Читать книгу Stand Up and Die - William W. Johnstone - Страница 10

CHAPTER FOUR

As captain of the wagon train that had left Dead Trout, Arkansas, the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III called every man, woman, and child he was leading to the promised land to kneel in the camp’s circle. He was captain of the train, but preferred his rank of sergeant major, which he had earned through hard campaigning with the Thirteenth Arkansas Infantry for the late Confederacy.

All twenty-six people knelt, bowed their heads, and took hands as the Reverend began to pray.

“Dear Lord,” he said, “Please guide us safely through the evil, sinful town that blocks our path to the glory that awaits us in Rapture Valley, Territory of Arizona. God, spare our children from the sights of debauchery, lewdness, smut, immorality, and from the offensiveness and drunkenness. Spare them, Lord, spare all of us, from the wretched, the gamblers, the confidence men and, Lord have mercy, the confidence women. And the fornicators—especially the fornicators, prostitutes, the soiled doves, the bawdy women, the strumpets, concubines, the harlots, the ladies of the evening, the courtesans, the lost lambs. Oh those poor lost souls. Lord have mercy on them—those scarlet women, those Jezebels, shameless hussies, the dance hall girls. Oh, God, if you could just strike down all those dancers with a thunderous bolt of lighting—and the floozies and the tramps and the trollops. And God, please spare us from the nymphomaniacs, if thus be Thy Will!”

He went on for deliverance from the evils of the gamblers and the confidence men (again), and the cutthroats and murderers and any Jayhawkers that might have drifted down from Kansas into the Panhandle of Texas, and any Yankee-loving son of a cur dog that dared slight the great Confederate States of America and, in especial, the state most noble to that glorious of now lost cause, Arkansas.

“Lord, you know after years of Yankee rule and the curse of Reconstruction, there was nothing left for us, your poor servants in Dead Trout, but you showed us the glory that awaits us if we make it to Rapture Valley,” he prayed on, sweating. “And if by your grace we survive this Sodom of Texas, the Gomorrah of our travels, if we can live to see New Mexico Territory and aren’t bushwhacked, raped, pillaged and tortured to death—all for your glory—by Mexicans or Apaches, and maybe Mormons if any of them live in the territory, and get us to . . .”

By that point, raven-haired Annie Homes’ neck hurt from such an eternally long bow, and her knees hurt from the prickly pear cactus on the flat expanse of Texas. She lifted her head and looked beyond their camp at the trail that led to Five Scalps, Texas. She breathed a little easier seeing that Winfield Baker had stopped praying, too, as had Betsy Stanton. Betsy, harlot that she was, began rolling a cigarette.

“You better hope the sergeant major doesn’t see you,” Annie whispered.

Betsy licked the paper and stuck the cigarette into her mouth.

“Got a match?” she asked Winfield, who tried to stifle his laugh. After winking at Annie, Betsy unbuttoned the top button on her blouse and dropped the unlit cigarette between her ample bosoms. “I’ll smoke it later, I reckon.” She giggled.

Winfield Baker’s eyes bulged.

That didn’t make Annie happy, but she held her temper and tongue and made herself look down the road at the dust sweeping across the first buildings on the outskirts of Five Scalps. Maybe, she prayed, that was the Lord hearing the long prayer of the reverend and sending his vengeance to destroy the evil that awaited them just a mile down the trail.

“Amen,” the preacher said.

Annie, Winfield, and Betsy quickly dropped their heads, answered, “Amen,” and then raised their heads and looked up at the heavens. They thanked the Lord again, helped each other off the cactus, thorns, and ants, and slapped at the dust and bits of gravel. Cactus spines stuck in their clothes and flesh.

“Reverend Sergeant Major Homer?” Annie heard her father Walter ask. “Flat as this country is, wouldn’t it make sense to just ride around Five Scalps, and not go through it?”

“Yeah,” said Horace Greeley, whose name often was the butt of many a joke. The Horace Greeley from Dead Trout, Arkansas, only touched a newspaper when he took one to the privy since he could neither read nor write. But this Horace Greeley was going West—just like that other Horace Greeley had invited and urged Americans to do.

“Well,” the preacher said in a blast of fire and brimstone, “You may flee if such is your will. Ride around a test that God himself has put before us. Nay, say I. Nay, will I. As a sergeant major in the Thirteenth Arkansas Infantry, I, the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose the Third, will see what is God’s will.”

He had already preached too much fear into the hearts of his fellow Arkansas travelers. Twenty-one of them elected to ride around Five Scalps, so Annie climbed into the back of the covered wagon, settled on the blanket and sack of flour between the chifforobe and her mother’s pie safe, and felt the oxen start walking. As the wagon lurched, Annie bumped her head against the wagon and cursed—but not loud enough for her parents or the pious sergeant major to hear. She bounced this way and that, although she really could not tell the difference between the path they had been following and the plains they crossed to go around the nefarious town.

Eventually, the wagons stopped, and she heard her mother and father climb down from the driver’s box. Annie pulled herself out from between the two pieces of furniture and rubbed her upper left arm where she felt certain she would see a bruise by tomorrow. She crawled through the tangle of blankets, clothes, and sacks, and peered through the rear oval opening in the canvas covering the wagon. Other members of the train—men, women, girls about Annie’s age, boys a few years older, and the little kids, were gathering and looking back east at the town of Five Scalps.

“Huh,” Winfield Baker was telling Jimmy Donovan when Annie came up beside him. “From all the stories we heard, I figured that Five Scalps would be a great deal larger.”

“It sure ain’t like the picture of that wicked city of Gomorrah that we got in our Bible,” Jimmy said, leaning forward and grinning. “Howdy, Annie.”

She returned the greeting and took a step closer to Five Scalps, Texas, so she could always say she got closer to that evil place than any of the other members of the Primrose Train.

“I don’t see the captain,” said one of the men off to Annie’s left.

“Or the others,” an old lady murmured.

“My God,” said Aunt Rachel, the oldest woman on the wagon train, who, as far as Annie knew, wasn’t related to anyone in Dead Trout, but everybody called her Aunt. “ Maybe they’ve been taken in by those evil villains.”

“Either that or the prairie swallowed ’em up,” someone else said.

A few of the men huddled together to determine their next course of action.

Annie inched her way about another foot closer, though Five Scalps still had to be a quarter mile, from where they had stopped.

“Huh,” she said, holding her scarf when a gust of wind blew.

The town might have five scalps somewhere, but it didn’t have five buildings, even if you included the privy.

A good-sized adobe structure, two stories with a high wall enclosing the flat roof, and gun ports on all sides. Too small for a fort, certainly not a jail, but from the number of horses at the hitching rail, it had to be the center of town. In fact, it was the town’s center. To its left and across the trail stood a smaller building, but it wasn’t anything more than a sod hut. To the big adobe’s right and on the same side of the trail stood another soddie, but a mite larger than the one on the left-hand side of the trail. Three buildings. Four if you included the privy. Five if you wanted to count the corral.

Annie pointed. “Isn’t that the Reverend Primrose’s wagon?”

It was hard to tell. The wind had picked up again and was blowing dust.

Her father tensed. “By the terrors, those dirty dogs must have bushwhacked the Reverend. And Thad, Jim, Hawg, and Muldoon.”

Another man said, “Isn’t that our captain wandering to that hovel across the street?”

Added Hawg’s cousin, “With that gal hanging on his arm?”

For about the time it took the man who looked a lot like the Reverend Sergeant Major Homer Primrose III cross the dusty street, no one in the Primrose Train spoke. The wind blew dust as the man managed to keep his hat on with one hand, his other hand holding on to the scantily clad damsel in distress. A moment later, the reverend—or someone who looked a lot like the reverend—and the girl were inside the soddie.

“Maybe that’s the church,” said Mrs. Primrose, whose husband had insisted that she travel with Aunt Rachel around Five Scalps. Mrs. Primrose said it again and nodded in affirmation. “Yes, that is the church.”

“What are we to do?” Aunt Rachel asked, then spit out juice from her snuff.

“Wait for the baptism,” Hawg’s cousin said.

Winfield Baker could not stifle his snigger, which caused him to get a quick scolding from his mother, father, and grandmother.

Annie’s father pulled his hat down tighter and turned around. “Let’s just see to our teams and our families. We’ll wait here. Stay close to your families, and I’m sure the captain will rejoin us later when he has . . .” His voice trailed off as he sighed.

Annie followed her parents back to the wagon.

* * *

She liked the way her father prayed. He sounded sincere, never so pompous as the Reverend Primrose. Her father prayed like he meant it. He didn’t ramble like the wagon train boss, but got to the point and wrapped it up. When he thanked God, he sounded sincere.

Annie’s family had corn pone, salt pork, leftover beans, and hot tea for their supper. They rolled out their bedrolls and sat on them, watching that big ball of orange slowly sink in the west like it had found quicksand in the distance and was being pulled underneath. The skies turned red, orange, purple and yellow, and finally the tip of the sun bid good-bye for the night.

“We never saw anything like that in Arkansas,” Walter said. “Did we, Mother?” Annie’s father often called his wife Mother.

“Too many trees.” Harriet shook her head. “Never thought I’d miss those trees till we got out here. When’s the last time we saw a tree?”

He laughed. “We’ll see them in Rapture Valley, Mother.” He winked at Annie. “The hillsides are filled with trees, piñon, and juniper, even pines farther up the hills. But the valley is wonderful and lush with grass. Paradise for sure. I’ll build my two girls a home in the hills, and the rest of the valley I’ll cover with my cattle.”

He had been talking about this for years.

The Reverend Primrose said the residents of Dead Trout had been driven out by carpetbaggers and Yankee scalawags, but Walter had been dreaming of leaving the Arkansas hills since even before the War Between the States. When that flyer showed up from the Concord mail stage, and someone posted it on the wall at the general store, he had seen it. He had been the first to suggest that a few families set out for the new country. Get away from the poverty and mosquitoes of the hills. Do what Horace Greeley—the newspaper man—said. Go West.

If anyone asked Annie, the men of the wagon train should have elected her father as the head of the train, but the reverend had been a good soldier, at least if you listened to what he said. He had even once set out for California, spent three years there before returning to Arkansas. He knew the trails even though the one he had taken to California and back had been much farther north.

“Do you trust the reverend?” Annie heard herself ask.

“Child,” her mother, Harriet, scolded, “He’s a man of the cloth.”

Annie’s eyes shot toward Five Scalps and the soddie across from the big trading post or whatever it was. She wondered if her first thought, Sergeant Major Primrose likely is not wearing any sort of cloth right now, would be declared a sin come Judgment Day.

Her father smiled with the patience of a father. “He has been to California.”

“We’re not going to California,” she pointed out.

“But he knows the trails, or at least, how to handle a wagon train on the trail.” Walter reached over and patted her arm. “You see how he taught us to circle our wagons at camp, and he guided us across the Red River into Texas. Now here we are, deep in Comanche and Kiowa territory, and we have not been attacked yet.”

“And he preaches a good sermon.” Harriet had always been one to admire some brimstone and vinegar.

“We have traveled six hundred miles, Daughter. Perhaps farther, and that means we are almost halfway to our new home. I would not disservice our train’s duly elected captain by complaining or making disparaging comments as to his wisdom or leadership abilities. We are all in good health and have run into no trouble to speak of.” He looked over at Five Scalps and shook his head with a smile, sipped the last of his tea, and turned back toward Annie.

“The Reverend Sergeant Major is a man, Annie, and men are—”

“Idiots,” her mother said.

They all laughed.

“Well, I am not idiot enough to argue with your mother, Annie, so I will agree with her. When the Reverend Primrose returns with the others we shall continue on to our destination. Perhaps we are delayed by the evils that men do, but let the boys be boys. There is not much left for them until we reach Arizona Territory. Do not frown too much at this delay. It is, I feel, needed.”

Her father’s face told Annie that he wasn’t speaking entirely truthfully. He was just trying to make things seem better than they were. That was her father’s way.

“You didn’t want to go with them?” her mother asked and chuckled at her good humor.

“I might have, Mother,” he said with a smile, and rose to collect the dishes. Most men would leave washing dishes to the women, but Walter liked to do things, liked to stay busy. He wasn’t one to waste time playing cards or drinking intoxicating spirits when he could be accomplishing something, like going to Arizona Territory to start a new life, or going around a place like Five Scalps to avoid unnecessary delay, or even washing the supper dishes.

She helped him because she loved her father. Her mother came to help, too.

This is the way a family should be, Annie thought.

When she prayed that night before going to sleep, she thanked God for that greatest of gifts.