’s getting the hang of it as he gets older.”

She smiled. “Supper here sounds grand, Pa. If you don’t think we’ll be imposing on her, Waits-by-the-Water.”

“I don’t think there’s a chance of that, Amanda,” he explained. “Soon as I came back to Taos to fetch her north to her home country, I started telling her all about you, ’bout your mother and grandpa too. We even talked about me takin’ her back to St. Louie some time, to look you up and spend some time. But … St. Louie and all them folks, all them farms an’ houses an’ crowded towns back there—just never seemed like a good enough idea for me to do.”

Amanda nodded and reached out to take one of his gritty hands in both of hers. “So, I had to come west to find you, didn’t I?”

“That what you was intendin’ to do?”

“No, I really never thought I’d see you again, Pa,” she confessed. “Figured you’d be dead, killed by Injuns or bears or froze in the mountains by now. Never figured I’d hear your name spoken again in the balance of my days.”

“Then you heard tell of Titus Bass in the store at Fort Bridger.”

She laughed. “Even heard your name cursed at Fort Laramie. The Frenchmen there swore they’d love to cut your throat, if they ever got hands on you!”

“So you figgered I’d gone under awready?”

“Chances weren’t good for a man surviving this long out here, Pa—were they?”

“No, Amanda,” he admitted. “But, I had the spirits smiling down on me ever’ since I come west in twenty-five. Ain’t no other reason I come through all the scrapes I put behind me.”

“God’s been good seeing me through this journey so far, Pa,” she said, casting down her eyes. “Lately, we haven’t had the best life, Roman and me.”

His eyes narrowed. “He ain’t been bad to you, has he?”

She looked at him again, saying, “No, no—Roman’s been a good husband. Strong and full of love, Pa. For me and the children. God knows he isn’t the brightest man I could have married, but he had the best heart.”

“Why you say you ain’t had the best life, you two?”

Shrugging her shoulders, Amanda turned slightly from her father. “Sometimes I think there’s certain people just not meant to make a go of things in life. No matter how hard they try, no matter they throw their whole heart into something … time after time.”

“There’s some folks who wander this way and that afore they eventual’ find the way of their life,” he responded after a long moment of thought. “Your own pa was that sort, Amanda.”

“There’s been times when it was real hard on the children,” she explained, looking up at him again. “Row … my Roman—sometimes he gets dark. Those were the times I could tell the failure was eating him up inside, Pa. He’d look around at other folks who had a store and they’re making a little money for their family. Or, Roman would look around and see other folks making the ground work for them, feeding their family and putting a little money away for the lean times. But … seems like it’s always been lean times for us. Never got any better. Last few years, we been going from bad times to worse times, no matter what Roman threw himself into with all his might.”

From the look on her face and the sound of her words, he was almost afraid to ask her the question, “You still love him?”

Yet she nodded her head emphatically and smiled as she said, “Oh, yes, Pa. I love him. Enough to follow him to Oregon Territory where he wants to make a new dream happen for us. Roman’s so sure that will be the place for us. You should see the way his face shines when he talks about the new life we’ll have out there.”

“Does my heart good to see that your man wants the best for his family,” Titus replied, reassured.

“He does, Pa. I know it in my heart.”

“So you’re gonna stand by him?” he asked.

“Every step of the way,” she declared with conviction. “We’re doing this for the children, going to Oregon for our family. Make a new start we haven’t been able to do anywhere else as we moved across Missouri, from one settlement to the next … hoping each new place was going to be the one where we’d really sink down roots and build up something good.”

Holding out his arms, Bass stepped toward her. Amanda came into the shelter of her father’s arms and laid her cheek against his shoulder. He said, “Ever’thing I hear about Oregon tells me it’s the place for a farmer’s family to put down those roots and make a life for themselves.”

“We started out reading all the papers and books about Oregon we could find,” she explained. “Right from the first, Row said it got much more rain than we got back home in Missouri. Some people wrote that it didn’t take much for anything to grow out there: just scratch a hole in the ground, drop in the seed, and wait for it to sprout right up on its own!”

“Other folks what already come through this summer all said pretty much the same thing, Amanda,” he emphasized. “On their faces is writ all the much trouble they been through getting this far west, but in their eyes is still the light of where they know they’re going.”

“I never knew the journey would be this hard on us, this tough on the children,” she admitted. “Never gone through anything like this that sucks me dry of all my strength by the end of every day … laying my head down every night, knowing I gotta get back up in the morning and do it all over again.”

“Sometimes your life can seem like it’s taking you nowhere,” he agreed thoughtfully. “But you just keep putting one foot out in front of the other, then one day—you an’ Roman gonna be standing in Oregon where you was meant to be.”

She backed up a step and gazed into his eyes. “There’s been times when we made camp late in the afternoon, to give us time to cook and clean up after supper before it got dark—and we’d look back to the east. How it makes my heart sink when I can see where we got up that very morning, Pa! After miles and miles of dust and heat, rocks and creek crossings, flies and gnats, and the sun allays sucking every drop of water outta me … and I can still see where we got up that morning!”

“Them wagons, ox or mule, ain’t made for covering ground fast, Amanda,” he sympathized. “Hell, your family damn well could mount up on horses, take along some pack animals, and light out from here to Oregon. Make it in half the time, I’d wager.”

“H-half?”

“But you’d be living off the land,” he continued. “An’ when you got to Oregon, you wouldn’t have all them things you brung with you to make that new home for yourselves when you got there.”

Staring at the ground, Amanda said, “I’ve got a set of my grandmother’s dishes in our wagon. Packed down in the flour barrel. Brought her bed and quilt too.”

“See? You couldn’t leave none of that behind!”

Nodding, she agreed, “Others, they’ve left a little here, and a little there along the trail—lightening the load the farther we went. But me, I just gotta keep up my courage for the days to come, the way I kept up my courage ever since we put Westport behind us. I can only pray to the Lord that the road’s gonna get easier from here on out.”

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Truth be, Amanda … the way from here gets tougher. What you’ve come through since leaving Fort John on the Platte, it’s about the same clear on to Fort Hall. But from there to the Columbia by way of the Snake—that’s some bad, bad country.”

Her sunburned face went haggard, drawn. “We haven’t seen the worst of the trail?”

Wagging his head, Titus told his daughter, “No. There’s times out there a farmer or shopkeeper from back east gonna stop and wonder why he’s in the middle of the wilderness. It’s gonna seem like it goes on forever, with no way out, not back east or on west. That’s where your Roman is either gonna have his dream go up in smoke, or he’s gonna grip it even tighter’n he holds on to you, Amanda. Out there … where you’re taking your family to find your dream—that’s where you—you, Amanda—are gonna have to put your whole heart into the journey to see the rest of your family through.”

“I kept hoping …”—her voice sounded small and weakened as she stared at the anvil—“that when we got halfway, the road would get better, easier on the animals and the wagons, easier on us, too. Ever since I couldn’t see Westport behind us no more, I’ve been praying that the way would get better.”

“But I’ll bet you got harder, toughened up, as you come west, Amanda,” he attempted to cheer her. “And what you come through awready is gonna make you able to last out the hard scrapes that lay ahead of you.”

She reached down and took one of his hands in both of hers. “I’ve got a good husband, a loving man. In my heart I know he’s gonna get us to Oregon. And the Lord is gonna watch over us—see us all the way through.”

Smiling, Titus told his daughter, “Don’t you feel your heart jump when you think about making this journey to a new home, Amanda?”

“It’s about the only thing helps me get back up in the darkness before sunrise every morning, Pa. I look out there ahead of us, and think to myself: ‘Just over that next hill I’m gonna see our new home.’ Then we make it to the top of that rise, so—I pick out another hill to look at and dream on. Over and over I do the same thing through the day till we finally stop for the night, when I can shake the dust outta my hair and clothes, put some salve on the sunburn and them bites the flies gave me.”

“That’s the way I done for myself all these years,” he declared. “Take a day at a time, take a hill at a time if I have to. Best part is seeing some new country, Amanda. Where I ain’t never been before—”

“Why don’t you come with us?” she blurted out, hope filling her eyes.

He could only stare at her dumbfounded.

“Bring your family,” Amanda pleaded. “There’s gotta be some new country for you to roam between here and there, Pa. Come see it for yourself.”

“I don’t think I wanna ever go to Oregon again, Amanda,” he tried to explain. “It’s become a place for settlers and sodbusters. Not the place for a wanderin’ man like me.”

Pressing her lips together, Amanda nodded. “You weren’t the settling-down kind back when you knew my mother. Likely you never will be, Pa.”

“But that don’t make me no better or worse’n a farmer like your Roman,” he explained. “Just differ’nt. I ain’t never been the sort to want those things, Amanda. I run away from farming back in Kaintuck when I was sixteen. About the age you run away from your ma.”

Taking a step toward him, Amanda looped an arm through one of his. “Won’t do me any good to try talking you into bringing your family to Oregon with us?”

He gazed down into her green eyes and shook his head. “Can’t. This here’s where I wanna stay. Ain’t never thought about leaving the mountains.”

Disappointment clouded her eyes. “I won’t say anything more about it, because I can remember how anxious you were to get healed up enough so you could get out of St. Louis and back to the mountains.”

“Back to my wife, and where I was s’posed to be,” he confided. “Now, you best be on your way to fetch up that family an’ have ’em back here afore suppertime.”

She took a few steps, then turned to him once more. “Pa, I need to ask you a favor. Please don’t say nothing to Roman about what I said of me ever being afraid of us going to Oregon.”

“I unnerstand,” Titus agreed. “Just atween you an’ me.”

Interlocking her fingers again, Amanda appeared nervous. “I can’t imagine what it’d do to Row if he was to find out I’ve been afraid of us finding a place to live out our lives. If he learned that I was able to tell you things I haven’t said to no one in so long.”

“That makes your pa proud to be the ears you told. We’ll keep our talk atween ourselves. No one else need know. Now, you best get along back to camp so you’re here before supper.”

“I can’t wait to meet my brothers and my new sister,” she said, her eyes growing a little misty as she stood there at the border of shadow and sunlight. “I … I never had no brothers and sisters before, Pa.”

“You do now, Amanda.”

She asked, “And you know what you got in turn?”

“What?”

“You got four grandchildren.”

That took his breath a moment, struck with the sudden sureness of the revelation.

“Damn, if I don’t,” he exclaimed quietly. “Here I am, ’bout to have my fifth child come this winter … an’ I got four grandpups awready! If that don’t shine!”