The Valley

by Sevenstars

15-year-old Slim Sherman and his family arrive in Wyoming Territory to make their home.

The Valley

by Sevenstars

SUMMARY: Another "young-Slim" story, a sequel to "Naming Day," telling how Slim and his family came to Wyoming. Guest appearance by a young Flint McCullough of Wagon Train.

In "Cemetery Road," Slim says that he (and presumably his family) first came to Wyoming by wagon train, though he doesn't say exactly when. Given that in "The Lonesome Gun" it was established that Matt Sherman began bossing trail-drives up from Texas when Slim was "seven or eight" (says Jonesy), probably to the Missouri River jumping-off towns, that Slim began going along at the age of 13 (15 years before the ep., when he's 28), and that the Shermans are obviously not Texans themselves, I choose to interpret this as meaning that they didn't move to Wyoming until after the trail-driving period, and that until then they lived somewhere in the Midwest, probably in the Indiana/Illinois/Iowa arc, which before the Civil War was an important beef-raising and -finishing region. I also wanted to expand on the fact that, in "The Pass," we learn that Slim can understand the Cheyenne language, though perhaps not speak it, while in "Handful of Fire" it's established that he's good enough in Sioux to serve as an interpreter.

Thanks to best pard Gloria for beta assistance.

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July, 1858:

Slim Sherman, fifteen and a half years old, five feet ten and a half with his boots off and a hundred and fifty-four pounds sopping wet in his longjohns, checked his piefaced Texas grulla pony as the wagonmaster's long descending "Ho-o-o-o!" sounded from up at the head of the column and the wagons slowly ground to a stop. He dropped his hand to his side, to the plain sleek holster holding the Colt Paterson .34 revolver that had been Joey Redhawk's, and loosened the old gun a bit in its place; a halt could come for any of a dozen or more reasons, but in these last 650-some miles—not to speak of two seasons on drives up the trail from Texas—he'd learned that it was always wise to be ready for trouble. He slanted a quick look sideways and up, to the high sheepskin-covered seat of the wagon where his mother sat, with his eight-month-old brother Andy in her arms and Jonesy alongside her handling the reins. Till they caught up with Pa again, all three were his responsibility, and he didn't propose to slack off.

A little whirlwind of dust appeared up the column, with a big dark dot in the middle of it that resolved itself into a rider on a horse—a roan mare with mottled splotches like a bobcat. It pulled up with a flourish and the rider touched his hat quickly to the woman on the seat, then turned his attention to Slim. "Mr. Bridger says for you all to come up, Slim," he said. "We found your pa's marker."

"Thanks, Flint." Slim relaxed a bit and called up: "Jonesy, you hear that?"

"Not deef yet, boy," the ex-trail-cook retorted, "just got a bad sacroiliac," and he slapped the team with the reins— "Git up there, boys! Git up, Willie, Joe!" The six-up leaned into their collars and the wagon eased forward, angled, and swung out of line. "Hiyaaa!" Jonesy hollered, and the horses picked up their feet and pulled. Slim and Flint waited till the rig had passed them, then fell in behind it. They were about of an age, but Flint McCullough was the older by some six or eight months, shorter, more compact, with dark-red hair, laughing eyes, a lazy smile, and a generous spatter of freckles on a face that might one day be roguishly good-looking. He wore a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, a fringed doeskin shirt, and strong cord trousers, with a gorgeous beaded belt cinched around his waist—it had been given to him, he'd told Slim, by a Sioux friend, a youngster named Curly Horse, back three or four years. Like Slim, he carried a sidegun—a Navy Model 1851 .36 revolver—and also a bone-handled knife in a case strapped to his leg. He spoke with a faint flavor of the Upper South, having been born in Virginia, though he'd lived at Bridger's Fort ever since his westering parents were killed by Indians when he was eight—half his life, now.

Jonesy steered the wagon deftly up the length of the column, to where Justin Mayborn, the wagonmaster, waited on his nankeen-colored "yellow" mare, with Flint's foster father, the train's scout, Jim Bridger, the famous mountain man, alongside him. Bridger was around fifty, but so weathered that he looked older, except for the gleam in his eyes; he was dressed all in fringed deerskin clothing decorated with bead- and quillwork, and the bay pinto pony he sat was rigged out with an old flat-hulled Spanish saddle sprinkled with silver. Mayborn was younger, probably thirty-five or so; he'd been taking wagon trains out to California ever since 1850, one every year. He touched his hat to Slim's mother, then waited till the two young men swung out and around to come up to him. Jonesy drew the team to a halt and sat forward, elbows on knees.

Mary Sherman was forty-two, a dozen years younger than her husband, a full-bodied, square-shouldered woman with dark hair and a rosy-beige skin tone that stood up well to the prairie sun and wind; her best feature was her eyes, large and round and black-brown. Pa said baby Andy was going to look just like her one of these days. She wore a checked gingham sunbonnet and a blue travelling dress with white collar and cuffs. "Mr. Mayborn? Flint says you found Matt's marker?"

It was Bridger who answered. "Yes, ma'am. Right yonder." He pointed to a heap of stones piled together just off the trail, with a small branch, stripped of its bark, lying on top of it, small end pointing southwestward. "That's Injun sign, Miz Sherman. Your man knows all them things. Plus he left this here stickin' out the top of it, so's we'd be sure not to take it for real redskin work." He passed up a stouter stick with a checkered cloth knotted to it; Slim recognized the scarf Ma always tied around her head when she was cleaning house. Ma did too; he could see the relief on her face as Jonesy took it from the former trapper and handed it over to her.

"This was tucked inside the mound," Mayborn added. "It's a map, shows how to go to get where he means to settle you. Reckon you better have charge of it, Slim," he said, and handed it to the blond youth. It was a sheet of soft-tanned buckskin—less likely than paper to suffer from water leaks—with markings drawn across it in some dark dye. Slim didn't bother to look at them right away, just folded the sheet and tucked it through the front of his gunbelt. "I sent back to have your stock cut out," Mayborn went on— "it'll be brought up here as the herd passes."

"Then this is goodbye," Ma said. "Thank you for everything, Mr. Mayborn."

"Glad to've had you along, Mrs. Sherman, you and yours. Slim's been a right help, especially since his pa rode on ahead; we appreciate that."

"Boy," Bridger told Flint, "you best go along with 'em a spell, help Slim with them critters. Shouldn't take you but five days at most to make it to Dancytown, then you can head on up the Laramie Basin and meet us at Kettle Creek."

"Sure, Mr. Bridger." Flint grinned briefly at Slim. "Give us a little more time for Slim to practice his Sioux."

The former trapper shook hands with Slim and Jonesy, and Mayborn did the same. "Good luck to you all," he said. "Take care of them, Flint." And he stood up in his stirrups and gave the call: "Wagons... ho-o!"

Jonesy checked the team in as the wagons lurched forward again, people waving from the seats as they passed, calling good wishes, promises that they'd write when they got to California. The loose stock came after, cattle and horses and mules all moving at a steady trail pace, Mr. Dowling's flock of sheep blatting mindlessly and flowing along like a puddle of thin gray mud, and last several of the stocktenders doing their best to keep the Shermans' fifty beef heifers and their calves, two young bulls and thirty-odd extra horses from blending back into the familiar herd. They peeled off as Slim and Flint took over, and thundered on to catch up. The Sherman wagon stayed where it was, Jonesy and Mary watching as the column was swallowed up in its own dust cloud. Slim and Flint couldn't spare the attention to do the same: the stock missed their trailmates and were half inclined to stampede to catch up. Copying the tactic trail drivers used, Slim got them milling, with Flint helping, and soon they were still, confused and disoriented. He waited till he was sure they weren't going to break out again, then pulled Pa's map out of his belt and he and Flint leaned over it from their saddles, studying it. "If we push a little," Flint said, his long forefinger moving across Pa's cryptic markings, "we can camp at this bend tonight, fill your water barrels, and then make an easy day of it to the Chugwater and follow that on down a couple more."

"Guess you know this country better than I do," Slim allowed. "You better take the point, I'll bring the stock along."

"Think you can manage 'em all by yourself?" Flint teased, grinning.

"I've taken a two-hundred-horse remuda all the way up from San Antonio to Independence and never lost a one," Slim retorted. "How bad can a little outfit like this be?"

"Bad enough, when you're tryin' to herd cattle and horses together," Flint observed seriously. "I'll swing back every so often and check on you." He spun his mare around. "Come on, Jonesy," he shouted, "follow me," and the mare broke forward in a lunging jump. Jonesy yelled at the horses and sawed on the reins, swinging the wagon away from the deep-cut grooves of the trail, lurching and bouncing across the seventy-five yards or so of rough ground left behind by fifteen years of westbound wagon trains travelling abreast of one another.

Slim drew his bandanna up over his nose and mouth and took his rope down from the string on his saddle pommel, shooting out the end of it in a series of explosive pops, the way he'd learned to do last year when he was riding the drags in his second season as a trail driver. This year he'd have been flank, most likely, if Pa hadn't decided to make the move West that he'd been talking about for as far back as Slim could well remember. "I got a good stake built up now," he'd said, "and I can get us a fine deal on cattle from Arch Bowman, young first-calf heifers that can take the trip. And things are gettin' worse between North and South every year, seems like; if Frémont had got to be President the South might just had to make good on its threats and secede. I don't aim to get caught in the middle of a war—and there'll be one, you mind me, if the South breaks away."

The stock responded to his urgings, stirring out of their mill and trailing after the wagon, on the flank and upwind. Ma had been a little uneasy about a westward journey with a tiny baby, which Slim supposed was natural, given that she'd lost no less than eight in the first twelve years of his own life. But little Andy seemed to be thriving on it, cooing and gurgling and waving his arms and legs and suckling (when the opportunity was offered him) as greedily as a longhorn calf. Slim hoped he'd make it; he knew Ma had been grieved to leave the graves of the others behind—having a little one to care for, these next few years, would be good for her, he figured.

Pa had sold the house and land and the older cattle, the latter going to Arch Bowman, the breeder "next door," who'd provided the heifers and calves and the two young bulls. He'd sold the pigs too, which Slim couldn't truthfully say he regretted—he'd never liked the critters, even though they were the most efficient mortgage-lifter anyone could ask for. He'd kept two of the milk cows, one with calf, one bred to freshen in the fall, and a couple of pens' worth of young hens and roosters, and Slim had been astonished to see how quickly the birds became trail-wise: let out at each stop to feed and exercise by scratching in the grass or chasing insects stirred up by the hooves of the grazing livestock, at the first rattle of harness chain they'd hurry back to the safety of their crates, the only homes they knew. He'd bought a good new wagon, a Studebaker from South Bend, Indiana, specifying one that was riveted together; the rough, rocky overland trails, he'd said, quickly shook apart the kind put together with nuts and bolts. With a trail unit hitched on behind, chiefly for the things they'd need to make camp every day or might want to get at in a hurry—camp stove, tent, featherbed, cooking gear, provisions, clothes, washtub, Jonesy's doctoring satchel and wooden chest of herbal medicines—the whole thing weighed in at around three tons, and a team of six strong horses could haul it without undue difficulty.

Much of the furniture had been left behind, but they still had Pa's small rolltop desk, the rush-seated dining-room chairs (both ladderback and rocking) that he'd made, his and Ma's ornamentally cast brass bedstead, the four-panelled corner cupboard that Ma's uncle had built for them when they married, the Biedermeier wardrobe, the walnut linen press still stuffed with bedclothes, quilts, table linen, and towels, the "Irish" cupboard for the kitchen, and the six-hole wood-burning range, all three-hundred-odd pounds of it. And where small things were concerned, Ma had pretty much gotten her own way: all the books, her favorite pictures, her guitar, her full set of transfer-printed chinaware (service for twelve, a hundred and twenty-four pieces), the "good" Sunday silver and the everyday bone-handled steelware, the pressed glass, the toilet sets, curtains, Argand lamps, the Seth Thomas mantel clock, flower seeds and garden seeds, cuttings from her climbing roses, and an assortment of trunks and boxes full of oddments from both sides of the family dating back maybe eighty or ninety years, things that were important to Sherman and Bryan history. They had window glass and the pierced-tin panels for a pie-safe (the safe itself would be easy enough for Pa or Jonesy to build), all the hand farming tools, and the light plow for the kitchen garden, but of the larger machinery the only thing Pa hadn't sold was the revolving one-horse hay-rake ("We're not goin' to be farmers," he'd said— "we'll be ranchers, raisin' beef, and till our herd grows we can sell hay"). He'd fixed up a kind of basket cradle for Andy that could be slung from the wagon bows in the daytime, when the rocking motion of the moving wagon would help lull him to sleep, and from the tent-pole at night, which would keep him safe from snakes.

Andy, fortunately, had been born early enough that Ma didn't have to cope with being pregnant on the trail, as probably one out of five emigrant women did, and had been recovered from his birth well before they had to start out for the river towns. Pa had been reading the advertisements in the St. Louis papers, where as far back as '43 promoters had been inviting prospective emigrants to meet and organize, charging a certain fee per wagon to take them across country; that was how he'd lit on Mr. Mayborn. Mayborn started his trains from Kansas City, at the mouth of the Kaw River, so Pa had written Jonesy to meet them there, which Jonesy had, and while they waited for the train to get fully formed he'd found a buyer for his chuck wagon. The place had been nearly as wondrous to Slim as his first Mississippi River steamer, or the Texas State Capitol at Austin. All the river towns—St. Charles and Franklin, later Independence and Westport, Atchison, St. Joseph, Leavenworth, Omaha, Council Bluffs—were now, as they always had been, something pretty special, points of distribution for goods and men. From them led the trails over which travellers streamed by horseback, covered wagon, stagecoach, and foot, with railroads, visionaries insisted, one day to come; to them came all the varied types of humanity who made up that mosaic of American types known as "Westerners." But Kansas City was a city unique in the Republic; the crown jewel of a string of "jumping-off points" that faced toward the unknown West, the "Indian country," the trappers' "Shining Mountains," the Spanish (later Mexican) possessions which now were a part of the United States, the green valleys of Oregon, and the goldfields and rolling surf of California. It had always been the cream of them, always had a certain air about it, a certain frontier love of the best which went with the character of the daring young men who made it their headquarters. It was a city remarkable for its vigor, briskness, and enthusiasm for the good life. Here at the bend of the Missouri, North, South, and West met, and the streets were thronged with people of every description: dark, broad-hatted Mexicans in slashed trousers and bright shirts; French hunters from the mountains and American riflemen from Kentucky and its environs; bearded mountain men in buckskin; bullwhackers carrying their long whips; merchants in broadcloth and tall hats; Indians—Sauks and Foxes with shaved heads and painted faces, Shawnees and Delawares in calico shirts and turbans, Wyandots dressed like white men, wretched Kansa wrapped in blankets, and splendid tribesmen from the Plains. Traders, buffalo hunters, explorers, English sportsmen, steamboat pilots, industrialists, tavernkeepers, rivermen, stage drivers, financiers, land speculators as checkered as their vests, Texas cattlemen in their high-heeled boots and broad slouch hats, gamblers with their cards (and sometimes their derringers) up their sleeves, French-Canadian voyageurs and their halfbreed sons with gay-colored sashes wrapped around their middles, Army officers and common soldiers, and now even railroad magnates and transient tracklayers, all with a certain flair for manly elegance if it went no further than a love of fine feathers and a readiness to fight, mingled in the streets with the permanent residents and the emigrant hopefuls, all conversing in a mixture of several Indian tongues (and sign language where those failed), three European languages (English, French, and Spanish), and a score of dialects. Dressed in Eastern styles, the wives and daughters of the leading citizens picked their way daintily through slush, mud, or dust, mingling freely enough with "decent" calico-clad women in sunbonnets, all alike discreetly averting their eyes when the orange-haired "other kind" went by.

The wagon train had pulled out the sixth of May, with Bridger and Flint to guide it, and the two-plus months since had been spent forging westward and literally upward, as the tallgrass prairie, rising in elevation, gave way to shortgrass plain cut across by dry washes, deep, narrow, unexpected gullies, and even canyons. Pa had left about a week ago, to ride on ahead to the place where he wanted to settle them, a place he'd first found years ago when he was trading with the Indians out this way. Slim had wondered if he'd get to see Fort Laramie before they had to turn off, but that hadn't happened: it was still, by his figuring, a good half-day's journey ahead up the Platte.

All over this last winter, Pa had been teaching him to speak the Sioux language; Sioux and Crow, he'd said, were the stock trade languages of the northern plains (in the south it was Comanche, with Spanish a close second), and most Indians you met could get by in one or the other, perhaps piecing out their vocabularies with the wonderful, graceful hand-talk. In any case, the country where they'd be living was traditionally Sioux ground, and it was always good to be able to converse with your neighbors. When he met up with Flint, Slim had quickly discovered that the other boy spoke it even better than Pa did, and ever since then they'd been carrying on most of their private conversations in it, sharpening up Slim's command of it. Even Bridger said he was "doin' right well," which, considering the man's reputation, Slim took as high praise.

The wagon was following a little creek now, bearing west by southwest, then gradually swinging due west as the stream angled. Sixty or seventy miles straight ahead lifted the shining peaks of the Laramie Mountains; Slim had been seeing them these last thirty or forty, but they seemed more solid now, more real, and they took his breath away—a long sawtoothed spine of snow-capped rock, lower slopes dark with conifers; much like what he thought the Alps, over in Europe, might be like. The prairie hadn't seemed strange to him: he'd been born on one in Illinois, after all. But never in his life, not even in the hilly Indian Nations, had he seen the like of these mountains.

They camped at the bend Flint had specified, turning the animals out to graze but parking the wagon in the trees along the stream, and when the stock had fed, bringing them back into the growth as well. "No need to worry your ma," Flint told his friend, "but like your pa said, this is Sioux country, and they're a lot less friendly than they used to be back when Mr. Bridger first came through it. So we'll just sort of hunker down in these trees where we'll be harder to spot and the branches and leaves can break up the smoke from our fire." Slim figured Flint knew what he was talking about: this might be his first shot at guiding emigrants, but last year, no older than Slim was now, he'd ridden with Bridger to scout for General Johnston against the Mormons. Fortunately Ma had long since realized, with the steady and sometimes considerable prairie winds, that digging a trench for the fire was the best way to keep it from blowing out; it didn't seem to occur to her that it also made the flames harder to spot at a distance.

"Are we going to have to go over those mountains?" she asked Flint over supper. "I don't see how we can..."

"Chugwater Creek will take us right up to the base of them, Miz Sherman," the redhead told her with a reassuring smile, "and from there we just drop down a ways to Horse Creek, which will lead us up to the crest of the pass that runs right through to the Laramie Basin. It might be a bit of a haul, so we'll want to rest the animals overnight before we start up, but we can do it. It's how the first settlers of Dancytown brought their wagons in."

"How do they come to call it that?" Jonesy asked. "Dancytown, I mean."

"It's after old Theophilus Dancy and his family," Flint explained. "They came out here eight years ago—an extended clan with seventeen children and twenty-three grownups, thirteen men and ten women, including two grandfathers. They filled sixteen wagons when they rolled out of Independence. They stayed together till they found a place they liked, then unloaded, filed on the land, and named the place after themselves. Better than two thousand acres, they took up—don't have legal title to it yet, of course, 'cause these parts haven't been surveyed; when they are, it'll run 'em around $2600 by pre-emption, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem. As early as the next year there were other folks comin' in and buyin' pieces of it from them. That was before my time, or rather not too long after I got to Fort Bridger, but it does seem to me I remember hearin' of a Sherman bein' one of 'em—Jonathan, I think was the name."

"That's funny," said Slim. "Pa didn't say we had kin where we're goin'."

"It is funny," Jonesy agreed. "Not the kind of thing Matt would forget, seems."

"Well," Ma suggested, "that was seven years ago—maybe he's moved on, whoever he was. Jonathan... yes, I think I met him, at our wedding; he's a cousin of your pa's, Slim—made a trip or two out this way with him, trading with the Indians. He must have liked what he saw of the country and decided to come back and try to settle." It had taken her a while to get used to her older son's new name, but he'd noticed that since he'd come back from his second season on the trail she only slipped and called him Matty when she was seriously distracted—or half asleep, like when Pa had taken him into the bedroom to meet his little brother.

They filled up their water barrels the next morning, then left the creek behind and headed straight southwest across the plain. The stock seemed more tractable now that they could no longer see or smell the big herd from the wagon train, and allowed themselves to be pushed along without much trouble. Slim found himself, perhaps inevitably, thinking about Indians, wondering if they'd prove to be a threat to his family. Flint had told him that probably most whites killed by red men on the northern plains ("Texas is another thing entirely") still died because they just happened across the path of war parties on their way to or from expeditions against some other nation—except for trappers, twenty-three of whom, in '41, had held off 500 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho at the Little Snake River. During the early '40's the Indians along the Oregon Trail had been mostly tolerant, even friendly, with occasional exceptions; the first large wagon train to Oregon, in 1843, had Indian scares almost every day, but found the tribesmen amicable and helpful. Around 1846 the red men turned downright belligerent; they started attacking wagon trains freely, and often wiped out an entire party. Hostilities remained sporadic: in '49, not one wagon train on the Trail had been hit by them, though night-guards were sometimes still-hunted and filled with arrows from a distance before they could discharge their guns or even call for help. But even that early the country between Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger was inhabited by branches of the Sioux Nation that had been pushed off their ancestral lands around the Great Lakes by white settlers, and they wouldn't miss an opportunity to steal stock and even kill stragglers. It didn't help that by '45 the numerous wagon companies had so frightened and decimated the buffalo that they were no longer seen close to the road, though a hunting party could usually find some if it was willing to ride well out of sight, and lesser game, like antelope, deer, and prairie chicken, remained easily available. During the season of 1850 the Sioux remained quiet, though the normally peaceful Cheyenne began to harass the emigrants, but by '51 the Indians along the Trail had become hostile, or at least sullen, and while up till after '52 attacks almost never occurred, there was still pilfering, begging, stealing, threats, demands for payment for their grass and game in the form of tolls and tribute, killing and stampeding of livestock, and general harassment. A favorite dodge was to sell a horse stolen from some overlander to another in the next train, or make off with some stock by night and offer, the following morning, to find the "strayed" animals for a fee. Not all the redskins were yet completely soured on the newcomers: there was still peaceful trading, and once in '53, when a man from a wagon party was swept down a river, a local chief took several of his men and made valiant efforts to recover the body, though they didn't succeed. Others would charge a small fee to swim over a river, guiding a horse by its bridle or halter; the other horses would follow it, and the cattle, if sufficiently driven and hurrahed at, were usually willing to follow them in turn. Then, in August of '54, a village of Sioux butchered a stray cow belonging to some Scandinavian Mormons, which led to an argument with a lieutenant named Grattan out of Fort Laramie and his thirty-man detachment; the great Brulé chief Conquering Bear was shot, and the soldiers were killed. This in turn was followed by scattered attacks on emigrant trains and freight convoys, a general sullenness among the northern tribes, and, the next summer, a campaign out of Fort Kearney, 600 men led by Colonel William Harney, who smoked with another Brulé chief, Little Thunder, at his village in Ash Hollow; the Indian declared that his band wasn't responsible for what had happened to Grattan, but Harney was hot for revenge, and after the smoke he attacked, killing eighty-six Sioux, many of them women and children, and carrying a hundred off to prison for more than a year. This unnecessary and ill-considered aggression had so aroused the Sioux that they'd become the biggest menace of the Trail. Hostilities weren't continuous, but no one knew when or where an incident might occur, and while full-scale attacks on large, well-armed parties, like Mayborn's, were rare, straggling groups of one to three wagons were sometimes hit, and herds were a favorite target. All trading at Fort Laramie was stopped and the Sioux were told they must trade only at the new agencies in Nebraska; no new traders were to enter their country. This made the Sioux angry, and fewer of them went to trade at all; they stayed along the Powder and the Tongue and learned to do without white luxuries, except for those—including guns—which the halfbreed sons of former traders brought them in wagons. Meanwhile, in 1856 the Southern Cheyenne had attacked several emigrant parties near Fort Kearny, causing the Army to hit a camp of theirs on Grand Island, and last year Colonel E. V. Sumner had led an expedition against them, which had routed the Indians with few casualties to either side, but was noted as the first time that tribe had engaged the American military. He had gone on to burn a hastily abandoned Cheyenne camp, but had seen nothing more of the Indians. Hoping to punish the tribe, he distributed their annuities to the Arapaho, but was restrained from further action by the outbreak of the Mormon trouble.

Even though there'd been no Indian trouble in the Midwest since the Sauk War in the '30's, or in the East for even longer, most children had grown up with stories of Indian slaughter and captivity and had a dreadful fear of the tribesmen. Some of the mothers in the Mayborn train had made special preparations for the worst—shearing most of their daughters' hair to make them less attractive to scalpers, carrying lockets of cyanide capsules for themselves and their youngsters in case of capture. But the train was too large for most war parties, fifty or sixty men and their families, and by far the greatest number of its mishaps and catastrophes had involved accidents, particularly to children who fell beneath the wheels of moving wagons or the hooves of the teams: restless youngsters couldn't be long confined in the small space of a wagon, and curious ones were soon hopping in and out, some inevitably tripping and hitting the ground just as the wheels groaned over them. Most were pressed down into the sand and dust that lay shin-deep in some places, and suffered only bruises, but two had died from their injuries, and another had lost a leg. Toddlers inevitably wandered off when afoot and headed straight into a patch of cactus; this wasn't deadly, but the thorns took days to pick out, and it was little wonder that some mothers kept their youngest leashed while in camp. Their more careful elders had better sense, but caused concern on their own account by wandering or riding off or lagging behind and disappearing: people who strayed away from the train, regardless of age, were liable to get lost, for on the vast sameness of the plains, even adults could become disoriented and wander aimlessly for days; some, despite frantic searches, were never found. Rivers posed another threat: while fetching water or playing along the banks, children might fall into streams churning and muddy with spring runoff; huddling in the bed of a crossing wagon that shuddered with the current's weight against its sides, a youngster might be tipped out if it capsized, lost in the flood or washed more than a mile downstream, or caught underneath and drowned. Inexperienced people, heavily armed and often nervous, shot themselves and one another in a constant succession of accidents. Deep knife and ax cuts were common, and marshes and quicksands a widespread threat. Several women had gotten their skirts caught in campfires while cooking, and in one case had had a dress nearly burned off, though no fatalities had occurred. Drenching spring and early-summer thunderstorms brought winds that tore through wagon canvases and rains that soaked the interiors. In one thing, at least, they'd been fortunate: no major diseases had struck the train, apart from a flirtation with measles that had killed three adults but passed harmlessly enough over the children who caught it. Up till the Shermans' departure, the outfit's death toll had been light, only about ten per cent.

Slim felt quite proud of his mother, on the whole; she'd taken well to westering. She dressed neatly, as she would have done at home, in her blue, dove-gray, or bottle-green travelling dresses—the ones she used to wear for their Saturday trips to town—rather than homespun, linsey, or calico, and clung steadfastly to ribbons and bows, starched white aprons and petticoats, even though the dress of the Indian women they occasionally saw was both chaste and practical. She had fixed little pockets in the wagon cover to hold small items like mirrors, combs, and brushes; she laid a rag carpet to keep the floor of the tent snug at night. The limited number of cooking utensils presented culinary challenges, but she met them head-on. She used a reflector oven to bake bread and biscuits and potatoes; she was an expert in the use of the Dutch oven, and served hot biscuits, cornbread, and roast meats done to a turn. She rolled out her piecrusts on the wagon seat beside her as they travelled, let her bread dough rise through the day (by the time they made camp it would be ready to bake), and every morning, after milking, would hang a sealed bucket of milk from the axle; by evening the rocking, bouncing motion would churn it into clumps of fresh butter floating in sweet buttermilk. Occasionally she even had special treats for her family: fresh doughnuts, red and white currants covered with sugar, fresh onion soup made from onions grown by a ferryman, a pie made from blueberries neighboring wagoners' children had picked, fish Slim had caught in the river. A good pickle could be made of the so-called prairie pea. Raspberries and gooseberries grew in profusion and made a tasty tart; grapes and wild plums were to be had for the picking; plates were piled high with buffalo, elk, antelope, deer, and wild fowl. During the day the women visited from wagon to wagon, exchanging recipes, knitting and crocheting, or talking of their home life "back in the States," the loved ones left behind, and their hopes for the future. They cooked together and went swimming. There was time to pick the strange and lovely prairie flowers, to rock babies, play games with the children, knit and sew. The trip was difficult, but, as Ma said, a well-born and -bred American woman was inevitably endowed with the courage of her brave pioneer ancestors, and no matter what the environment she could adapt herself to all situations, blithely travelling where women reared in other lands would fear to follow. Jonesy had taught her to make a fireplace trail-herd style, using two iron rods, each cleft at one end, and a straight one; following his instructions, she'd drive the former upright into the ground, lay the latter across them, and hang pots from it, where many of the other women used only wooden poles, resulting in the pots' falling into the fire and the food getting burned. Sometimes one of them, plagued by heat, flies, dust, dirt, weariness, lost cattle, sick babies, and an apparently never-ending journey, grew so desperate as to strike her children, take a horsewhip to her husband, set fire to her wagon, or even threaten suicide, but Ma somehow seemed to find it easy to stay calm and collected; her only real complaint involved the difficulty of keeping little Andy clean and dry. Not a day went by that there weren't diapers strung to dry on a cord draped along the side of the wagon cover.

One long day's travel brought them to Chugwater Creek, which they followed for another two and a half before turning due south along the edge of the mountains. They picked up Horse Creek, camped beside it overnight, and the next day ascended the pass and dropped down the other side toward a grassy basin that Flint said ranged from forty to fifty miles broad and ran well over a hundred north to south before widening out to merge with the plains of western Nebraska. "You don't need me now," he said. "It's less than twenty miles to Dancytown, and

by Mr. Sherman's map you don't even have to go that far. I'll be ridin' on."

Ma loaded him with fresh bread, some pickles and cheese from her stash of special delicacies, ham, and a spare canteen of a little citric acid mixed with sugar, water, and a few drops of essence of lemon, the trail substitute for lemonade. "I know your folks are looking down on you just as proud as they can be," she said. "You write to us, now!" Jonesy wrung his hand and wished him the best. At last he shook hands Indian-style with Slim and said, in Sioux, "Oglu lila waste, kola wayo [best of luck, true friend]. Akiyagle wanna [go home now]."

"Pila maya ye, kola [thank you, friend]," Slim answered. "Akanyanka wolakota [ride in peace]."

They watched the roan mare until she was out of sight, and then Slim passed Pa's map up to Jonesy. "You'd better have this, I've still got the stock to drive."

"Don't you worry about me, boy," Jonesy told him. "Not the first of Matt's maps I ever had to cipher out. Git up there!"

**SR**

Sunset at this season came around seven-thirty, and it was about an hour before that when the wagon dropped down a long slope and came into a small, level valley where a couple of horses, a rangy golden chestnut and a steeldust gray, lifted their heads at their pickets and whinnied a welcome as the breeze brought them the familiar scents of old trailmates. Matt Sherman's graying head popped out of the cellar-hole he was digging and he reached reflexively for his rifle, then relaxed as he recognized the wagon and the cattle, the deep-red pinto horse that Joey Redhawk had given Slim when he died, and the distinctive shape of Jonesy's derby. "'Bout time you got here!" he bellowed, and began climbing out of the hole.

They pitched the tent, built up Matt's fire, and made supper while the stock spread out over the flat, feeding hungrily on the rich shortgrass. "Well, this is it," the man said. "You'll be able to get a better look at it come daylight, but this is where we'll have our buildings. I'll stake out this whole valley and the best water and pastureland around with my soldier scrip, and that'll give us control over everything that rubs elbows with it."

Slim was the first one up the next day, rolling quietly out from under the wagon to the tune of Jonesy's snores from his bed on top of the load, getting soap and towel out of the box ironed to the side of the trail unit, carefully circling the cellar-hole and making his way down the shallow slope behind it to the stream to wash up in the cold, clean mountain water. It was lined with a jungle of box-elder, redhaw, Rocky Mountain juniper, willow, redbud, dogwood, and above all cottonwoods with their furrowed whitish-gray bark and big, heart-shaped light-green leaves rattling in the wind, underpinned by thickets of wild cherry, wild rose, wild plum, wild gooseberry, currant and chokecherry bush. It was shallow, like the plains rivers the wagon train had crossed—not more than two or three feet at its deepest—but faster, clearer, with a rockier bed. Beyond, the land rose again to terraces of level plain, interlaced with hollows, brush-filled draws, and hills with steep-cut south-facing banks; and in the distance, looming vaguely against the still-dark western sky, a second range of mountains, which he guessed marked the far side of the basin. He washed up, then climbed back up out of the bottoms and watched as the rising sun filled the valley's bowl with honey-colored light. Straight ahead was the high ridge down which the wagon had come; to the right lower, rounded hills, well scattered with trees; to the left the greater expanse of the valley, which he estimated at about a mile each way, and more hills beyond that. Past the ridge and the gentler slope that rose to it, the higher hills lifted, running up into the mountains. Mountains in our yard, Slim thought, a bit amazed at the concept. So close you can almost reach out and touch them.

"Well, what do you think?" came Pa's voice, and Slim jumped.

"Pa, don't sneak up on me that way!"

"Wasn't sneakin'. Could'a' come ringin' bells and blowin' whistles, you wouldn't'a' heard me. Them mountains... they do take a man's eye, don't they?"

Slim let out his breath. "Yeah. It's gonna take me a while to get used to 'em, I guess. I just didn't figure we'd have 'em in our laps, almost."

"One reason I picked this spot," Pa said. "Most folk like their land level. Figured we'd have less competition for the kind that's got a fair bit of up and down to it." He pointed up the way they'd come. "There's a little side-trail runs off over those hills," he said, "deer made it, likely—leads to the prettiest little lake you could ever want to see. Got trout in it, and perch, and even watercress. Go on past it another three miles or so, you come to an old Indian trail, runs north and south, that takes you on about eight, ten miles to Dancytown; that's where we'll trade. Go on past without turnin' off and bear north some, and eventually you come to the high country. Trees, meadows, open balds, game—deer, elk, bighorn sheep—wild horses, too. Figure we can catch some for sale or to keep. And off that way," indicating left, "it drops a little lower, hills and ridges with pine groves and valleys between—sheltered land, good for winter range. Just at the edge there's a stream, runs into this one eventually, that's fed by a spring—won't fail even in drought, I figure. We'll use my scrip and Jonesy's to file on the water sources, the lake, the two streams, and the two of us can buy up land in between through pre-emption, or maybe get it under the Graduation Act—I talked to Mayborn and some of the other schooled men on the train, they said it regulates the price of land based on its quality, and some that's classed as good for nothin' but grazin' can be bought for as little as four bits an acre, or sometimes only one. I figure we'll use this part along here for the horses, to begin with, and we'll have to fence it—horses have a way of pullin' out for their home ground in the spring, even if the graze is good where they are. Put the barn under that rising slope, and the house here, of course."

"What about the cattle?" Slim asked.

"Move 'em up into the high meadows in summer, then down again for wintertime. Told you about the north range. And just over th'other side of this creek, that broken-up land will screen 'em from bitter winds and give 'em patches of grass free of snow. This country... God made it for cattle, son. Best grass country south of Canada, except the Powder River and Dakota. And I'll lay money there's a good flow of water somewhere under our feet, maybe ten feet down, maybe sixty, maybe somewhere in between. We'll sink us a well and have all we need for the house and garden and barn. Figure we thin out some of that tree growth in the bottoms, that'll give us rich hay, close by for easy haulin'. Probably get two cuttings a season, three in good years. Even if we don't get but a couple of tons to the acre, it's three dollars each minimum in our pockets for what we sell, maybe as much as five, besides not havin' to pay out to get it for our stock."

"We'll need to get our buildings up before it gets cold," Slim said. "How long do you figure we've got till then, Pa?"

The man squinted up at the shimmering peaks. "Last of that snow'll be off in another week or so. Then around September some time it'll come back, and a couple months after that we'll see the first of it down here on the flat. So four months at most."

"Not a lot of time to get a house and a barn up," said Slim.

"Oh, the neighbors'll take care of the barn, once we get the lumber for it ready," Pa assured him. "House is the first order—got to get some good shelter for your ma and Andy."

They began that very day. They put up a brush arbor for Ma to use as a kitchen, oriented so it sheltered part of the tent too, and drew the wagon around to provide a screen against the wind. They unloaded their truck from the trail unit and the chairs from the wagon, set up the stove, tied rolled-up tarpaulins around the four sides of the roof so they could be quickly dropped and pegged down in case of rain, and then Pa took Slim around on their horses, marking the best timber for their needs. The higher slopes were thick with pines—white, with feathery foliage that gave a soft, billowy effect; sugar, as thick as eight feet through; heavy-wooded ponderosa equally robust; dense stands of tall, straight lodgepole with cinnamon-colored bark, sometimes reaching a hundred and fifty feet in height—and inland Douglas firs, so prodigal of lumber that settlers in Oregon, where they grew to 200 feet and more, had found that a single tree could yield wood enough for a frame house, shed kitchen, and woodshed, plus 300 ten-foot fence rails, 334 railroad ties, 500 six-inch-wide by two-inch-thick boards, and fifteen cords of firewood, with a lot of tree still left; the Wyoming kind was only half as tall and perhaps a quarter as thick, but very valuable all the same. In among them grew deciduous saplings "planted" by roving animals or passing birds, for pine seedlings, unlike spruce, didn't grow well in their parents' shade. Here too were mountain mahogany, spruce, scrub oak, hawthorne, mountain apple, and above all quaking aspen in thick clumps, with white bark, trunks almost all of a size, and heart-shaped leaves that quivered and fluttered noiselessly. Pa would start the cut with an ax, then the two of them would get to work with the crosscut saw until the tree swayed and crashed to earth. They'd trim off the branches and leave the trunk to season a bit while they went on to the next. When they had enough, they brought the wagon up, loaded the logs into it, and took them down the mountainside to the valley, where Pa squared them off and he and Slim whipsawed boards and cut them to length. The plentiful scraps and waste wood would make fine fuel come the cold weather.

Jonesy, with his bad back, couldn't do heavy lifting, but once a tree was brought in and cut into manageable lengths, he could plane boards for floors, partitions, inside panelling, window shutters, door and window frames, and furniture—beds for himself and Slim, blanket chests, a pie-safe, bookcases—and make dovetail joints to put pieces together. He could nail chairs together—one for Pa to sit on at his desk, others for kitchen and dining use—and stain them to make them look less raw; could trim and cut battens for the planned bedroom wing of the house and footings for floors, shape timbers, smooth roof shingles with a drawknife, cut rail notches in fenceposts and trim the ends of the rails, and he took full charge of the chickens and the cows. He strung a barrel on trunnioned wheels that moved on an overhead wire down to the stream; it could be filled by hand, with buckets, and then hauled up the slope by a horse on the end of a rope, eliminating the need for repeated trips down to the water. Later he could mix up mortar for the fireplace.

They drove into Dancytown; Pa was familiar with the place, but the others had never seen it. It wasn't much, chiefly a large general store, a blacksmithery, and a saloon, besides about a dozen houses harboring a population of fifty or sixty persons. At the store, which always kept in stock at least a house or two's worth of furniture for new settlers travelling light, they bought a good kitchen table for four dollars, a simple eight-foot dining table for seven, a dish cupboard for sixteen, a couple of chiffoniers for ten each. A large bulletin board by the front door served as the community's news exchange; here hand-written notices of all sorts were posted, ranging from descriptions of missing livestock to announcements of forthcoming weddings—there was no church yet, nor school either, but a circuit preacher, based out of Fort Laramie, came through at intervals to minister to the community's spiritual needs. Pa put one up to invite folks to help raise his barn in October.

The store also served as a mail center; not a formal post office, but a place for people to drop off letters they wanted to send, along with money for postage. Every couple of weeks a rider would take them in his saddlebags up over Horse Creek Pass and along the edge of the mountains to Fort Laramie, drop them off to be taken east (or sometimes west) by the next stagecoach, pick up anything that might be waiting for Laramie Basin folk, and bring it back, together with any stray newspapers and magazines he could find, which circulated through the small local population until they were practically read to rags. Letters came to the Shermans from Flint McCullough at Bridger's—not often, but regularly enough to assure them that their young friend was well and keeping busy.

Evenings, they'd discuss their plans. Pa admitted that growing a herd, with the small base they had, would take years, but it wasn't a long ride up to the Oregon Trail, and it should be possible to buy some footsore cattle from wagoners reluctant to try taking them through the mountains. Once they had a hundred or so of these to drive back for rest and fattening, it would be easy enough to go to swapping rather than cash payment, giving one recovered beast in exchange for two unsound ones. Since many wagon trains bought Texas longhorns for trail beef at the river towns, they could also try to purchase some young cows of that breed, to cross with their two Midwestern bulls; already, in both Oregon and the Midwest, it had been found that such matches produced a get of tough, sturdy, good-sized cattle ideally suited to free-ranging life. Mustanging, trapping, timber-cutting, and the sale of hay could be used to bring in cash money.

Slim, naturally familiar with branding since his experiences with the trail herds, asked what their mark would be. "Why, Sherman Ranch, of course," Pa said, and drew it in the dirt with a stick: a big sprawling S R, connected by a short bar.

In less time than Slim would have imagined, the house began to take shape. At the core of it was a stout chimney, which could serve to vent the kitchen stove as well, and a welcoming fireplace. From this the two main rooms spread out: a sitting/dining room on one side, a kitchen on the other. Off the rear of the latter opened a bedroom for Ma and Pa, and to the side a storeroom, where in the winter water barrels and firewood could be kept handy; off the far side of the former, a little room for Jonesy and a larger one for Slim and any help they might accumulate ("This is gonna be a little family ranch for some time to come," Pa said, "and there's no reason not to let our hands live as part of the family"). Underneath was a commodious cellar for winter stores. The main block of the house was made of thick, sturdy logs, lain parallel to the ground, with broad vertical planks from chest-height up; the side wings were board-and-batten. Once the timber had been cut and prepared, the whole thing went up in under three weeks, Slim and his father working side by side "from can-see to can't-see," except for time out to eat and tend to chores. A small porch shaded the main door, and Ma, with Jonesy's help, set out her rose cuttings to climb up its posts and over the walls of the bedroom wing and the trellis he built over the front of the kitchen. Outside the side door they ran up a chickenhouse and a woodshed, although stacks and cords of wood were left in the sun to season for as long as the weather would allow. And, as Pa had predicted, there was water under the ground. One of the Dancy grandfathers was a water-witch, and he came out and confirmed it: not more than five feet out from the kitchen corner, and maybe fifty feet down. Pa built a spring-pole rig to drill for it: a springy eight-yard-long pole, one end tied into a homemade base to keep the butt down and the tip raised, the other holding a couple of rope stirrups for the drillers and, near the tip, a rope from which hung the weighted steel bit, welded to a six-foot iron shaft. Slim and his father stepped into the stirrups to bring the bit down, and the spring of the pole raised it for the next blow, moving the bit up and down in the hole like the pestle in an old-fashioned corn-grinder. At intervals the bit was rotated with a four-way handle at its top end, or pulled out with a tripod and windlass so it could be sharpened, a new section added, or the loosened earth cleaned out with a sand pump, which was a long shaft in which moved a kind of plunger with a ring at its head. It took them till well into September, working at it in between everything else they had to do, but they found the water, sure enough: cold as ice, and with a faint and not unpleasant tang of iron. They hammered pipe down the hole and set a pump at the top, and it was no longer necessary to fetch water from the stream.

One weekend they branded their cattle, packing the whole herd into the first corral they'd built, roping each animal by turns and dragging it protesting out through the gate (Jonesy had charge of opening and closing it as needed), then throwing and stretching it with their trained Texas cowponies so the Sherman Ranch mark could be burned into its hide. This done, they drove the animals up onto the slopes to feed on the richer grass there until cold weather.

There was no possibility of a garden this season, but Ma marked out where she wanted it to go, and meanwhile they arranged to trade game for "put-ups" (that was Pa's term for anything a woman might can or preserve at home) from the longer-established families; staple root vegetables like potatoes and onions would be readily available at the store. Wild fruits in plenty, however, could be picked along the stream, and many of these ended up in Ma's copper preserving kettles, as did the dwarf plums from the trees in the coulees. Hay, too, they would have to buy this year; it was one reason Pa had wanted to have "a good stake" built up.

They crafted and numbered the pieces of the barn framework, trimmed the siding and the shingles, and then the neighbors swarmed in: men in their work clothes bringing their familiar tools; women in the sober finery of their second-best dresses, each fetching food enough to feed her own family plus one person more—cold ham and chicken, pickles, preserves, jams, jellies, home-canned fruits and vegetables, loaves of bread, crocks of home-churned butter, cakes and pies; children of all ages. The littlest ones were put down in the house, where they could nap or crawl about in safety; the bigger ones teamed up for games. Two carcasses of elk, shot by Slim on "the mountain" (as they were already beginning to call the nearest of the greater heights) the day before and fetched down by packhorse, turned slowly on spits over fires in the old brush arbor. In a single day the frame of the barn was raised, the siding and the roof put on, the partitions for the stalls and grain room sketched in; off to one side a projection of the roof created a shady spot for smithing, harness repair, and other work, and behind that was an oblong room for harness and tools, which eventually could be converted to bunk space for hired hands. There was a feast at midday, and when the work was done a cold supper off what was left, followed by a dance in the new-raised building. For the first time the Shermans met their closest neighbors, who lived a little under five miles west of their house: Reed McCaskey, who was a few years older than Matt; his wife Lillian, who was about twenty years younger than he; and their six children. Mr. McCaskey, who had been the first man to bring cattle into the Laramie Basin—he'd come here in '49, and tallied over 800 head now—said his "best hands" were his four daughters: Carolyn, sixteen; Marjorie, thirteen; Marcie, ten; and Celie, seven. The three biggest ones worked like men, riding horseback all over his land, looking for stray calves hiding in creek beds, patrolling his boundaries and fence lines, counting the cattle, stretching and branding them in season, and breaking wild horses, dressed in cowboy hats and shin- and ankle-length skirts. Celie wasn't old enough yet to join them on the range, but she dressed like them and rode her brown-and-white Indian pinto as if she'd been glued to it. After her came two boys: Joe was four and Henry about a year old.

It might have been around two in the afternoon that Slim decided he needed to take a break. Walking out of the sounding shell of the barn, he crossed the yard to the house, where a couple of big water barrels stood for just that purpose. On the other side of the building he could hear a murmur of voices from under the brush arbor: the women were gathered there, gossipping the way women did at these affairs. Some of the children were probably napping inside, the rest perhaps down by the stream in the cool of the trees: the weather had turned warm for the time of year—Indian summer, he figured. Wagons were lined up against the pasture fence in a neat rank, turned tails-in so the teams could be easily hitched up when the time came to go home; the mules and horses, having fed their fill, dozed inside the bars with the Sherman stock. They'd met more of their neighbors today, Slim reflected, than in all the previous three months they'd been here, which had been good for Ma, especially; women got lonely for the company of other women, he knew. He took a long drink, savoring the faint tang of the well water; it had taken a while to get used to, but it was clean, without any hint of alkali, and he was getting so he rather liked it now. He dumped a dipperfull over his head, gasping at the shock of it and shaking his dripping hair out of his eyes, and turned to face toward the steep ridge and the mountains beyond. They'd been working so hard he hadn't had much chance to explore yet, but what he'd seen so far of the land Pa meant to claim pulled at his heart in a way the old farm never had. As if, somehow, this had always been their real home, waiting for them. He promised himself that come spring, he'd really get to looking it over. After all, Pa would want to get a picture of which parcels he most needed to get title to, in order to control the best grass, the best hay-bottoms, the water.

His eyes, tracking idly along the spine of the ridge, stopped partway. There were riders up there. Three of them, and what appeared to be a couple of unburdened horses—packhorses, perhaps. At this distance it was hard to make out details, but the slant of the sun hit the animals' coats plainly: one was a copper-chestnut, another a bright blood bay. And—

And the riders weren't wearing hats. Feathers thrust from their hair at various angles.

Indians.

Slim had fought Indians, on the trail up from Texas; he'd also dealt peacefully with peaceful ones, notably the Five Civilized Tribes in the Nations. He'd heard stories enough of the Sauk War and of the troubles that had come with and before the second big scrap with England, even of Comanche raids in Texas, that he was properly cautious with regard to the redmen, but he didn't fear them as some of the Mayborn train women had, and was willing to let them make the first move if that was what they wanted. Still... He squinted, trying to see how they were armed. Bows and arrows, he thought; one lance. He didn't think they had guns. And would a war party have pack animals? Would it be so small? If it was... they had to be noticing the number of wagons, even if they hadn't been standing there long enough to see how many people there were. Far too many for such a small group to want to tangle with. Unless they were scouts, like that one Comanche the day Joey had been killed... but, no, there was still the element of the packhorses. He couldn't see war-party scouts towing packhorses along.

Then, between one breath and the next, they were gone, slipping out of sight down the other side of the ridge, into the ravine back there, more than likely.

He stood there for a long count of two hundred, but they didn't reappear. Just curious, maybe, he decided tentatively. Probably never saw a barn-raisin' before.

He walked back to rejoin the builders. Maybe he'd tell Pa, after the neighbors had gone. Maybe he wouldn't.

**SR**

Two days later Slim was in the barn, nailing boards onto the stall frameworks, when a shadow filled the open doorway and he heard Jonesy's voice. "Slim—you better come see this."

Something in the older man's tone brought him fully alert, and even as he laid his hammer aside, he was reaching for the gunbelt draped around the support post at the end of the stall. He slapped it around his hips and buckled it as he walked toward the door. Jonesy was standing profile-on to him, alternating uneasy glances from the shadowy interior to something outside. "What's up?" he asked as he came even with his father's friend.

Jonesy didn't speak, just nodded sidewise. Slim looked, and there they were. Five horses, three ridden, two not. A copper-chestnut, a bright blood bay, and a stripe-legged buckskin. Feathers thrusting from the hair of the riders. They were standing just where the hill began to flatten out, maybe a hundred yards away. Not moving, not making a sound, just standing there looking, like Old Dan Tucker in the song.

Pa had ridden out to talk to a couple of the neighbors about buying hay for the winter; no telling when he'd be back. If this lot meant any mischief, Slim knew at once, it was up to him to deal with it. "Where's Ma and Andy?" he asked.

"In the house," Jonesy replied.

"Get in there with 'em," Slim said. "I'll see what these fellows want."

"Better you come with me," Jonesy countered.

"I don't think they mean us harm, not showin' themselves like that," Slim observed. "If they'd wanted to take us by surprise, seems they'd have kept to cover and sneaked up when nobody was lookin'. And with Pa not here, I'm the only one that can talk to them, unless one of 'em speaks English, which there's no guarantee of. Besides, I can run faster than you if it comes to that. Jonesy, I'd feel a lot easier in my mind if I knew Ma and Andy had you with 'em, to look after 'em."

Jonesy hesitated. "I sure hope you know what you're doin', boy," he said after a minute, in a tone that suggested he didn't believe for an instant that Slim did, and began moving sparely toward the house. Slim stepped free of the doorway, showing himself to the Indians, making it clear to them that the man had someone to cover him if they tried a charge on him. They waited, and so did he. He heard the kitchen door open and close. All right. Jonesy was inside now, under cover. Slim took a deep breath and began walking toward the Indians.

They moved to meet him, ponies walking slowly. He'd been right: bows and arrows and one lance, but no guns. No shields either, which war parties would carry but hunters wouldn't need, and no paint. The chestnut and the blood bay, he saw, were mares, with the dished faces, short backs, and trim bone of the Spanish Turks, Barbs, and Arabs from which all Indian ponies descended. The two unridden animals were ordinary mustangs, not much better than scrubs, with lumpy parcels, wrapped in hide, secured to their backs, quite possibly butchered meat.

One of the braves, the one on the chestnut, was out just a foot or so from his friends—the leader, Slim guessed. It was hard to tell age with Indians because they lived so much more out of doors than most white men, but he thought the fellow couldn't be much older than Flint, maybe seventeen at most. He wore two eagle feathers in his hair, aslant from each other, and his braids were neatly wrapped in calico. His leggings had a deerskin flap on the outside below the knee, not the more usual fringe, and above them he wore a sleeveless jacket worked with porcupine quills. Around his neck hung a gleaming Sun God medallion of Apache silver, on a chain of the same. Slim was suddenly glad of his height—the Indians would probably take him for older than he really was.

Forty yards from the barn he stopped and raised his right arm, hand flat, vertical, palm-out, in the universal peace sign. "Hau, kola," he called in Sioux. It wasn't technically a greeting—hau actually meant "yes" or "it is so"—but it was used as such.

They checked, and he heard a murmur from the one on the buckskin to the rider of the bay: "Skay-e-ay." That meant "to talk white"—a person who spoke Sioux. But there seemed to be something off about the accent—it wasn't like Flint's. Of course Flint was white, and he probably spoke Sioux with an American accent, but still...

After a moment the fellow on the chestnut—he was also the one with the lance—slipped off his mare's back, then quickly drove the iron tip of the weapon into the earth before her and knotted her rein around the shaft. He copied Slim's gesture, acknowledging the suggestion of peace. "Hau," he said.

Neither of them spoke again for a minute or so. Slim knew enough, from Pa and Bridger, to know that if you pushed the issue with Indians they got the idea you weren't sure of yourself, and then you lost their respect. The Indian, for his part, seemed to be taking everything in: the completed barn, the chickens scratching over by the house, the horses shifting around in the corral, uneasy from the unfamiliar redskin scent; Slim's height, his high color, the old Paterson Colt at his side, hung a bit low where his hand would fall naturally close to the butt. After a bit he made a quick little all-inclusive gesture and said, still in Sioux, "Agliti nici [your home]?"

"Tiwahemi na ok'e [my family's and mine]," Slim agreed.

"You know this is Sioux country," the Indian went on.

"We know. We wish to live peacefully with the Sioux. We will give them presents for the use of this land, and try to do it no harm. It would be foolish to make bad use of the land we hope to live from."

"Have you told the Sioux that?"

"I am telling them now," said Slim.

And the Indian actually smiled—a quick flash of a grin, heartbreakingly like Joey's. "No. We are Cheyenne."

Slim tried not to show his surprise. "Do the Cheyenne not live beyond the mountains?"

"Yes. We come here to visit friends. Our cousin—Blue Eagle's and mine—" Blue Eagle, from the direction of his nod, was the one on the bay; older, about twenty, maybe— "is wife to a white man in this valley."

That, Slim, realized, would be Mr. Lake. He hadn't been to the raising; he tended to keep pretty much to himself, on his land farther up toward the north end of the basin. But the Shermans had met him in Dancytown about a month ago. He was, indeed, married to a Cheyenne woman—it was said he'd had the chaplain at Fort Laramie read the Christian service over them—and they had a son, Cory, who was about Slim's age. "We know this man, I think," he said. "He has bade us welcome here." He hoped that would carry weight with them. It hadn't been so very long ago that the Cheyenne had had their first armed disagreement with American soldiery. Some of them might be honing to wipe out whatever grudge they'd been nursing from that time. And in any case they were close allies of the Sioux and might conceivably be willing to take on some of that tribe's quarrels.

"Let us sit," the Cheyenne suggested, "and talk as men should."

For just a second Slim hesitated—not that he'd mind sitting, but the idea of those two other braves still on their ponies bothered him just a bit—but then Blue Eagle and the third one slid to the ground and moved up abreast of their spokesman, and all three dropped into the cross-legged Indian position as if pulled on the same string. Slim hastily copied them, discreetly pushing his holster around so it wouldn't be directly under his leg.

"You are very tall," the Indian observed, with a hint of respect in his tone. The exact wording he used was wazi s'e—tall like a pine tree.

"So is my father," Slim told him. "He says our family breeds tall men."

"Have you been long in this place?"

"Three moons," Slim said.

"And you have seen no Sioux?"

"No."

The Indian grinned again. "I think they have seen you, maybe."

"This would not surprise me," Slim admitted. "I have dealt with Indians before, south of here, and east. I know they are clever stalkers. But you," he added, "you let me see you, only two suns ago." In Sioux it was gliyahan—"to show up on a hill in sight of my home." "I remember your horses."

"So. That was you? We saw you also."

"And so," Slim went on, "you come down here, peacefully. And yet, it has been told to me that Cheyenne and Sioux are good friends."

"Itukalesh [truly]," the Indian agreed.

"But you do not tell me to take my family and go away? Even if this is not your land, still it is your allies'."

The Indian's face changed, just a bit, as if he realized that they were getting into the meaty part of the discussion. "The Sioux are friends of the Cheyenne," he said. "But they are not Cheyenne. What happened at Ash Hollow, that was a bad thing—but it had nothing to do with Cheyenne. When Cheyenne are hurt so, they will strike back. Until then, we are at peace."

Slim remembered what he knew of Sumner's campaign. Those had been Southern Cheyennes; these three must be from the northern branch of the tribe, which cut down on the personal aspect of the thing, and perhaps, too, they took the attitude that what had happened with Sumner had been proper warfare, not a massacre of women and children like the Grattan affair, and was therefore not something that demanded revenge. "This makes my heart good," he said. "I am not—we are not—afraid to fight, if we must; but we have done much of that already. We would rather live here quietly and give heed to our own affairs."

"A man should care first for the Helpless Ones who belong to him," the Indian agreed, approvingly. "And next for the land he lives on, remembering always that it does not belong to him; it is only his to use, for a time, and to respect."

"My father has told me," Slim mentioned, "that it is good to care for the land. So it will be here to support our children, and theirs, and theirs after them."

"Your father is wise. Perhaps one day we will be able to talk with him also."

"Cheyenne will always be welcome at our home, if they come in peace," Slim told him. "And if they come in war—who are we to deny them?"

"Maybe we will tell this to the Sioux, if we meet them," the Indian suggested.

"That is your choice to make. But so long as we are at peace, will you take presents to bind our friendship?"

The Indian grinned. "Presents are always good."

"I will tell my family," Slim said, and scissored his long legs, getting up in the long graceful thrust he'd learned on cattle drives.

Jonesy met him at the kitchen door, holding his long-barrelled double shotgun. "You all right?"

"Fine. They're Cheyenne, and they say they're friendly." Slim looked past him, to his mother, who was peering warily around the shoulder of the fireplace, his own Volcanic carbine held loosely in her hands. "Ma, can you get some things together to give them? Coffee, and brown sugar, and some salt and flour if we can spare it."

"They're friendly?" she asked.

"They claim so, and this isn't their huntin' grounds, so they've got no reason to lie about it," he said. "Anyway, Pa says Indians don't lie, as a general thing."

She seemed to accept that, and quickly put together a package of the foodstuffs Slim had mentioned. He took it out to the Indians, who were mounted again, waiting for it. "Take these," he said, "to remind you of this meeting. When white men wish to be friends, it is a custom for them to tell each other their names. Mine is Slim." He gave them the literal translation, Ci-kci-k'aya.

For the first time the spokesman looked uneasy. "A person should never speak his own name. A devil might steal it, and leave the poor person nameless."

"You have told me Blue Eagle's name," Slim observed. "So maybe he could tell me yours."

He could see them both thinking that over, and then they nodded, and Blue Eagle jerked his chin toward his brother, pointing Indian-fashion. "Thunder Coming," he said.

"Washte," Slim said— "good." He offered his hand for a shake, a white custom he knew Indians heartily approved—show that you carried no weapon, grip strongly to prove your good intentions and your strength. They took it, one by one, and pumped sharply in the Indian fashion.

"Come again one day," Slim invited, "and meet my father, maybe."

"We will remember," Thunder Coming promised, and all three of them turned their ponies and swept up the trail the Sherman wagon and horses were beginning to cut down the flank of the hill.

**SR**

The first snow fell on November 2—not a heavy snow, only three or four inches, but enough to make it clear that winter was on its way. Pa had bought sled runners for the wagon at the Dancytown store; he and Slim jacked the vehicle up and put them on in place of the wheels. They had brought the cattle down from the higher country late in October, scattering them around the sheltered pastures on the other side of the creek. Now the preparations for the cold weather went into high gear—packing the barn with hay and feed, cramming cured firewood into the shed, banking the house foundations with sod, filling the cellar with food and lamp oil and all the other things they'd need to carry them through till April, if it turned out to be a rough season.

They saw nothing of Thunder Coming and the others, though Pa, when he came back from his quest for hay, had seemed approvingly impressed with the way Slim had handled the affair. It wasn't till the month was half over that Slim remembered what Flint had said, and thought to ask Pa about the Jonathan Sherman his friend had mentioned.

"Well, nobody's spoke of him to me," Pa admitted, and frowned— "which is funny, 'cause they sure can't have missed the name. And it's a sure thing I've seen nothin' of him. Maybe your ma's right and he moved on, and they figured no point bringin' it up. Jon always did have kind of an itchy foot—like your Uncle Jack. But I'll ask, next time we go in."

He stayed on late, their next trip, to pass some time in the saloon, which was of course the local club and male news-and-gossip center; Slim and Jonesy took Ma and Andy home, and unloaded their purchases. It wasn't till well after dark that Slim, already in bed, heard the door open and the sound of boots being stamped clean. That was all right, then. Pa was back. Folks in town were saying there'd be a fair-sized snow sometime in the next twenty-four hours; Slim had been a bit concerned about whether the man would get home in time to beat it. He turned over and soon dropped off to sleep.

He woke, later, suddenly, not sure at first what had roused him, until he heard it again. Voices. His father's deep rumble from the back bedroom, with a strange harsh note in it that Slim couldn't recall hearing there except that one time on his first drive when they'd mixed with those trail cutters, eight days out of Independence. Then Ma's lighter voice, with a strange note of her own, imploring. That alerted him, for usually Mary Sherman was calm and even-tempered, and it took quite a lot to stir her up. He sat up, pushed the quilt aside and eased his way across the chilly floor to the door of his room, cracking it open cautiously. A light showed under the back-room door, and he could see the shadow of feet moving back and forth across the crack. Ma's voice went on, with Pa giving brief, gruff responses, as if he had something else on his mind. Then the door suddenly opened, and Slim instinctively pulled back as his father's tall silhouette filled the opening, but the man's face was turned back, over his shoulder. "—do this, now," he was saying, "before they hear we've settled here and get the notion I'm tryin' to hide."

"But it's seven years!" Ma objected.

"Don't care if it's seventy," Pa retorted. "It's what I got to do. You know that, Mary."

"It's waited this long," Ma pleaded, "can't it wait till spring? Matt, it's going to snow!"

"Wouldn't be the first snow I been out in. I'll be all right. I got to settle this thing, Mary. It's gone on far too long. I fetched us out here to get away from one brewin' war, and I don't aim to end up in the middle of another. Slim and Jonesy'll take care of things till I get back."

Ma appeared at his side, a vaguer silhouette than he: he was fully dressed, and she muffled in her warm flannel nightgown. "Just you get back, you hear me?" she said, in a different voice, a fierce, longing one.

He put one arm around her—the other was cumbered with a pair of fat saddlebags over his shoulder and his long Colt Patent .69 rifle in his hand. "Got every intention of livin' to a hundred and forty," he told her. "But I aim to end this foolishness before then." He kissed her, hard and hungry. "You be here when I come?"

"Always," she said, and stood there, silhouetted in the lamplight, watching as he crossed the dark front room and took down his muffler and long winter coat from the wall rack. Then there was a whimper from somewhere behind her and she turned back to see to Andy, the door closing quietly. A couple of minutes later Pa's dark muffled figure slipped out the front, and all was still again.

In the morning it was snowing—a thick curtain of white that had already filled in whatever tracks Pa and his horse might have left. When Jonesy went out to milk, Slim confronted his mother. "I heard Pa leave last night," he said. "What's goin' on, Ma?"

She looked at him with those big brown-black eyes, as if seeing him in a new way—and perhaps, considering his exchange with Thunder Coming, she was. "It's the Parkisons again," she said, after a moment.

That shocked him. "I thought we'd seen the last of them." He knew about that old feud; Shermans and Parkisons had despised each other from Kentucky to Ohio to Illinois, though there hadn't really been much violence, just a simmering antagonism and cold hate: in a hundred-odd years only four Parkisons and two Shermans had died, besides assorted woundings, cripplings, and small-scale disagreements. For decades their meetings—always very formal, arranged ahead of time, with disclaimers given to the local law and no legal trouble made for the winner—had involved old-fashioned single-shot flintlock duelling pistols, but when revolvers came in, twenty-odd years ago, each family had had a special one crafted for itself—a five-shot percussion pistol with a barrel nearly a foot long, like Joey Redhawk's old Colt Paterson .40, and big slugs, bigger even than the .44s now coming into fashion; Slim knew that the Sherman one was packed away in one of the trunks they'd brought west with them. The last outbreak had been maybe ten years back, in Illinois, while Pa was off fighting the Mexicans and Slim was just a youngster. Pa's Uncle Clifford had issued a challenge against the current head of the Parkison clan, and killed him, and the Parkisons had left the neighborhood, nobody seemed to know for where.

"So had I," his mother admitted, "but it seems that this is where they ended up, or some of them, at least. They've got a big spread up in the hills, and even a town they founded about three or four years ago; that's why we haven't heard anything of them till now, they don't come down to Dancytown much any more. Remember Flint telling us about that Jonathan Sherman who was one of the first people to follow the Dancys in?"

"The one you said was Pa's cousin?"

"That one," Ma agreed. "Well, from what your pa found out, he hadn't been here more than three months before he put up a notice at the store—like your Great-Uncle Clifford's—announcing that he was going to kill the head Parkison the next time he saw him. Only it didn't work out that way."

"The Parkison killed him?"

"They killed each other, actually," Ma said. "The Parkison died right off, and your pa's cousin a couple of days later. So now it's five and three, and your pa's gone up to Parkison Town, if he can find it. He wants to talk to whoever's in charge up there now, try to work out a peace treaty of sorts."

"Does anybody still know what started that feud, Ma?" Slim asked.

"Not that anyone ever told me," she said, "but I'm only a Sherman by marriage. That's one reason your pa wants it ended. He says if there's an immediate reason for a fight, that's one thing, but to have it hang on for lifetimes—that's foolishness. You ask him when he comes back."

"Do you figure he will?"

"He promised me he would," she replied, "and I believe him." A pause, then: "I have to believe him, Matty."

**SR**

It snowed for two days, and toward the end the wind picked up, creating great six- and eight-foot drifts wherever any obstruction blocked it. Slim and Jonesy did the chores, Ma kept house and looked after Andy, and the house was a bright, warm oasis in the midst of the howling whiteness.

On the third morning the sky was a clear bright blue and the wind not too strong, and Slim decided he'd better ride out and check on the cattle; this was the first time they'd been asked to weather a really serious storm. He wasn't too worried about Pa; he knew that with something for a windbreak, a drift of insulating snow, a buffalo robe to wrap in, and a supply of pemmican or jerky, a man could last out even a mountain winter. But the cattle were the family's future, and it was important that he find out how they'd done. He bundled up in layers and made a sort of mask out of a length of calico with two slits cut in it, which he fastened over his eyes to cut the glare and ward off snow blindness. Then he saddled up his grulla and crossed the creek behind the house, guiding his mount carefully over the solidly-frozen water and up the bank on the other side.

Later, looking back on it, he knew it was a combination of things that had caused his downfall. He'd gotten a fair look at this part of the range when they moved the cattle in, but he wasn't as intimately familiar with it as he would grow to be in years to come, and of course the drifted snow changed the whole look of it. Then there was the fact that his Texas-bred pony had never seen a snowshoe rabbit in its life—and probably the rabbit had never seen a horse, either: it didn't know that the grulla wouldn't hurt it—all it knew was that something large and unfamiliar was getting a lot closer to it than felt safe.

Slim had counted ninety-four cattle, including both the bulls, and was just thinking of turning homeward, when without warning a snowdrift directly in front of him seemed to explode as a two-foot-long shape burst out of it and went bounding off across his path. The grulla flung itself backward, whinnying in shock, and something gave way beneath its dancing hind feet. Slim felt the animal sliding and tried to throw himself clear, but he still wasn't sure just what had happened, and the pony was turning too fast as the soft powdery drifts filling the ravine gave way in a cascade under its weight. Something came down full across Slim's right leg and a great shock of pain burst and spun in his head, and that was all he knew.

He fought his way back to consciousness with snow down his neck and scattered half over him. At first he was still stunned, and it took him a while to get a handle on his situation. The grulla lay across him, dead, its neck snapped in the fall, its six hundred pounds of mass pinning him securely. His right leg hurt in sharp stabs—broken, more than likely. He was lying on his back, looking up at the boughs of the trees that grew along the edges of the ravine.

He knew better than to struggle; he might only make the injury worse. He couldn't reach in under the pony's body to feel of it, to find out how badly he was hurt. And in this position there was no way he could get enough leverage to free himself; it felt as if the grulla had scooped itself out a sort of hollow as it fell, so that instead of having soft snow under him, easy to dig out, he had the floor of the ravine, covered by no more than two or three inches of the white stuff. He throttled the first natural surge of panic and tried to take stock. The walls of the ravine were high enough to cut the wind if it got up again; the trees above provided a kind of sketchy roof. He had some food in his saddlebags, and he could reach them if he took it slow and careful. And his Volcanic carbine was under the left stirrup leather, which was on the upper side of the dead horse. He wasn't five miles from the house, and the sound of a gunshot could be heard as far as ten in cold weather—more than that, if it was a long gun. But supposing Ma or Jonesy did hear it, what then? Jonesy wasn't a good rider, and he had a bad back besides. Ma was better in the saddle than a lot of women, but assuming she could find her son and get the grulla's body off him, how would she get him home? Could she get the wagon out here? This cut-up range was great shelter for cattle, but not so good for driving over, least of all with all the ravines filled with snow and hidden from view.

The water divide wasn't far off in the other direction, but did anyone live within hearing distance on the other side? It was probably McCaskey land, and he was sure there was another creek over there—there always seemed to be, in this country—but that didn't mean anything.

Still, he had to make the try, or resign himself to a slow death from hunger and thirst—or a quicker one from cold and exposure.

Slowly and cautiously, a little bit at a time, he levered himself up, clenching his teeth against the pain. It must have taken him nearly half an hour to work into a position that let him get his hand on the carbine. Then he took a deep breath and pulled—and came very close to passing out again. But he'd done it: he had the Volcanic in his hands now, and that was half the battle.

He rested a while, letting his depleted energy recharge itself. He should try to get at his grub and eat something, he knew, but he decided he didn't want to try moving again so soon—and he'd have to, if he wanted to reach his saddlebags. He lay back in the snow till his breathing settled down, then pointed the weapon straight up and fired off three rounds, the universal distress signal.

Give it some time, he told himself. I've only got sixteen shots, unless I can reach the extra cartridges in my saddlebag. Space it out. If anybody heard me, it'll take 'em at least an hour to get up this far, with the drifts. And when they do, they'll halloo, guessin' I might not be where I can see 'em.

He gave it maybe half that time, then began trying to get at the saddlebags. That kept him occupied for a long time, having to stop and rest whenever the pain threatened to overwhelm him. He listened for rescuers calling, but heard none.

He unearthed a thick beef sandwich, neatly wrapped in paper, and celebrated his triumph by letting off three more rounds. Then he spent a while nibbling on the sandwich slowly, making it last. It took some time for him to realize that it wasn't just the trees that made it seem to be getting darker; it was that the sky was clouding over again, uncomfortably fast. Was he in for more snow? If he hadn't been pinned, he could have gotten around to the grulla's underside, gutted it, and lain half in and half out of the carcass, with his blanket and tarp pulled over him; the flying snow would have covered the rest, and he'd have been as safe from freezing as if he'd been in his own bed. But if he hadn't been pinned, he could have walked out of here, or at least splinted his leg with some branches, or found a better shelter, maybe an old badger sett, otter den, or coyote hole—odds were there'd be something like that somewhere along the ravine.

The first flakes felt soft and chill against his face. He fired off three more shots, unease gnawing at him now. Night would be coming on soon, and in a renewed snow he'd be harder to find than ever. I've got to get out of here somehow, he thought. If Pa doesn't come back, I'm all Ma and Andy and Jonesy have.

The leg was numb now, which was good in one way but not so much in another; as long as it hurt him, he knew he could stay awake, but if he fell asleep in this falling snow...

He must have drifted off, all the same, because suddenly he was aware that he was no longer alone; there were hands on him, voices talking back and forth over his head. "Ma?" he wondered aloud. "Jonesy?"

"Hiya kihowaya, kola [don't talk, friend]. Rest. Let us do the work."

He rolled his eyes upward and nearly got them full of snow. He couldn't see the speaker's face, but he made out the rich fur of a wolf coat, and then the muted flash of a silver medallion and chain hanging down on the breast of it. "Who— Thunder Coming? Is that you, kola?"

"Still, be still," the voice repeated, and then: "Now—I have him; pull!"

Weight shifted against his leg, and he bit his tongue to stop a scream. Then he was being hauled back, out from under the dead pony, he vaguely supposed, and it was too much, and he slid into merciful blackness again.

**SR**

The muffled moan of wind roused him, but this time he was warm, and somewhere off to his left there was a bright glow of fire. He could feel soft fur against his bare skin—bare skin?

His eyes popped fully open. Above him a framework of poles extended into darkness, with what looked like some kind of heavy hide lain over it. Beneath him was a firm surface padded with, he thought, dried sweetgrass.

The fire wasn't large; in its flicker he made out skin bags and bundles hanging from the poles, a kind of inner skirt of painted hide pinned up inside them about halfway up, a couple of black pots sitting on the flames and steaming, giving off a tempting smell.

"Ah," said a voice somewhere near his head, "so, you are wandering in darkness no longer, kola? Good."

He twisted his neck awkwardly, and it was Thunder Coming, silver Sun God medallion and all, bare to the waist in the pleasant warmth. "Where... am I?" he asked.

The Cheyenne grinned. "I have visited you at your home; now you visit me in mine. The snow was growing thicker; we knew we could find our way back here, but we were not so sure we could reach your family's lodge. And your leg needed binding. It will heal straight and strong now; our healer, Walking Sun, has good medicine for broken bones. Are you hungry?"

Slim suddenly realized that, in fact, he was starving. "Han. Akaecon s'e icajapi [yes, very much]."

Thunder Coming turned to face across the tipi—at least Slim assumed it was a tipi, though he'd never been inside one before—and spoke in a language that wasn't Sioux. The next thing Slim knew there was an Indian woman settling down on her knees beside him, a woman a little older than Ma, he thought, wearing a beaded dress and braid wrappings of snow-white ermine fur. Thunder Coming helped him sit up and eased something narrow and firm behind his back to support him. He would have been embarrassed at the fact that he was apparently stark naked under the robes wrapped cozily around him, but the soup the woman offered him in a crude wooden dish smelled so wonderful that he didn't have time for such unimportant considerations. It turned out to be hot beef, or perhaps buffalo, with some sort of small red fruit in it, which gave it an unusual but not unpleasant taste. She gave him a spoon made from a buffalo horn, and he fed himself eagerly. "Pila maya ye," he told her politely when he was done, handing her the empty bowl.

Thunder Coming said something over his shoulder in that other language, and then, in Sioux, "My second-mother speaks only our Cheyenne tongue. So I tell her what you say."

"Have I been asleep long?" Slim asked.

"If we could see him, the sun would stand over our heads now," the Indian told him.

"Noon?!" Slim blurted in English. "No! I've got to get home—Ma and Jonesy'll be half frantic—"

Thunder Coming gripped his bare shoulders firmly and pinned him where he lay. "You move around, you undo all Walking Sun's work, maybe. Rest."

"But my family," Slim insisted, remembering to speak Sioux. "They will think I am dead in the storm."

"Then when they find out you are not, they will be all the gladder for it," said Thunder Coming. "Listen, kola. Your medicine was very strong, that Blue Eagle and I heard you shooting off your gun. We had not even meant to go hunting, but something whispered to me that we should. My second-father said we were both fools to risk ourselves when there was plenty in the lodges."

Guess I wasn't very smart myself, Slim thought, goin' out with another snow comin' on... only I didn't know it was. Well, I'm not used to the weather in this country yet. "So you found me."

"Yes. And brought you here, because it was the quickest way to be sure you would get the help you needed... and get warm."

"I did not mean to sound ungrateful," Slim apologized quietly. "It's only that... I worry for my family."

"That is good. That is how a man should behave. You would make a good Cheyenne, kola."

Slim realized he'd probably just gotten the highest compliment the Indian could give. "When can I go home?"

"Walking Sun says, your leg will heal firm in maybe two moons. Before the pronghorns give birth you will be walking again."

Two months... and probably a couple of weeks on a crutch after that, Slim thought. I'm gonna miss Christmas...

That thought hurt. It would be Andy's first—well, the first he'd be able to take any real part in; his birthday was St. Nicholas Day, December 6, which was why his whole legal name was Andrew Nicholas, the Andrew being after Grandpa Sherman—and their first in their new home; his parents had been talking special plans since before the first snowfall. "When the snow stops," he said slowly, "can you send someone to carry a message to my family, to tell them I am safe? If you bring me my clothes, I can make a talking leaf for them." On the drives he'd learned to carry a pocket notebook and a piece of pencil at all times.

"When the snow stops, we will talk about it," Thunder Coming promised. "Now, I think, you should sleep more."

Slim suddenly realized he was feeling very drowsy from the warmth of the tent and the bellyful of rich soup. "Yes..." he agreed, "maybe you are right, kola."

**SR**

He learned, eventually, that he was in the Indians' winter camp, made, according to Cheyenne custom, in waterside timber, not more than two or three miles from where he'd been injured—down the ravine, which widened and deepened abruptly into a shallow canyon, with the stream flowing down the middle of it. The band would ordinarily have been farther north and east, but they had been delayed trying to find enough game to make meat for the coming cold season and had decided to stay where they were: the Sioux wouldn't object, since the two tribes were allies and friends. His rescuers had stripped the dead grulla and brought his gear and tack along with them; it, and his clothes, were stored neatly under the backrest at the head of his bed. They'd rough-splinted his leg with a couple of long branches, wrapped him in a buffalo robe, gotten him astride their packhorse, and led it back to the camp, one of them riding alongside to catch him when he started sliding off. The healer had set the broken bone and wrapped the limb in a green hide, which contracted as it dried to hold the leg immobile and protect it from bumps and bangs.

Thunder Coming and Blue Eagle, he discovered, weren't brothers by blood, but courtesy-brothers, chums from boyhood. The lodge he was in belonged to Eagle's parents, whom Thunder Coming called "second-father" and "second-mother"—distant kin and long-time friends of his real parents. Thunder's birth-father had been killed by the Pawnees when Thunder was around eight or nine, and his mother had died a couple of years afterward, so his second-parents had taken him in to complete his raising, not an uncommon thing in such cases. He would continue to live in the lodge till he married, when he would go to live near his wife's parents, although he would remain close to the other family and visit them often. Besides the couple, whose names were Many Strikes and Small Snow, and Blue Eagle, the lodge was home to three or four younger children, including a thirteen-year-old daughter, Moon-in-Morning, who were theirs by birth.

Slim had never thought very much about what it might be like to live in a buffalo-skin tent all winter, but he found it was surprisingly comfortable. When the band went into retirement for the season, they had dug out the floors of their lodges by four or five inches, leaving a sod bench all around the circumference that served as a foundation for the beds. The bare floor had then been wetted and packed down, and the tipi set up with the poles planted in the ground just outside the bench; a lodge lining, whose beading was the masterpiece of Small Snow's life, had been folded inward over the sod so no drafts could blow in under the cover, and the bench well padded with grass. Each bed consisted of blankets, buffalo robes, and lesser animal skins, and at the head of it was a mat made of horizontal willow withes attached to a tripod, covered with more buffalo robes to provide a backrest. The lodge's conical shape allowed it to withstand the terrific winds that often accompanied the storms of winter. The family lived to the left of the door, as you came in; Slim was in the guest quarters, to the right, though Thunder Coming usually sat beside him to serve as company and interpreter, since only he, Blue Eagle, and Many Strikes spoke Sioux, and the man not too well.

The second snowstorm lasted only about twenty-four hours, and Blue Eagle agreed to take a note to Slim's family. He pondered over what to say, then decided to make it as simple as possible:

Dear Ma and Jonesy,

My horse fell with me and broke my leg, but I'm all right. The Cheyennes I talked to, right after the barn-raising, found me and brought me to their camp. They've set the leg and they're treating me well, as a guest. Their healer says I'll be all right in a couple of months, but till then I'm probably stuck here. Believe me, I'm fine—I just miss you and wish I could make it home for Christmas.

Love,

Slim

If he'd been at home, he could have spent his convalescence reading, playing checkers and cribbage, and talking with the others. Since he couldn't, in self-defense he tried to learn Cheyenne. It helped that all Indian cultures were heavily oral and that winter was a season for story-telling. But Cheyenne, as he was to find out in later years, was the most difficult of the Plains languages, even more than the weird Kiowa tongue, and very few whites, unless they'd been brought up in the tribe, ever fully understood it. Slim actually did rather better than he had any right to expect: with Thunder Coming translating into Sioux for him, he got to where he could follow it pretty well—he just couldn't seem to wrap his tongue around the sounds of it.

He kept trying to think of a way he could get home, but the snow this winter was apparently very soft and deep, and except on the trails and the widest open stretches of prairie, where the wind sometimes scoured long stretches clear, there was no way a wagon, even on sled runners, could get around. A horse could, if it took its time, but with his leg in its green-hide cast, he couldn't ride. The Indians only had travoises—pony drags—and they were even less suited to deep snow than wagons were.

He'd been with the Cheyennes the best part of a month when the answer finally came to him. Thunder Coming and Blue Eagle were off at some warrior-society function, and by the time they came back he was so excited he could barely hold himself in. "Kola," he said, "I know how I can go home. I have seen it in a dream." From listening to their stories he knew that dreams were frequently credited with inspiration, and in fact he wasn't at all sure that he hadn't dreamed it.

"What is your plan?" the Indian asked, all attention.

Slim got out his little notebook and sketched quickly. "See," he said, "it is like a travois, only it does not drag on the ground—it hangs between two horses. It is called a 'litter.' " He used the English word. "You can wrap me up well in robes, and I will be above the snow."

Thunder Coming took the notebook gently from his hand and studied the sketch carefully. "Wakan," he said softly, using the Sioux word for "a mystery," "holy," or "medicine," of which the last in turn was often applied to anything strange or unfamiliar, anything they thought the spirits might somehow have a hand in. "Yes, I see that this is the answer."

"Kola," Slim said, "I want you to understand something. I am grateful to you, and to your family, for all you have done for me. I will not forget it. But among my people, at this time of year, there is a very special festival, a time when all families try to be together. I belong with mine." He'd been keeping track of the days with a notched stick. It was already December 21.

"This is a thing you must do?"

"If I can, yes, I must." Slim met the dark eyes steadily.

"What a man must do, he must do," said Thunder Coming, "and if his friends care for him, they should not try to stop him. Tomorrow, we will make this."

**SR**

The litter was simple enough, for a people already expert in the building of the travois: just a pair of peeled poles, each about twenty feet long, with some spring and give in them to make the ride easier, and strung between them a meshwork of rawhide thongs. The Cheyennes had had to cut the lower right leg of Slim's pants and longjohns off, because of the broken bone; Thunder Coming helped him slide the injured limb into half of a pair of flannel leggings, then get the remains of his own clothes on the other. Next came winter moccasins of buffalo hockhide, with the fur side turned in—cuiyohe hanp'hanshma, in Sioux idiom—and his own undershirt, shirt, sweater, vest, jacket, gloves, and muffler. The litter was lined with a buffalo robe, also fur side in, and the two young braves lifted him into it, brought the robe up over him, and fastened it in place with thongs loosely tied. Then they carried him out to the waiting horses and some of their friends held it in place while they fitted the poles into loops in the ends of broad hide straps lain across the animals' withers. A packhorse carried his saddle and gear; Blue Eagle took its lead rope, and Thunder Coming that of the front litter horse. Three or four other young men went along to take turns breaking trail wherever the snow was deep.

The day was cold and clear and still, with high clouds moving slowly on a wind the creatures of earth couldn't feel. In the warm robe Slim felt quite cozy, and the slight sway of the litter wasn't an unpleasant motion, though occasionally the rhythm was broken when the horses had to lunge through a rough place. He dozed on and off, lulled by the motion, until one of the trailbreakers came back, his horse plunging over the snow, shouting something in Cheyenne that Slim didn't clearly hear. He guessed at what it meant, though, and pushed himself up, awkwardly, in the enveloping robe. They followed a descending trail, then paused below the lift of a hill on the left, and there they were: the buildings of Sherman Ranch, perspective slightly distorted because of the angle.

"Kin ya tipi wasin [this is your dwelling here]," said Thunder Coming. "We take you down now, kola."

**SR**

"Supper in ten minutes," Mary Sherman announced. Her eyes wandered to the perfectly shaped little pine tree in its bucket of sand. There hadn't been such trees in Illinois; they'd had to make do with cedars from the river bottom. The first real Christmas tree they'd ever had off their own land—well, the land that would be theirs as soon as the Government let them file on it—and Slim wouldn't get to see it. She had been so glad to know that he was alive, safe with his Indian friends, but he was still her oldest, almost her only, and she hadn't thought that they would have to face the season without him for years yet—not until he found himself a wife, at least, and maybe even not then.

Matt sighed and jacked himself up out of the chair. He knew what she was thinking, as well he should after more than fifteen years together—or maybe just because he was thinking it too. "Dang fool thing to do," he growled half to himself. "If I hadn't taken off I could'a' gone with him that day."

"You did what you thought was right," she insisted, as she had at least once a day for the past three weeks, ever since he'd come back from his journey. "Slim knew that. I know that. We don't hold it against you." He had found Parkison Town, after getting lost twice, and had met with a Parkison named Joseph, the elder son of the one Jonathan Sherman had killed—the man's younger brother, Ben, had taken off for California several years earlier. They had talked, and hammered out a tentative agreement that involved, basically, each family staying in its own part of the country—no contact would mean no provocation, or so they hoped.

Jonesy sucked on his pipe and watched them, saying nothing. He wasn't going to admit it, but he missed the boy as much as they did. The rough knock on the door startled all of them. "Who would that be at this hour?" Mary asked uneasily.

"Well, it ain't a Parkison, that I can tell you," Matt snorted. "At least, it better not be. Still..." he added, and drew his long Walker Colt from the holster hanging on the rack. "Get back over by the tree, Mary, where you can duck out of sight. Jonesy, get the shotgun."

The ex-cook reached up for the long-barrelled gun hung above the mantelpiece and fell back across the room, where he could scatter the whole doorway with double-0 buck. Matt looked back, just once, to be sure he was in position, then quietly drew back the bolt, cocked the Walker, and opened the door.

"Pa! Pa, you're back!"

Matt stood frozen, looking at the two tall Indian braves who stood on the little porch, a litter slung between them and his elder son up on one elbow in the basket of it, half swathed in a buffalo robe, his cheeks flaming from the cold. "Slim," he said in a numb voice.

Slim grinned at him. "Merry Christmas, Pa."

Mary came rushing over; Jonesy forgot his trail-cook dignity and whooped. The two Indians, as if understanding that all was safe now, carried the litter in, and Jonesy hurried to get a couple of kitchen chairs for them to rest it on; a third followed them with Slim's saddle over his shoulder, dumping it in the corner. Matt, recovering, grabbed his son's gloved hand and wrung it. "How'd you ever— If I'd thought I could'a' got a wagon to that camp of theirs, I'd'a' come, you know that."

"I know that, Pa. It doesn't matter that you couldn't, though. I figured out what to do on my own. All I had to do was show 'em how to build a horse litter, like they talk about in King Arthur."

"Well, now," said Matt. "Well.—They talk Sioux, do they?"

"Thunder Coming does," said Slim, indicating the brave at his head.

Matt took the Walker off cock, reached over to lay it on the desk, and faced the young Indian. /"I am Slim's father,"/ he said. /"I thank you for bringing my son home, and for helping him when he was hurt. If there is ever something I can do for you, or for your people, you have only to ask."/

/"He is kola,"/ said Thunder Coming. /"And hotoma—a son to be proud of."/ He looked down at Slim. /"Have we brought you home in time?"/

Slim was looking at the tree; they hadn't started decorating it yet. /"Yes, kola. Akigle wahehan [in good time]. Thank you—again."/

/"Washte. We go to our home, then."/ He shook the hand Matt offered him, then Slim's, and then, almost as quickly as they had come, they were gone.

Slim took a deep breath, filling his senses with the familiar smells of home and the sharp piney essence of the tree. "Ma, what's that I smell? I've been eatin' Cheyenne food for so long I've half forgotten."

"Corned beef hash—oh my Lord, I've got to fry the eggs!" and Mary vanished into the kitchen.

"Good to have you back, boy," Jonesy said, grinning.

"Good to be back," Slim admitted. He looked up at his father. "I knew I had to make it somehow, for Andy's first real Christmas, and our first here."

"Well, you did," Matt said. "Let me get that robe off you, son, it's way too warm in here for it."

"Glad you got back in time too, Pa."

"So'm I, son."

**SR**

It was two years later that Ben Parkison returned from California, bringing with him two small sons. He didn't appreciate the fact that a peace had been arranged without his input—and with the Shermans up by two dead—but a word was a word: when his brother Joseph died, he became head of the clan, but he sullenly kept the peace until another three years had passed. Then, while Slim was off fighting for the Union, the feud broke out again, this time with the "immediate reason" Matt had spoken of, when a dispute arose over rights to a stream. The water was wholly on the land Matt had claimed, and Ben issued a challenge, but Matt backed away from the duel and tore down the fence, offering the Parkisons free use of it. Then, the year after, the wells at Parkison Town began to run dry. In six months only Ben and his sons still lived there. Forced to sell off most of their cattle or see them die of thirst, they lived off the proceeds and the few head they could still support for another seven years, scarcely venturing down to the town that became Laramie. Until, one day, fifteen-year-old Floyd made the mistake of putting his own family's brand on a Sherman calf...

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Note: hotoma=in Cheyenne, "one who is Cheyenne in his heart;" as Thunder Coming uses it, a person to be respected for courage, courtesy, and cleverness.

Note #2: The history of Dancytown/Laramie as given here is entirely imaginary and based on the information in "Duel at Parkison Town," in which we learn that "20 years ago" one Jonathan Sherman posted a public notice similar to the one Ben Parkison dictates to the newspaper editor. The history of the Sherman/Parkison feud is cobbled together from the (mostly cryptic) hints given in the same episode, and holds true only for my version of the Laramie reality.