THE JUMP-OFF
With the first thin line of pink the coyotes hanging on the flanks of
the great encampment raised their immemorial salutation to the dawn.
Their clamorings were stilled by a new and sterner voice--the notes of
the bugle summoning sleepers of the last night to the duties of the
first day. Down the line from watch to watch passed the Plains command,
"Catch up! Catch up!" It was morning of the jump-off.
Little fires began at the wagon messes or family bivouacs. Men, boys,
barefooted girls went out into the dew-wet grass to round up the
transport stock. A vast confusion, a medley of unskilled endeavor marked
the hour. But after an hour's wait, adjusted to the situation, the next
order passed down the line:
"Roll out! Roll out!"
And now the march to Oregon was at last begun! The first dust cut by an
ox hoof was set in motion by the whip crack of a barefooted boy in jeans
who had no dream that he one day would rank high in the councils of his
state, at the edge of an ocean which no prairie boy ever had envisioned.
The compass finger of the trail, leading out from the timber groves,
pointed into a sea of green along the valley of the Kaw. The grass, not
yet tall enough fully to ripple as it would a half month later, stood
waving over the black-burned ground which the semicivilized Indians had
left the fall before. Flowers dotted it, sometimes white like bits of
old ivory on the vast rug of spindrift--the pink verbena, the wild
indigo, the larkspur and the wild geranium--all woven into a wondrous
spangled carpet. At times also appeared the shy buds of the sweet wild
rose, loveliest flower of the prairie. Tall rosinweeds began to thrust
up rankly, banks of sunflowers prepared to fling their yellow banners
miles wide. The opulent, inviting land lay in a ceaseless succession of
easy undulations, stretching away illimitably to far horizons, "in such
exchanging pictures of grace and charm as raised the admiration of even
these simple folk to a pitch bordering upon exaltation."
Here lay the West, barbaric, abounding, beautiful. Surely it could mean
no harm to any man.
The men lacked experience in column travel, the animals were unruly. The
train formation--clumsily trying to conform to the orders of Wingate to
travel in four parallel columns--soon lost order. At times the wagons
halted to re-form. The leaders galloped back and forth, exhorting,
adjuring and restoring little by little a certain system. But they dealt
with independent men. On ahead the landscape seemed so wholly free of
danger that to most of these the road to the Far West offered no more
than a pleasure jaunt. Wingate and his immediate aids were well worn
when at mid afternoon they halted, fifteen miles out from Westport.
"What in hell you pulling up so soon for?" demanded Sam Woodhull
surlily, riding up from his own column, far at the rear, and accosting
the train leader. "We can go five miles further, anyhow, and maybe ten.
We'll never get across in this way."
"This is the very way we will get across," rejoined Wingate. "While I'm
captain I'll say when to start and stop. But I've been counting on you,
Woodhull, to throw in with me and help me get things shook down."
"Well, hit looks to me ye're purty brash as usual," commented another
voice. Bill Jackson came and stood at the captain's side. He had not
been far from Woodhull all day long. "Ye're a nacherl damned fool, Sam
Woodhull," said he. "Who 'lected ye fer train captain, an' when was it
did? If ye don't like the way this train's run go on ahead an' make a
train o' yer own, ef that's way ye feel. Pull on out to-night. What ye
say, Cap?"
"I can't really keep any man from going back or going ahead," replied
Wingate. "But I've counted on Woodhull to hold those Liberty wagons
together. Any plainsman knows that a little party takes big risks."
"Since when did you come a plainsman?" scoffed the malcontent, for once
forgetting his policy of favor-currying with Wingate in his own surly
discontent. He had not been able to speak to Molly all day.
"Well, if he ain't a plainsman yit he will be, and I'm one right now,
Sam Woodhull." Jackson stood squarely in front of his superior. "I say
he's talkin' sense to a man that ain't got no sense. I was with Doniphan
too. We found ways, huh?"
His straight gaze outfronted the other, who turned and rode back. But
that very night eight men, covertly instigated or encouraged by
Woodhull, their leader, came to the headquarters fire with a joint
complaint. They demanded places at the head of the column, else would
mutiny and go on ahead together. They said good mule teams ought not to
take the dust of ox wagons.
"What do you say, men?" asked the train captain of his aids helplessly.
"I'm in favor of letting them go front."
The others nodded silently, looking at one another significantly.
Already cliques and factions were beginning.
Woodhull, however, had too much at stake to risk any open friction with
the captain of the train. His own seat at the officers' fire was dear to
him, for it brought him close to the Wingate wagons, and in sight--if
nothing else--of Molly Wingate. That young lady did not speak to him all
day, but drew close the tilt of her own wagon early after the evening
meal and denied herself to all.
As for Banion, he was miles back, in camp with his own wagons, which
Woodhull had abandoned, and on duty that night with the cattle guard--a
herdsman and not a leader of men now. He himself was moody enough when
he tied his cape behind his saddle and rode his black horse out into the
shadows. He had no knowledge of the fact that the old mountain man,
Jackson, wrapped in his blanket, that night instituted a solitary watch
all his own.
The hundreds of camp fires of the scattered train, stretched out over
five miles of grove and glade at the end of the first undisciplined day,
lowered, glowed and faded. They were one day out to Oregon, and weary
withal. Soon the individual encampments were silent save for the champ
or cough of tethered animals, or the whining howl of coyotes, prowling
in. At the Missouri encampment, last of the train, and that heading the
great cattle drove, the hardy frontier settlers, as was their wont, soon
followed the sun to rest.
The night wore on, incredibly slow to the novice watch for the first
time now drafted under the prairie law. The sky was faint pink and the
shadows lighter when suddenly the dark was streaked by a flash of fire
and the silence broken by the crack of a border rifle. Then again and
again came the heavier bark of a dragoon revolver, of the sort just then
becoming known along the Western marches.
The camp went into confusion. Will Banion, just riding in to take his
own belated turn in his blankets, almost ran over the tall form of Bill
Jackson, rifle in hand.
"What was it, man?" demanded Banion. "You shooting at a mule?"
"No, a man," whispered the other. "He ran this way. Reckon I must have
missed. It's hard to draw down inter a hindsight in the dark, an' I jest
chanced hit with the pistol. He was runnin' hard."
"Who was he--some thief?"
"Like enough. He was crawlin' up towards yore wagon, I halted him an' he
run."
"You don't know who he was?"
"No. I'll see his tracks, come day. Go on to bed. I'll set out a whiles,
boy."
When dawn came, before he had broken his long vigil, Jackson was bending
over footmarks in the moister portions of the soil.
"Tall man, young an' tracked clean," he muttered to himself. "Fancy
boots, with rather little heels. Shame I done missed him!"
But he said nothing to Banion or anyone else. It was the twentieth time
Bill Jackson, one of Sublette's men and a nephew of one of his partners,
had crossed the Plains, and the lone hand pleased him best. He
instituted his own government for the most part, and had thrown in with
this train because that best suited his book, since the old pack trains
of the fur trade were now no more. For himself, he planned settlement
in Eastern Oregon, a country he once had glimpsed in long-gone beaver
days, a dozen years ago. The Eastern settlements had held him long
enough, the Army life had been too dull, even with Doniphan.
"I must be gittin' old," he muttered to himself as he turned to a
breakfast fire. "Missed--at seventy yard!"