Even at this early hour the emigrant meadow was beginning to throb with noise and color. Oxen bellowed and mules bawled as men and boys brought back strings of the beasts from a long watering in Black’s Fork. The wind out of the west brought Scratch a cornucopia of fragrances, from fresh dung to coffee on the boil, from the strong perfume of bacon crackling in cast iron to the heavenly scent of flour biscuits or ground-corn johnnies. Here and there rode men on horseback, their eyes taking in everything as they moved slowly from wagon camp to wagon camp, rarely uttering a word that wasn’t some terse or scolding command.
“You figger ’em for Hargrove’s bully-boys?” Shad inquired.
“That’un, see how he just spotted us,” Titus replied. “Lookit him turn ’round an’ lick it back to give Hargrove the word that trouble just showed up.”
They watched that first rider off to their left give his horse a kick and lope away into the midst of the busiest place in camp, just before a second bullnecked horseman dared to ride a bit closer, standing in his stirrups for long moments while he satisfied his curiosity and got himself a good long look at the newcomers, then suddenly reined aside and tore off at a gallop.
“We ought’n find Roman’s camp straightaway,” Scratch declared sourly. “I figger company’s gonna come callin’ soon enough.”
“Never thought about it,” Shad admitted. “What if Hargrove an’ his boys say we can’t go along?”
Bass snorted. “You ever ask a by-your-please of ary a man to ride where you wanted to ride, Shadrach?”
“No. Onliest I ever give a thought of it was my first time in Blackfoot country up north.”
“What if they tol’t you, ‘No, you can’t ride across our country’?”
Sweete said, “We damn well rode across it anyways.”
“Now ain’t the time to change our ways, Shadrach.”
“Titus!” Roman Burwell shouted as he stepped from the corner of the wagon. “Come to see Shadrach off with us?”
He waited a few moments longer until he had stopped near the wagon and dropped to the ground there as Burwell, Amanda, and their children came flocking toward the horses and those two happy, yipping dogs.
“My stick floats with Shadrach,” he confessed. “Thort the young’uns an’ Waits might like to see some new country!”
“Y-you’re really coming along?” Amanda asked breathlessly, reaching out to take her father’s hand in both of hers.
“Till we get you to Fort Hall,” he confessed. “The two of us, we’ll run down a pilot to lead your bunch the rest of the way.”
Roman’s eyes flicked away, then he turned back to the two old trappers. “Seems Hargrove is coming to welcome you to the train himself.”
They all turned their heads, watching the three men approach. Train captain Hargrove, with two of his biggest men hard on his tail.
“Don’t that appear to be a big ol’ smile of welcome on that bastard’s face?” Titus grumbled with mock cheer. “Amanda, why don’t you take Waits and Shell Woman around the other side of the wagon with all the young’uns? Find ’em something to eat, maybe. Put ’em to helping you pack up your goods in that wagon.”
She could read the seriousness in his eyes. “All right, Pa.”
For a moment longer he watched Amanda gesture to the women, then start them around the back of the canvas-topped prairie schooner, where she would get them involved with more than the arrival of the wagon captain.
“Good morning, Burwell!” Hargrove sang out in that easygoing way of a man who always carried a smirk on his face and self-righteousness in his heart.
“Hargrove,” Roman responded.
The hair at Digger’s neck ruffed menacingly, and the dog growled, low at the back of his throat. Bass quieted him with a whisper. “Hush, boy!”
The captain’s eyes raked over the trappers. “I trust you’re here to bid farewell to these members of your family.”
With a shake of his head, Titus said, “That ain’t why we’re here.”
Straightening in the saddle and pressing his chin down against his puffed-up chest, Hargrove tried again. “Then it’s probably for the best that you’ve come to try talking Burwell and his wife into staying behind with you here until another train comes through for Oregon. Admirable, my good man—that you should place their welfare so highly, rather than see them risk it all on an unwise gamble on their own.”
“They won’t be on their own,” Titus declared. “My friend here, Mr. Shadrach Sweete, he was first to jump up an’ offer to ride along to Fort Hall. Likely find some fella there what can lead the train on to Oregon country after you an’ Harris gone off to Californy.”
Hargrove’s eyes appraised Sweete a moment. “You’ll be part of the Burwell family since you’ll be making the journey by yourself?”
Shadrach picked at an old scab on the back of one hand and said, “I ain’t goin’ alone. Got my family comin’ too.”
“Family?” the wagon captain repeated uneasily.
“Wife, two young’uns.”
“Wife? She’s come out from the East?”
Crossing his big forearms across the saddle where he stood on the ground beside his horse, Sweete peered over the animal at the man, saying, “She ain’t been no farther east than the Little Dried River, or the Smoky Hill. She’s Cheyenne.”
“So you’re a squaw-man?”
Bass slowly stepped aside and laid his rifle atop his saddle so that it pointed in Hargrove’s direction. “That’s a word you don’t wanna use with neither of us, Cap’n Hargrove. Some things just get under a man’s skin, an’ make him see red.”
He turned back to Sweete. “You’re married to a squaw.”
“Cheyenne, like I told you.”
“An’ my wife’s Crow,” Titus advised. “Her people come from far to the north. Likely you ain’t heard of ’em.”
Hargrove blinked a few times, then asked of Sweete, “Your … wife and children—you’ll be part of Burwell’s camp?”
“We will,” Bass replied for them all.
The wagon master’s head jerked in his direction. “We?”
“I figgered to go along, show my family some country, give a hand to Roman when he needed it—”
“I can’t allow all of you to join our train!”
“That don’t callate to me,” Bass argued. “Two day ago you was tellin’ ever’one how you an’ Black Harris was taking off for Californy on your own. So what the hell say you got in who throws in with these other folks when you’re dropping out soon as you reach Fort Hall?”
“It’s my train,” Hargrove growled. “I formed it, I—”
“You was elected captain,” Burwell interrupted as he stepped up suddenly, causing a horse ridden by one of the hired men to shy and shuffle backward awkwardly. “You don’t own none of us. Not our wagons. An’ you sure as the devil don’t own this trail.”
“We’ll see what the others have to say about that!”
Scratching the side of his cheek, Titus said, “No man’s got a right to tell me where I can ride and where I can make camp for the night, Cap’n.”
Hargrove glanced to his right, then to his left, in a way that unmistakably indicated his hired men. With a smile he said, “I think we understand one another. In this wild country, might always makes right.”
“Most times,” Sweete responded.
Hargrove wagged his head meaningfully and clucked, “It can make a man nervous, forced to watch over his shoulder for trouble creeping up on him all the time.”