“Now we'll just take one more look about among those cinders and then we'll get away from heah just as fast as the Lord will let us. I seen places I liked a heap better.”
But the search revealed nothing new.
“Who do you allow done it? Indians?” asked Jim, as they hurried away in the direction their mules had taken.
“Who else would it be?”
“No one else, judging from the way they'd been used. They—”
“Shut up!” cried the Missourian with sudden fierceness, “I ain't likely to forget how they was used! Good God! That's going to stick in my crop to the end of my days, I reckon—don't you rub it in!”
“Well, you done what was white!” said Jim, with unexpected and generous enthusiasm.
But for the rest of that day and far into the night, they could talk and think of nothing else than those dead men in the ditch.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE Missourian and Jim camped on the edge of the timber. So little of the day was remaining to them after they left the hill that they had been forced to stop here; but they were in the saddle again with the first pale glimmer of light that shot across the plain.
“We'll tuck along out of heah in pretty considerable of a hurry, Jim,” said the Missourian.
They crossed the narrow bottom and entered the mountains; but before these quite closed about them, moved by common impulse, they turned for a last look at the hill.
“I certainly am proud to see the end of that!” observed the Missourian as he faced ahead once more.
“You bet I wouldn't care to loaf around there none; most any place'd suit me better,” and Jim took a long, deep breath.
“I tell you, Mr. Orphan, daylight's a thundering fine thing, and I'm going to hanker for it for twenty-four hours at a stretch from now on for right smart of a spell. What sleep I took last night I took in jerks; and what, between seeing Indians and finding dead men, there was no manner of comfort in it.”
“I was some that way myself,” admitted Jim.
“But there's a thing or two I can't just understand, Jim; there wasn't so much as the broken haft of an arrow anywhere about that hill; and a many of them hosses was shod all round.”
“What do you think?” asked Jim.
“Well, I reckon I don't think—I'm plumb beat.”
“I'd like mighty well to have learned who they was, and where they came from. I reckon they got friends and kin back in the States who wouldn't mind hearing what had become of them,” said Jim.
“I guess there's no use our figuring on finding that out; it's annoying, but it can't be helped,” and the Missourian shook his head with an air of settled conviction; “I done my best; I went through 'em for papers or letters; but you seen there was nary the scratch of a pen.”
“I had a brother once,” began Jim, with an air of reminiscent melancholy, “George was his name; and he was some older than me. He went like that; leastways he just sort of never came back to explain what was keeping him. He crossed the Mississippi to hunt and never showed up any more. We 'lowed after a time the Indians had got him all right; and when folks would come round the place asking if we'd heard anything new about George, it was powerful distressing to mother; she'd a sort of special fancy for George.”
After this they continued in silence for a little time, and then, as usual, it was the Missourian who renewed the conversation.
“Who do you reckon had a leg over them shod hosses, Jim?” he asked.
“I ain't the least idea in the world, unless it was redskins,” Jim responded.
“I guess you're right, maybe. It must have been redskins.” Yet it was plain that he was not satisfied, for again and again as the morning advanced he returned to the subject. Finally, however, he seemed to weary of fruitless theorizing, for he drew the map with which the trapper at Fort Bridger had furnished him, from his pocket, and fell to studying it.
“He was a right clever cuss, Jim—we've covered each day just about the distances he said we would; I've marked 'em all off. At this rate about four days more will fetch us out at Raymond's ranch on the bench above Salt Lake; that's the first Mormon settlement we strike. He was sort of sour on Mormons in general, but he spoke well of this heah Raymond.”
The contemplation of the map, and the prospect of so soon reaching the valley had a noticeably cheering effect on him; he began to sing, and the song was a classic of the trail.
“Oberdier, he dreampt a dream,
Dreampt he was drivin' a ten mule team,
But when he woke, he heaved a sigh,
The lead mule kicked out the swing mule's eye.”
But he got no further than the end of the first verse when the words suddenly died on his lips; he reined in his mule and turned to Jim.
“We seem to have found their trail, and they seem to be going in toward the valley; do you see that?” he said.
“I noticed,” answered Jim laconically.
The Missourian dismounted and examined the signs which had compelled his attention. His examination was brief, however, and when he settled himself in the saddle again, he said quietly:
“It's them all right. You and me's got company ahead of us, Jim.”
“They got plenty start of us,” said Jim, moving restlessly in his saddle.
“That's so, these signs are all of a week old. We dassent take any chances trying to find another road into the valley.”
“Scarcely,” said Jim, with a vague, uneasy smile.
An hour later they came upon a spot where the party preceding them had evidently camped, for the ground was trampled and bare where their horses had been picketed. Here, too, were a variety of bulky articles of comparatively small value.
“They seem to have been getting shut of a good deal of their stuff heah,” was the Missourian's comment.
“We know how that goes,” said Jim.
“I reckon they was sort of dividing up their plunder, and chucked out what they didn't think worth toting farther; for you see this couldn't well have been a night camp. I 'low they must have halted heah about midday. You notice their hosses was picketed close, not turned out to graze; if it had been a night camp, a party this size would have let their stock range, because there was plenty of them to herd it through the night.”
From this point on, for perhaps a mile, the signs were quite plain, and then the party appeared to have broken up; one well-marked trail led off to the south; another kept on toward the west; but presently this, too, turned into a branching pass and was lost.
“Humph!” said the Missourian. “Those was mostly the shod hosses; pretty singular, ain't it?”
But it was evident that both he and Jim experienced a sense of positive relief.
All that morning they had toiled through the mountains; but toward the middle of the afternoon they emerged upon a high ridge; here there was good grass and a scattering growth of small timber. They crossed the ridge and descending found themselves in a fertile, well-watered valley.
“We'll camp heah,” said the Missourian, with a sweeping gesture. “Yonder, by that thicket—a stream heads there.”
As they neared the spot he had designated, Jim, who was riding a pace or two in advance and to his right, all at once swung around his long rifle. But the Missourian threw up his hand in protest.
“Don't shoot, Jim!” he called, urging his mule into a shuffling trot.
There was the sound of a stealthy, guarded movement in the tangled undergrowth they were approaching. Jim, whose sense of sight and hearing were strained to the utmost, heard a dead branch snap loudly, and then he saw a small, vague object appear on the opposite side of the thicket, and run limping away. His nerves were quite shattered by the events of the previous day, but here was something tangible, something at which to shoot, and, in his present frame of mind, the mere noise of his gun in that sombre solitude would have been a consolation; but the Missourian's ear caught the ominous click of the lock as he drew back the hammer.
“Don't shoot, you blame fool!” he called again as he crashed through the thicket in pursuit of the fleeing object. The race was a short one, and through an opening in the brush Jim saw his friend rein in his mule suddenly with a savage jerk, and swing himself from his saddle; at the same instant he heard him say:
“There, son, I ain't going to hurt you.”
An instant later Jim broke through the intervening thicket himself, and to his astonishment found the Missourian bending above the prostrate figure of a child.
“He tripped up and fell, he was powerful keen to get away,” explained the Missourian. “I might have hollered at him and saved him the tumble,” he added regretfully.
The boy was lying prone on his back on the ground, gazing up at the two men. Bewilderment, doubt, and fear were mingled in his glance. He did not speak.
“And you wanted to shoot the little cuss, Jim,” he was mildly resentful. “You're always in such a sweat to use that gun of your's, seems like you'll not be content until you plug some one with it.”
Jim merely looked at the child. He saw that he was wretched enough; that his face and hands were torn and bruised, while his clothes were a fluttering mass of unpicturesque rags. The man's mouth opened in silent wonder.
“I certainly am mighty glad we found him,” said the Missourian; and at these words a look of keen suspicion flashed in the child's eyes. Then they had been hunting for him! That was what the man meant!
“Look at him, Jim,” continued the Missourian, all of whose emotions were easily translatable into words. “If he ain't most starved to death I certainly don't know what starving is! He's all skin and bones—what you had to eat, son?”
The child struggled to his feet with difficulty; he was, evidently, very weak, for he shivered and trembled as he stood there. The Missourian put out a staying hand.
“There was things growing on the bushes—I ate them,” he said in a hoarse whisper, begotten of hunger, fatigue, and exposure.
“Wild plums I reckon you mean. Well, sir, me and my pardner here will fill your pinched little carcass full of bread and bacon. Wild plums! Hell! and him a growing child.”
“Where's your folks?” Jim now asked, he had found his voice at last.
“I ain't got any,” replied the child sullenly.
“You ain't got any? Then what in blazes are you doing here all by yourself?” demanded Jim; he was quite indignant.
The child made no response to this, but his restless glance searched the faces of the two men. His expression was one of dark mistrust; it almost seemed that he meditated flight; but the Missourian's hand was on his shoulder.
“And so you ain't got no pa?” said the latter ingratiatingly, for he recognized something of the boy's distrust and suspicion, though he was quite at a loss to account for it.
“He's dead,” and his lips trembled pathetically.
“Dead,” repeated the Missourian after him.
“You knew that,” and the child turned on him with sudden fierceness, his small hands tightly clinched, and his eyes glittering feverishly.
“I suspicioned it,” said the Missourian.
“The Indians killed him!” the boy added dully.
“But I allow your pa put up a pretty stiff fight; it was on a hilltop, now warn't it? and your pa drove his teams up there and took out and fit them from behind the wagons—him and those who was with him?”
The child shrank from the questioner's touch, but he answered:
“Yes, it was on a hill.”
“I knowed it,” declared the Missourian triumphantly.
“Knowed what?” demanded Jim with some impatience.
“Why, this little cuss came out of that scuffle back yonder; most anybody would have guessed that but you, Jim.”
“And he come here all by himself? Not any,” but his friend ignored what he said to turn again to the boy.
“There were four other men beside your pa with the wagons, warn't there, son?”
The child nodded, but his eyes still flashed with a precocious sense of wrong and hate.
“I knowed it,” declared the Missourian in triumph a second time. “And it was the Indians they fit with, you're sure about that?”
“It was the Indians,” said the child indifferently. “My pop said it was the Indians.”
“I reckon he ought to have knowed,” said the baffled Missourian. “But they were certainly curious Indians from what we seen.”
“It was the Indians, they said they was Indians.”
“Who?” cried the Missourian quickly.
“The men,” answered the child.
“The Indians told you that, did they? Well, they was real obliging.” He turned to Jim. “I'm having doubts about these heah Indians.”
“Look here, son, what was your idea about them redskins?” asked Jim.
The child did not answer him, but there came a sudden flash of intelligence to his pinched little face which the instant before had been quite expressionless in its abject misery. It was plain he understood what the man meant when he spoke of the Indians; then he smiled slyly, cunningly.
“What I want to know,” said Jim, “is how he got away from them.”
“That's so, son, how do you happen to be heah?”
“The Indians fetched me here,” answered the child readily enough.
“And left you heah?”
“I ran away in the night; when they was all asleep.”
“So you fooled 'em—well, you was smart; but didn't they hunt for you any afterwards?”
“I hid in the rocks.” He pointed vaguely to the broken hills in the west. “They looked all around for me and never found me, but I saw them. Then they went away.”
“How long ago was that?”
The child looked troubled.
“I don't know,” he finally answered.
“I 'low you ain't forgot your name?”
“No.
“Well, what is it, son?”
“Benny Rogers,” then all at once he began to cry from sheer weakness and wretchedness.
The two men were puzzled and mystified. There was that one point about the Indians that they could not understand; and yet what they had seen in the ditch was in accord with their preconceived notions as to Indian warfare.
“We'd better go into camp, Jim,” said the Missourian. “You keep hold of the boy while I unsaddle the mules and turn them out,” but midway in his task he paused and glanced at the child who was still crying softly, miserably.
“I half believe the little codger lied to us,” he muttered. “Well, maybe it was Indians after all, he surely ought to know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
EPHRIAM RAYMOND, standing in the doorway of his ranch house, well within the shadow of the foothills, was watching two horsemen as they crept along the trail.
To the west, where the land dropped from bench to bench until it finally found the level of the flat valley with its farms and irrigating ditches, lay Great Salt Lake; a gleam of sunlight was reflected on the water, and a few misty clouds low in the sapphire light betokened its nearness.
A year before, and the trail had been illy marked through the mountains; and scarcely more than a trace, as it crossed the desert beyond, where it wound its course from failing streams which fought the dry, thirsty sands, on to brackish water holes that were evil to smell, and yet more evil to drink from. But that single season had altered without lessening its terrors. It was heavy now with alkali du$t, dry with the season's rainless suns, and fine with the grinding wheels of freight and emigrant wagons; it was further marked by the bones of cattle and horses. No one could mistake it now.
As the two men came nearer, Ephriam saw that they were mounted on mules, and that one of the men, a gaunt, red-whiskered fellow, shared his saddle with a child.
“Is this heah Raymond's settlement?” the latter demanded, reining in his mule before the ranch house door.
“Yes,” answered Ephriam. “Won't you light down?” he added. He was a kindly, venerable man, with a patriarchal beard and long, grey hair; there was more than a touch of the ministerial in the decent black broadcloth suit he wore; the fact that he was collarless, and that his trousers were tucked in at the tops of his heavy boots, did not detract in the least from his palpable pulpit dignity.
“We will, elder, if it's agreeable to you, and we'd admire to fill up on kitchen victuals.” And the red-whiskered man drew the back of his hand across his bearded lips.
“You're just in time,” said Ephriam smiling.
“I told you, Jim! Elder, I smelt 'em from the moment we broke out of the hills.” He lifted the boy down as he spoke, and making a common movement with Jim, swung himself stiffly from the saddle; a half-grown boy had appeared from the direction of the corrals, and at a sign from Ephriam led away the mules.
“Are there no more of your party coming?” said the old man.
“What's left of us is right heah, elder,” answered the Missourian; then he saw that Ephriam was regarding Benny curiously. “Oh, him? You allow he don't belong to either Jim or me—and you're right, elder, for he don't.”
Ephriam turned on him with unexpected sternness at this.
“Perhaps that is your excuse for his condition!” and he pointed to the child, whose white, scared face wore a preternatural look of age and suffering; and whose tattered clothes scarcely covered his pinched little body; while his hands and bare feet were cruelly torn and bruised.
“Well, sir, I admit he ain't much to brag on, and his looks is a scandal to this outfit. We picked him up only four days back; he says he'd run off from the redskins. He'd most starved to death.”
His own gaunt frame and hollow cheeks, however, told plainly of the hardships all had endured, and lack of food had not been the least of these. Ephriam's face softened.
“Yes,” he said, in apology for his momentary suspicion, “I can see you have suffered.”
“But you have got a fine climate, elder,” broke in the Missourian, bent on being conciliatory. “Jim and me noticed that right along. This is the place to come for climate; there's nothing else heah to take your mind off it; it's heah thick.”
But Ephriam's glance had gone back to the child.
“Poor little fellow! Some emigrant's boy, probably.”
Benny looked up quickly into his face and stole to his side. Whatever those first suspicions of his concerning Jim and the Missourian they had in no wise abated; all their kindness had not altered his doubt of them. The questions they had asked him, but more than all their strange and to him utterly incomprehensible knowledge of so much that had taken place on that hill, had bred conviction in his brain. He hated and feared them.
“Seems to fancy you, elder,” said the Missourian. “We certainly done what we could for him, which ain't saying much, for we'd liked to do a heap more.”
A young girl appeared in the doorway; the Missourian turned quickly, hearing her light step, and swept off his battered hat with an elaborate flourish.
“Ma'am,” he said.
Jim, by a casual gesture, brushed the flapping brim that shaded his eyes; he was speechless.
“If you will come in, dinner is on the table, father,” said the girl. She had outgrown all curiosity concerning these wayfarers from the States; yet she gave the Missourian a smile, and to him that smile was an event.
Seated at the table the old man contented himself with seeing that his guests wanted for nothing, while his glance constantly shifted first from one to the other of the men and then on to the child.
Jim ate in stony silence, but his more social companion, once the first rigours of his hunger were appeased, was disposed to talk.
“Our finding him, elder,” indicating the child by a flourish of his knife, “was certainly mighty curious.”
“Yes?” inquiringly.
“It was four days back. Jim and me had come to a sandy valley, it was like a good many other valleys we'd seen, except that it had a little more sand and a little less of grass than some of the others, but, perhaps, the most singular thing about it was a flat-topped hill that stood right out on the plain; a wagon trail led up to the top of that hill, but just where the trail struck up the slope, we noticed that it was crossed and crossed again by another trail—not a wagon trail—which led in a circle about the hill.”
“Indians,” said Ephriam; he was deeply interested.
“But a many of them hosses was shod, elder, and Jim and me made it our business to go to the top of that hill; we found there had been some sort of a scuffle there; there was five dead men in a wash on one of the slopes, and we could see where three wagons had been emptied of their loads and burnt; but the uncommonest thing about it was those dead men; for, when we come to examine them, we found their pockets had been looked through and pretty well emptied, and no letters nor no nothing left to show who they was or where they come from. The next day we found this boy; he remembered about the hill and about the fight, said his pa had been killed there, and said it was the Indians done it.”
“What of that? It was all quite likely,” said Ephriam.
“But was it so blame likely?” remonstrated the Missourian. “Recollect a many of the hosses was shod.”
“But the dead men?” asked Ephriam.
“Well, what had been done to them was a plenty; but I made up my mind that in some sort it was a white man's job,” responded the Missourian, staring fixedly at him. The lids of Raymond's eyes drooped for an instant.
“A white man's job?” he cried. “White men?” he repeated dully; he seemed stunned by the idea.
“Which it might have been redskins,” said Jim, with his mouth full. “Elder, this cooking hits me hard.”
“Does the boy know who he is, and where he comes from?” asked Ephriam.
“He knows little that's going to help in finding his folks; but I don't allow he's got any. He's a pretty complete orphan.”
“Who are you, and where do you come from, child?” asked the old man gently, and he placed his hand on Benny's head, his long fingers straying among his sunburned curls.
“My name's Benny Rogers.” He spoke with a shrill little voice. “And where do you come from, Benny?”
“From Benson,” answered the child.
Ephriam seemed to consider, then he looked at the Missourian, who shook his head.
“Never heard of it,” said he shortly.
“Benson—and where is Benson?” and Ephriam turned again to Benny.
The boy's glance instantly became troubled.
“I don't know, but he told me I was to remember,” he said at last.
“Who told you to remember, Benny?”
“Mr. Landray.”
“Where is he?”
“The Indians killed him.”
“Where?”
“On the hill.”
“When? How long ago, I mean?”
“I don't know.”
“You are sure they killed him?”
“I seen them,” in a frightened whisper.
“And they were Indians?” he watched the child's face narrowly.
“Yes—”
“You are sure, Benny?”
Benny looked up into the old man's face doubtfully; he appeared to hesitate before answering.
“Yes, I am sure they was Indians.”
The three men glanced at each other.
“And your father, Benny, what became of him?”
“The Indians killed him; but that was after they killed Mr. Landray.”
“That's every blessed thing we could get out of him, elder,” said the Missourian.
But here a quite unexpected interruption occurred. There was the sound of wheels on the trail, and an open carriage to which was attached four spirited horses, drew up at the door. Ephriam rose hastily from his chair.
“Finish your meal,” he said, and with that he quitted the room.
“He's a right friendly old party,” was the Missourian's comment. “I reckon, Jim, it wouldn't take much to plant me heah. I might even get a revelation to take the young wife of some old Mormon saint.”
On leaving the house, Ephriam found himself in the midst of a score or more of armed and mounted men who were riding in from the trail; but without giving heed to these he hurried to the side of the carriage, which held a solitary occupant; a florid-faced, good-looking man of perhaps fifty, who, in spite of a certain physical coarseness, was a not unimpressive figure. He was carefully, even fastidiously dressed, while his whole air was that of one who placed a high opinion upon himself.
To him Ephriam presented himself, but for the moment he was entirely ignored. The florid-faced man looked on beyond him, and through the open door of the ranch house, where the two men and the child could be seen, and inspected them narrowly. One of the horsemen seemed equally interested in Raymond's guests; for he had ridden up close to the single window that lighted the room and peered in. Now he turned, making a slight gesture which the occupant of the carriage acknowledged by an almost imperceptible movement of the head; then he said to Raymond:
“Friends of yours, brother Ephriam?” and his short under lip and heavy chin quivered with some secret emotion.
“They are emigrants, Brother Brigham,” answered Ephriam quickly.
“Still they might be friends of yours, Brother Ephriam,” returned the other significantly, but he held out his hand frankly and cordially.