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  She laid out poles, dug into her rolls of thong, found her hatchet, and began chopping the crossbars. Skye took over that task while she bound the bars to the longest lodgepoles.

  That drew Enoch Bright.

  “Two travois,” he said.

  “One for my pony, and one for your Morgan,” Victoria said testily. She had not consulted with him about using the Morgan to draw a travois.

  “Three travois,” Mary said. “The boy will ride on one. I will walk.”

  “Three?” He stared.

  “It is good.”

  “Between four and five hundred pounds off the wagon, sir,” Skye said.

  Bright peered owlishly at them. “When I invent a flycatching trap, you will get the first one.”

  fifteen

  They reached one of those message centers that dotted the trail. This was a sandstone cliff and it was plastered with notices, mostly daubed on the rock with axle grease.

  Some were instructions. Others were death notices or changes of plan: Eliza Jones, d. Aug 15, 1847. Ella, taking Hastings, Gilbert. Columbus Co. July 28, 1849. Amy Quill, go to Sacramento. Bloomfield Train, June 30, 1850. Lost Eddy, contact Vasquez, Bridger Fort.

  Skye paused as he always did, learning what he could from what sufficed as a post office. Here people were lost and found, warnings were posted, deaths announced, and advice given.

  Older messages had faded in the sun and wind and rain and were often overwritten by newer ones. A fresh one, the black stain of axle grease bold in the yellow rock. “Plague party ahead, Green Wagon. Many dead.” It had a crudely drawn skull and crossbones.

  Skye studied it, knowing trouble was brooding. Peacock pulled up beside him and spotted the new message.

  “I’d hoped we were past that,” he said.

  Bright and the wagons appeared. The youngsters on the tailgates studied the cliff. Finally Skye’s family.

  “What the hell does it say?” Victoria asked.

  Skye told her and Mary.

  “Well, hell, we got grease and we cover it up.”

  It was a temptation. But the real trouble lay ahead, not behind. At Fort Bridger, probably, or at the Saints’ Great Salt Lake City. Word traveled forward.

  “Too late,” Skye said.

  Lloyd Jones, gaunt but still teamstering, studied the message. “I feel like I’ve been put into a debtors prison. There’s no way out,” he said.

  “We’ll push along,” Peacock said. “Let’s not borrow trouble.”

  The whale oil merchant had a steely resolve that Skye admired. They would deal with trouble as it came.

  They drove west for several days. The oxen were slowly gaunting in spite of the lighter load, and Skye hoped fresher animals would be available at Fort Bridger, or at least some grain. He would trade that Sharps for fresh livestock or grain, whatever it took.

  Twice more they found warnings against the plague company daubed into rocks, and once on the side of an abandoned wagon. Someone ahead was making a major case out of it, whipping up trouble. Each time they came across one of these warnings, the young people grew more and more distressed.

  The Tucker twins burst into tears. Eliza and Mary Bridge could not comfort them. Sterling Peacock scowled, and threw pebbles at these terrible notices, daubed in oversized letters in an effort to dominate the message areas. Pete Sturgeon, too weak to do much but lie in the green wagon, learned of it and buried his head under his blanket. But Anna Bennett was a different sort.

  “Next camp we see, I’ll go visiting and watch them run from the wicked witch,” she said.

  No one laughed.

  Skye stared helplessly from a distance. The quarantine separating him and his family from these consumptives was carefully observed by the sick and the well. Skye and his women were washing themselves far more than usual too.

  Victoria needed to have each sign read to her; not just the ones warning of a plague party, but the rest. She was a great student of the ways of European people. But Mary absorbed herself with her son, with cooking and camp-tending, and keeping the travois loads balanced.

  Few parties passed them because they were the stragglers now, and only one company seemed to notice the green wagon. They whispered to one another, pointed, and hurried past while Peacock’s little company rested beside a tributary creek. Maybe it would come to nothing, Skye thought. Most of these companies bound for California or Oregon were, after all, far ahead now.

  July days, and then August days slipped by without incident. By traveling slowly, resting frequently, and sparing the oxen as much as possible, they struggled westward without any breakdowns. If even one ox died or failed, they would be out of luck. Fort Bridger loomed ahead like heaven itself. It would be the place to trade worn oxen for fresh. There would be blacksmith services, wheelwrights, skilled men with tools, as well as everything anyone would need, all for sale. The post had been started by the old mountain man Jim Bridger and his partner Luis Vasquez, but the Mormons had gotten hold of it and now ran it as a lucrative business catering to the migrants. Just now it looked like some sort of heaven to Skye.

  According to the gossip along the trail, the Mormons were trading two worn oxen for one rested ox, which Peacock could not afford, but the Sharps would make the difference. Skye was prepared to trade it for two rested oxen and wouldn’t take less. That Sharps was some gun, all right. He wished he could keep it, but the welfare of the company came first.

  They reached the Sweetwater, struggled through Devil’s Gate, entered a land of slopes that wore hard on the oxen, a land denuded of grass by the migration. The livestock starved. Still they struggled west along the one little river in all the West that enabled the migrants to go to Oregon and California. They were climbing now, but so subtly that the Massachusetts people barely noticed, though Skye observed the distant peaks of the Wind River range. This was a naked land, inhospitable, barren, and cruel. The higher they progressed, the less able the young people were to breathe. The air in this high country was thin and unsatisfying, and the consumptives suffered.

  Then one day Skye halted the party on a barren slope. Far to the north lay high country; off to the south the land was enveloped in white haze.

  “This is South Pass, the continental divide,” he said. “You hardly notice. From here, the waters run to the Pacific. We’ll start descending to Little Sandy Creek, and then we have a bad stretch we must cross at night. Then we’ll drop into the Green River valley, and it’ll be heaven. But I must warn you. We’re in for some tough going. The sick will have to walk or the livestock will quit and die.”

  They stared solemnly at him, absorbing more bad news.

  They started downslope in windless heat, the sun’s blast radiating from the very earth. Soon they were parched. Skye urged them onward.

  “We’ll hit the Little Sandy soon. You can see the valley from here even if you can’t see the creek,” he said.

  But those around him could see nothing in the white heat haze. He rode onward. At least the oxen didn’t have to pull hard; not the way they had toiled up the long slopes to South Pass. The country was so large it seemed frightening, and there were brooding clouds over distant mountains, waiting to pounce on the unwary.

  The heat was oppressive, and in spite of the dry air, man and ox sweated. The trail was so well worn here it cut a deep notch in the desert. They were never out of sight of debris, abandoned cargo left by desperate companies. Peacock took to looking for food in all the junk, especially grain or flour, but wily captains of other trains had raided the discards for every useful thing.

  They rolled into the anonymous valley where Big Sandy Creek ran, barely two feet wide but still cool, cool water. Skye turned his party upstream a little, hoping for grass but found nothing. They would water here, rest, and then tackle the long night passage to the Green River valley.

  The oxen and Skye’s ponies slowly lapped up the water and kept their muzzles in it, tonguing it occasionally, sometimes standing in the same spot for ten or twel
ve minutes at a time. Then they stood still, miserable, their eyes accusing their owners of starving them.

  Two other trains came and went, but Skye waited for the cool of evening, waited for his animals to recover as much as possible in that cruel heat. Then at twilight he steered them west across a blinding white desert. There would be no water until the next day sometime, depending on how fast they moved. He had a canteen. Peacock had one small cask, mostly for his sick young people. There wouldn’t be enough to water any animal in a meaningful way.

  They were lucky. A chill August breeze descended out of distant mountains, freshening the air, invigorating the stock, and even helping the consumptives a little. They all did better than Skye imagined they could, plodding through starlight, and then by the light of a thin moon, into the unknown. At times Skye could barely see the trail but it had been carved so deeply into the caliche that he was never lost for long. As the sun lit the east, they descended into a branching valley, ever downward, past arid cliffs, and finally, in the middle of morning, into the lush valley of the Green River. Somehow, miraculously, they had survived intact. He once again turned them away from the trail, hoping to find good grass. There wasn’t much, but it would do. They spent most of that day recovering beside this River Jordan that had become their salvation and baptismal font.

  Skye thought to put a few miles on that evening, and they progressed through complex country, with the trail branching off in various directions, cutoffs, shortcuts, who knew where?

  He was feeling pretty good. That dry run to the Green River was probably the cruelest lap of the trip, and now it was behind them. Ahead, not far, lay Bridger’s Fort, brimming with salvation and hope and renewal.

  Then they hit another sign, daubed on the turnoff that would take them to Salt Lake City. This was the famous Hastings Cutoff, which steered the California-bound trains south and into a waterless desert that was brutal on livestock, especially now when the heat was high. It was a graveyard to many a dream and hope, but it could save time if a traveler was superbly equipped with grain and water and fresh stock.

  A sign had been erected there to guide travelers. “Welcome, friend. Bridger′s Fort straight ahead. Oregon stay right. Hastings Cutoff straight ahead. California via Spanish Trail, straight. We have what you need.”

  “First friendly sign I’ve seen in a while, Mister Skye.”

  “Maybe we’ll get some oxen,” Skye said. “The Mormons are looking for business.”

  sixteen

  Fort Bridger occupied a verdant valley watered by Black′s Fork of the Green River. It was a bonanza for whoever operated it; the only outfitting and supply post west of Fort Laramie, heavily patronized by overland travelers.

  Skye eyed it sourly from a distance, noting that the Saints had not improved it. It slouched somnolently in the August sunlight, without the slightest sign of life. It was a ramshackle quadrangle of utility buildings, and if it had once been fortified, the defenses had long since fallen away. But the flat before it showed signs of heavy use. Its naked clay was littered with debris, dung, and the remains of hundreds of cook fires.

  Skye halted Jawbone and studied the post, finding nothing to alarm him. He motioned to Peacock, and the New Bedford Company made its slow way down a long slope to the rippling river, and followed a worn trail on its bank to the post. This was a good place, generous and comfortable, watered by snowmelt from the mountains. It sat strategically on the junction of several great trails west, to Oregon or California via the Hastings Cutoff, or to southern California via the old Spanish Trail.

  A few years earlier the Mormons had driven old Gabe Bridger out, with warrants for his arrest for supposedly selling powder and lead to the Indians. And soon after, they bought out his partner, Vasquez, and took over. The whole Mormon rationale was a little too convenient for Skye’s tastes. Whatever actually happened, the Saints held the post now, and did a lucrative business there, outfitting the endless procession of wagon companies heading west each summer.

  “Looks all right. Let’s go on in,” Skye said.

  “I’m weary of trouble,” Peacock replied. “But I see no warnings here. Nothing but a long flat.”

  They proceeded along the crystalline river, admiring the glowing valley, and eventually drew up before the silent fort. But now the quiet was broken by the clanging of a hammer on steel. Enoch Bright halted the hospital wagon, and the Jones brothers pulled up the supply wagon, and the young people began to tumble down to the clay and stretch in the sweet sunlight.

  “I imagine you and I ought to go in ahead of the others,” Skye said to Peacock.

  “That is wise.”

  Skye slid off Jawbone and turned him loose. The ugly roan yawned, stretched, clacked his teeth, and eyed the world suspiciously. Skye and Peacock hiked through the silence, entering the post through a gap between log and adobe buildings, and found themselves in a large yard, naked of even one blade of grass.

  But in the center was a forge, with bellows, and at the forge was a burly smith, hammering a red-hot shoe over an anvil.

  The man was as powerful as any Skye had ever seen, his broad chest and shoulders ox-strong. A mop of black hair topped him, and a close-cropped jet beard largely hid his face. Obsidian eyes added to the man’s darkness.

  If he noticed Skye and Peacock’s approach, he did not let on to it, but continued to hammer at the horseshoe. Skye saw at once that the smith was widening the heels of the shoe, and expertly employing the various surfaces of the anvil to achieve his goal. The bony spotted horse whose hoof was being fitted, tied to a post, yawned.

  Not until the smith was satisfied with his task did he acknowledge the visitors. He lifted the hot shoe with tongs, plunged it into a water bucket, causing spitting and steam, and then laid the shoe on the brick forge.

  “I suppose you’re the plague party they’ve been telling me about,” he said.

  The voice seemed to rise out of the man’s belly.

  “Yes, sir,” Peacock said. “New Bedford, Massachusetts.”

  “Well, you aren’t Saints,” the man said.

  “No, we’re heading for the desert, where my patients hope to be healed by the climate.”

  The smith nodded, dipped his hands into the water bucket, and shook them off. “You don’t look sick,” he said.

  “The sick are in our wagons, or near them. We keep them apart,” Peacock said.

  The smith studied Skye. “I’ve heard of you,” he said.

  “I’m Barnaby Skye, sir. And you?”

  “Morton Rockwell.”

  They did not shake hands. Skye thought the man’s hands could crush every bone in his own, and was grateful.

  “I run the post,” Rockwell added.

  “We’re interested in some trading.”

  Rockwell smiled for the first time, revealing great gaps in his incisors. “Fat chance,” he said.

  “Because we’re a party of the sick?”

  “No, because you’re the last of the litter. No one heading for Oregon or California’s going to get close to there, this late. There’s not a thing on my shelves. Go wake up the clerk. Heber Smoot. He’s napping on the counter.”

  “Not a thing? No food?”

  Rockwell shrugged. “I’ve been bought out. We’ve had four hundred, five hundred wagons this year.”

  “We have great need, sir,” Peacock said.

  “So do they all. So do we.”

  “We?”

  “The Latter-Day Saints. We arrived here with nothing. We still have nothing. Let those who starved us eat stone.”

  Peacock swallowed a response.

  The smith gingerly lifted the cool horseshoe and set it down quickly. It was still too hot to touch. “The company ahead of you warned me about you. They said you spread sickness. Plague. People die at every campsite. You would bring a plague down on the Saints.”

  Some sort of furnace heat radiated from the smith’s face, as if he were working himself into a temper.

  “Trail talk
,” Skye said.

  The smith smiled suddenly. “I thought so. They were Pukes. Big company of Pukes.”

  “You’ll need to educate me about that word, sir,” Peacock said.

  “Pukes. Missouri scum, Illinois scum, thugs who killed our prophet Joseph Smith, killed the Saints, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, and drove us away with only the clothes on our backs. Pukes. They hung around here outfitting, and then they left. I charged them double. Haven’t seen another company since, until you. They talked about you.”

  “Trail talk,” said Skye.

  “Disease. The Pale Horse of the Apocalypse. Made it sound like you’re the ones who’ll destroy the Saints. Well?”

  “We’re passing through, sir,” Peacock said.

  The smith stared out at the two wagons sagging outside the post, at the sick young people sitting on the clay, waiting for word. “What is it you need?” he asked.

  “Food and fresh stock,” Skye said.

  The smith smiled darkly. “Right off the shelves.”

  “We’re slowed down. Someone shot my prized Morgan horse. We need a yoke of fresh oxen,” Peacock said.

  “I have none. I’m cleaned out of every spare animal. I’ve nary a nag nor a mule nor an ox.”

  “I have something valuable to trade, sir,” Skye said. “A new Sharps rifle.”

  “A Sharps? Did you say a Sharps?”

  “I did. It was used by someone to shoot Mister Peacock’s Morgan horse.”

  The smith smiled. “The Pukes told me to confiscate any Sharps that was offered to me. Someone stole it from them.”

  Skye drew the weapon from Jawbone’s saddle sheath. “This?” he said.

  “That.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Their guide. Manville. He’s taking them to the coast.”

  Peacock snorted.

  “Did this Manville have anything wrong with his shoulder?” Skye asked.

  “No, but the other one, Trimble, had his arm in a sling. It was Trimble’s Sharps, I think.”

  “That explains a lot, Mister Rockwell.”