beneath the brim of his straw hat. The five of them tromped past the cattle and through a copse of small trees, the fellows bragging about spirits at first, then about the girls they’d danced with, then about girls from their hometowns. Jeremiah listened breathlessly as William was queried by a homely fellow in badger fur about the pretty lass with the pigtails.
“I will grant you that she’s a flower at the cusp of maidenhood. An Ohio girl with a proper education.”
“How far did you git last night?” Smith, the man in badger fur, asked. The others chuckled nervously.
“A gentleman doesn’t describe his affairs in detail,” William replied, and he gave Jeremiah a wink.
“My gut aches,” Badger-Fur Smith muttered. A moment later he unleashed a torrent of vomit against the trunk of a tree.
“Mary and Joseph, save me!” David leaped aside to avoid getting splashed.
“Whiskey,” Smith said between two blasts of regurgitation. “What the hell we got here?”
In the clearing before them stood three short men in animal hides. Their skin was dark, their hair tar black, their noses large, and their hands outstretched. “Them’s Kaw,” a young squat fellow named Stewart said. “I reckon they expect tribute fer us hunting their land, as the captain said they would.”
Smith wrinkled his features and spat close to the feet of the Indians, who approached, nonetheless, with hands out. “Hell you talkin’ ’bout? Tribute! By God!”
As the ugly man grumbled Jeremiah gazed in wonder at the dark-skinned strangers and didn’t think to step back with his fellows before one of the Indians had a hand in his breeches pocket and another on his flintlock.
“Hey,” he said, yanking back, “that’s my grandpap’s gun!” He heard the clicking of hammers behind him as the Kaw released the rifle stock but remained with outstretched hand.
“Put your piece down, Smith.” William came up beside Jeremiah with a beautiful pistol pointing at the man who’d ransacked the boy’s empty pocket. “They may not have any manners, but Stewart’s right about the custom.” With his other hand he tossed a plug of tobacco into the grass near the trio. “If we’re to consider this their land, we must expect to pay something.”
Smith growled through his matted whiskers, “I’d as soon kill ’em.”
“And start a durned war, you idiot?” David had stepped to Jeremiah’s other side. “Ain’t you heard a single one of the Oregon Emigration Society rules?”
The Kaw walked back into the trees with the tobacco plug. “I’d as soon shoot and skin ’em,” Smith grumbled.
THE WAGONS moved out behind the dust cloud of grazing cattle, single file and slow among the scrub oaks and pine flats. In draws and gullies and rises the old man had them disembark and push or pull the old converted hay wagon, and that first day outside Big Soldier he had Jeremiah and Ruth and himself simply walk beside the oxen the duration of that spring afternoon until they camped at sundown. Mother fretted over the boy’s catarrh, but after some time the wheezing became less frequent. Jeremiah had never walked much beyond the half mile to the river from their cabin; that afternoon the old man guessed they’d stamped a good five or six miles.
David called on Ruth during camp and tried to carry her firewood, but she knocked him aside with a hip. Not so hard as to discourage his attentions during supper, however, Jeremiah noted. William and several of the young men smoked pipes at another fire, and Jeremiah hovered near them a while, then wandered in search of the girl with the golden pigtails. Once again the fiddle was struck up after camp cleanup, and the couples danced in lines by firelight, his sister with the jokester David, William with the girl with the radiant smile framed by pigtails. Small children held hands and spun about near the adults; drunks slapped knees and hooted. Jeremiah rubbed his sore feet and legs and watched the others beat the ground with their boots until a gunshot echoed through the night sky.
The dance stopped, and voices shouted from the west. William embraced the girl, released her to the clutch of well-dressed children and adults who must have been her family, and took up the elegant pistol and rifle he’d set against a wagon wheel. Jeremiah followed him among several men, a few holding oil lanterns.
“They done stole two head of cattle,” a deep voice growled.
“And now you skeered half the herd off into the hills,” another voice shouted. Jeremiah and the others reached a pair of men standing near what looked to be a twisted log. A fellow with a cow hat cursed and hollered at the other, whose badger coat gave off a distinctive odor reminiscent of the morning’s hunt. “And you was supposed to skeer ’em. Not shoot ’em!”
Badger-Fur Smith held his rifle to his broad chest. “They’s thieves,” he said.
The cluster of men parted to make room for the arrival of a small fellow in black with a hatchet face and blazing eyes. Jeremiah knew him only as the captain and had heard him shouting orders from his saddle the day before. The group became quiet as the captain stepped past Smith and knelt in the grass beyond the circle of lamplight. The boy suddenly realized that the twisted log behind Smith was a human body. The captain lifted the man’s bare arm and let it drop.
The boy was seized by a sudden nausea, and he thought of Smith’s blasts of regurgitation that morning. The group remained silent as the captain knelt beside the corpse. Finally he stood and entered the lamp circle.
“You’re relieved of guard duty and fined one day’s provender,” he said to Smith.
“What the hell—” the man started, but the captain cut him off:
“Further insubordination and you’re cut off with my order to shoot you on sight if you follow the train.”
Smith’s squinty eyes exploded open. “Fer killin’ a goddamned thief Injun?”
The captain turned his narrow face from Smith and searched the gathering. “Where’s that old feller? McKinley?” Jeremiah was dumbstruck to see his father step forward into the light. “What you know about Kaw funerals?”
The gaunt old man pulled on his long whiskers before responding. He knelt beside the corpse near the captain. “They bury ’em,” he said at length. “Leave a pile of stones atop and some remembrance, I reckon. That ’ere necklace would do.” He touched the dead man’s neck, and another spasm went through Jeremiah’s innards. “I’ve seen them leave a little food in there, such as they’d have something to eat in the other world.”
“Smith,” the captain said, “you dig the hole and see to McKinley’s wishes.” The ugly man started to grumble, but the leader’s glare silenced him. “I need five men with horses to help round up the strays,” he said to the assemblage. William and David stepped forward. “Follow me.” Jeremiah made off in their direction, but his father called him back.
“Boy,” old Daniel said, “come give a hand.”
“I was going to help with the cattle.”
“You ain’t a need to those men. We sold the horses fer them ox.” In the periphery of the lamplight his father’s beard and glinting eyes were the only things visible about him. Smith stood with one boot on the corpse and arms crossed, cursing softly. “Git the pick and shovel.”
“I’m
