and so far no one has forced them back. Now they think the treaty doesn’t count any more and they aren’t bound by it. In this Captain Jack’s mind, that means all this range is still his. He wants rent.”
The man puffed at Applegate and turned away on his heel, tapping his hat against his thigh, impatient at being detained by a ridiculous idea.
“Well,” Carr said. “You should shoot him. Then he wouldn’t think it was his.”
He walked out of the house through the still-empty door-frame and stood in the shade, squinting his eye against the bright sunlight, scanning from west to east and back again.
“Tomorrow I’ll want to ride down on the far side of the lake and see if we can’t figure out the southern boundary. You bring along your surveying stuff. I’ll need a legal description of all the lines, metes and bounds I guess, before I put a word out about this. I want you to survey it, if you can do it.
“And if you’re going to manage this rancho for me,” he continued, “you’re going to have to ride better herd on those Indians. I don’t put up with insolence, and I don’t want my foreman doing it either.”
#58
Black Jim shoved on the door when the woman opened it just a little. When she screamed and backed away, he pushed in past her. The cabin was just one room, but it had everything in it: a cook place, a bed, some straight-up chairs, a table. The oil-cloth over the window cut down on the light, but he could still see it looked good in there.
“My husband’s not here now!” she shrieked. “Not here now! Not here now!” Shouting as if he would understand the words if she just made them loud enough, backing away from him.
He crossed to the fireplace, fingered the strange things on the mantle, and took down the crystalline ball. Inside it he could see the little cabin, the tree. When he shook it, the white ground swirled up in a snowstorm. Medicine of some sort, he thought. Maybe he would take it to Curley Headed Doctor. Holding it in his hand, he went over to the bed and threw himself on it. She should shut-up her screaming.
He rolled over on the bed so he could look at her where she had backed behind the table.
“Illahee good!” he said in Chinook jargon, passing the glass ball in front of him, holding it out so it encompassed all the land surrounding the cabin’s four walls. “Illahee good!” he repeated. But she only stared at him, frozen. “You cook,” he said slowly, repeating the new English word Boston Charley had just taught him. “Boston woman cook for Black Jim!”
#59
When Wade went outside to collect his pants, the clothesline was empty. But he caught a glimpse of something crouched down by the hen house. Then it got up and ran.
“Drop them drawers!” Wade shouted. “Drop ‘em or your dead!”
Without turning, the Indian tossed the britches back over his shoulder and sprinted, not pausing to see who was coming. The soles of his moccasined feet flashed as he pounded away down the track.
“Hunh-Hunh! Hunh-Hunh!” his breath went with each stride, like a wind-broke mare, the sounds getting fainter and fainter as he cleared the track and leaped out of sight into the bushes.
“Dang!” Wade said to no one as he went out bare-assed, stepping gingerly in his stockings over the cinder track, and fetched back the pants.
#60
Here, inside the Middleton, Connecticut, Methodist Church, after the last sounds of the Mendelssohn Quintette had drifted away, Master Darius Baker delivered himself of the Salutory Address -- in Latin. “If… dog… rabbit,” Major General Edward Sprigg Canby said to himself as he listened.
Outside, above the bunting, the pennants snapped at the azure summer sky. The procession had marched along Court Street to Main and thence to the church, the thirty-six young men of Wesleyan University, the faculty of six, the platform party, all in their academic regalia. Now they sat, the dignitaries gazing out over the scrubbed and hopeful up-tipped faces of the graduates. Beyond them, the ladies and gentlemen in their pearl-grey suits, their hats and gloves, listened raptly, each word a reward to them for their sons’ successes in enduring.
“If…,” he thought. “If the dog had not stopped to lift its leg, the dog would have caught the rabbit. But the dog had stopped….” He stopped, too, struck by the fact that from his place of honor here on this platform really only about one hundred miles separated him from the place of his real beginning thirty-one years ago. West Point. Class of ‘39. A circuitous coming it had been. The program notes about him, he was relieved to observe, said nothing about his standing that long-ago June day: thirtieth in a class of thirty-three. There had been little or nothing then to suggest he would sit here waiting to have the honorary doctor of law’s hood slipped over his head, after the last speaker had charged the graduates to seize the day.
No, the program notes talked instead about the contingencies of his fifty-three years. Reviewing the program to help pass the time, he had remembered the brief parable of the dog and the rabbit: If he had not succeeded in moving his batch of Seminoles without losing them -- as others had been lost between Tennessee and the Indian Territory -- he would not have been commissioned to Mexico. If he had failed there to take the battery on the right flank of the hill at Cerro Gordo, he would not have been detailed to California in time to watch his deserting men convert from soldiers to gold-miners. Had he not brought them back in, he would not have been chosen for posting eventually to Utah -- via Kearney, Laramie, Bridger, the string of forts that would lead him to confront the Mormons, peaceably. And thereby would eventually have missed out on New Mexico’s Glorieta Pass and Sibley’s rebels, the New York draft riots, Fort Morgan with Farragut, being shot in the ass aboard the gunboat Cricket. And last of all, “The Reconstruction.” Commander of the Military Division of West Mississippi, Commander of the District of the Gulf, Commander of the Department of Washington, of the 5th Military District (Texas), the 1st Military District (Virginia), the 2nd Military District (Carolinas).
He could, he realized, have missed this. If things had been different.
But they weren’t and he hadn’t. So today, under the sober but optimistic New England sun, he was sitting here, exhausted or perhaps merely tired of it all, while the crowd of spectators craned its necks and adjusted itself so each could bear witness. It was time, all right, for the change that was coming. He could see Louisa at the farthest end of a pew, as she would be. When he had finished his remarks and the hood had been spread on his shoulders, they would be gone from this eastern world. Not a moment too soon for either of them. Time to shake the Insurrection’s dust from their feet. Time to leave this Eastern Establishment to its own devisings.
“A pleasant trip to you,” Sherman had said benignly in his letter.
That was what he wished for, too. For himself, but especially for Louisa. Patient, enduring Louisa, who still ‘walked with reed-like grace of movement.’ The last two or three years -- ever since their arrival in New Orleans -- had been hard for her. Harder, even, than the starving months of the winter of ‘57, when they lived in a tent as he built up Fort Bridger. Later, the recriminations, the attacks in the various newspapers of the ‘occupied’ territories, had been for him an understandable part of the job of reconstruction. Who could expect a defeated people to welcome the commander of the army of occupation, especially when he would mix so intimately into the political rearrangements taking place? He knew better than to take it personally and had simply persisted, as he was wont to do. But the words and