Chapter Three—

Straight From the Horse's Mouth

--

Who wants a pancake,
Sweet and piping hot?

Good little Grace looks up and says,
'I'll take the one on top.'

Who else wants a pancake,
Fresh off the griddle?

Terrible Theresa smiles and says,
'I'll take the one in the middle.'

--"Pancake?" by Shel Silverstein

--

Breakfast was seldom uneventful on the trail. And at the meal celebrating the wagon train's crossing of the Kansas border, things were barely contained. Fear, anxiety, triumph, pride, and bacon grease all came together in a way that made even the late sleepers sit up. (But then again, bacon generally has that effect on people.)

Jack was the first of the boys to wake up. Even in mid-April, nights on the trail were cold, and he was shivering in his tent as the blazing sun rose up in the sky, pulling his blankets tight around himself to try and milk as much warmth from them as he could. But long underwear coupled with a damp spring morning isn't a good combination no matter which way you slice it, and when the smoldering scent of the cooking fire wafted over to him, along with the promise of heat and a little breakfast, he heaved a sigh and got up out of his tent.

When he walked over to the fire a few minutes later, he was greeted by a pleasant sight. Their wagon train leader, Buck Mulligan, was slaking the already roaring fire, adding more kindling here or there while he concentrated on the task at hand—on a makeshift griddle of sorts, he was pouring batter from a blackened pitcher, ladling out pancakes to cook over the fire. Jack smiled, yawning sleepily as he sat down on a rough-hewn stool brought in for breakfast. He couldn't remember the last time he had pancakes.

Seeing him come over, Buck cracked a smile. "Nothin' like flapjacks first thing in the mornin', is there, Kelly?"

"Flapjacks?" Jack said in puzzlement.

Buck looked at him like he was about three, gesturing broadly to the pale rounds sizzling over the fire. "These, boy."

"Those are pancakes," Jack said flatly.

"Well, around here, we call 'em flapjacks, but whatever suits ya."

"Fine," Jack said, "but you're cookin' pancakes."

"When I'm the one buildin' the fire, boy, they're flapjacks."

This struck a nerve with Jack. Even though his eyebrows had grown back beautifully after last week's campfire adventure, since then he had been forbidden to go within five feet of an open flame, instead relegated to the ignominious task of buffalo chip collecting. He sighed, leaning back a little on his stool, and looked Buck straight in the eye. "They're pancakes."

This could have gone on for a very long time (in fact, for a while, it did). But at some point, someone had to wake up and settle the argument. It just happened to be Gwen's bad luck that she was the natural early riser in the group. And when you're stumbling out of your tent at six in the morning, a topcoat on over your nightgown, your hair a mess of snarls, the first thing you want to hear isn't two men arguing about the correct terminology for a breakfast food.

There was dead silence as Gwen wandered over to the cook-fire, both parties waiting for her to cast the tie-breaking vote. And who could blame her, really, for sitting down next to Jack, leaning over to look at what was cooking, and murmuring in happy surprise: "oh, look, hotcakes."

Jack made a strangled sort of sound and held out his plate for a pancake (or flapjack, or hotcake, or whatever). And it's to his credit that he managed to leave the argument alone until Racetrack ambled over, pulled up a stool, and sat down, reaching out to warm his hands over the fire. Innocently, Jack leaned over, and quietly asked him what they were having for breakfast this morning, and to please choose his words wisely.

"Um...griddlecakes, ain't it? Gee, I love those."

"NO!" Jack screamed in frustration. "God dammit, Race! PANCAKES!"

And Racetrack, who had never been much of a morning person anyway, recoiled in surprise and fell backwards off of his stool, his fall to the ground luckily broken by a pile of buffalo chips.

After that, Jack decided to abandon the argument, at least for the next few hours.

It didn't take long for their group to grow greatly, and anyone who had a tin plate to their name was welcome to join. The pancakes—or hotcakes, or flapjacks, or griddlecakes, or whatever else you might want to call them—were wonderful, perfect airy rounds coming from a seemingly inexhaustible source of batter, and sweetened with wild choke-cherry preserves. They were barely out of their first week on the trail and rations were still plentiful—there were fresh hen-eggs to fry up, edges crisp and lacy with sputtering fat, rashers of bacon to set sizzling on the hot griddle, and thanks to one family's old dairy cow, enough cold, sweet milk to fill everyone's cup.

It was a beautiful day, cool and dry, the only sound outside the circle of wagons the whispering of the wind in the dry prairie grasses. A cloudless sky was promised, with no further obstructions. They were making good time, and would probably reach Hollenberg's outpost by that afternoon, Buck said, with luck and a little elbow grease.

None of them had the slightest idea what Hollenberg's outpost was, of course, but it was still cause for celebration. People from all around the wagon train crowded next to each other on makeshift stools and benches, included in the morning's events so long as they had a tin plate to their name.

And so while Specs and Dutchy hotly debated the formula for the perfect pancake—("It's gotta be charred—y'know, blackened.")—Racetrack tucked into his fried eggs, the bad mood that had been following him around for the better part of the week lifting just a little. Next to him Kid Blink was trying to lure Mush into conversation, but the Pure One didn't hear a thing, captivated as he was by the sight of the red-haired girl from another wagon, who was talking to her friend, who wouldn't stop looking at Blink. Snoddy was talking quietly to a sweet-faced girl with golden freckles who he would say nothing about to the other boys but her name—Deanie—however much they prodded him. He was telling her, shyly, his one and only joke, rewarded with soft laughter ("So the woman says to the telegram guy, 'Oh, please sing it, I've always wanted a singin' telegram,' and the guy says, 'no, I couldn't,' but she insists—so he does a little two- step and sings, 'la, la la, your sister Rose is dead, la, la la la, la la...'"). Lute was explaining to Snitch how Prometheus got his name—("So they chained him to a boulder, and every day an eagle would come...")—and Skittery was surreptitiously maneuvering himself closer to Checkmate, who was eating her pancakes, completely unaware. Spot and Misery had finally stopped the argument that had been going on for the past two days, although whether it was just from sheer exhaustion nobody could tell. And Jack and Gwen, content that no-one was looking, were sitting close together in sweet silence, their fingers laced together, hidden beneath their plates.

Even at seven in the morning, after a cold night of little or no sleep, it's difficult to resist the scent of bacon frying as smoke curls and unravels in acrid plumes all through the wagon train, beckoning you towards something wholesome and warm. If anyone wasn't drawn to the campfire that morning, it was only because they had something much more important to worry about. Like repairing a broken wheel on one of the wagons, or tending to a sick animal, or writing a letter to a loved one.

Or, in Sapphy's case, fighting tooth and nail for her life.

The Great Sapphire Eyes was in danger as she never had been before. Surrounded on all sides by water, dark and impenetrable, she had to struggle to survive, to break the surface and save herself. She had been holding her breath for so long that time had lost all meaning to her. She had been under the water forever; she would never have another breath of air. Dread clouded her mind. She had lost all hope, but still she had to hold her breath. One false move, and she was a dead cookie.

The deadly body of water in which Sapphy was about to meet her imminent fate was not, as one might have suspected, a deep lake or a river, or even a stream. Instead, it was a small tin washtub which Mush the Pure had lent to her that morning. Not very frightening, in truth. But then, you had to make due with what you had...

Her heart pounded. Her whole body ached, felt hollow, and she wanted more than anything to breathe, to feel the air rush through her, and then out, in, and out...but she had been holding her breath for a long, long time now. She could hold it just a little bit longer. A little bit longer...

Suddenly, her body fought back, her mouth opening by instinct and trying to take in the water like air, fighting for life. She sat up, choking and sputtering, coughing up water from her lungs, opening her eyes to the brightness around her, and finally, breathing: her lungs taking in air by the barrelful, reveling in it, and for a while not caring about anything else.

She leaned against the side of the washtub, wringing out the hem of her undershirt, getting the water from her eyes. She recognized what was around her, and not from the jumbled few days that stretched behind her in recollection too close to be past. She had broken the surface of the water in distant memory. For a second time, she opened her eyes, and looked around her.

It was winter, but somewhere that winter barely touched, and the sun was bright and cold, brighter in the clear, dusty air. The others were off somewhere, but Chavez was still here with her: sitting on an overturned bucket, sharpening his knife. Turning around slightly, he looked at her abstractedly.

"Well?" she asked.

He pulled out his pocket watch. "Not too bad, Bluebell. Almost two minutes."

Sapphy slid down under the water, trying to hide the fact that she was smiling. "Don't call me Bluebell," she muttered.

"I'll call you whatever I damn well please 'til you can hold your breath under there without panicking." He cut a slice of something with his knife and held it out to her. "Here."

"What's that?"

"Turnip."

"Oh." She took it, munching thoughtfully. "How come you never try to teach me anythin' useful?" she said at last.

"Like what?"

"How to throw a knife."

"Well..." he looked at her, doing his best at innocence. "You might hurt somebody, Sapph. We couldn't have that."

"Gotta make sure that innocent belle of the ball don't hurt anyone, huh?"

Sapphy looked hearing the new voice behind her, and saw a familiar figure standing behind her, next to the washtub. She didn't need to see him to recognize him, not really. She knew his voice.

And his eyes. Nobody had eyes like that...

"Hey! Guess what's for breakfast?"

Sapphy started in surprise as she was pulled roughly into the present. Standing on the grass close by was a girl she had met up with a few days ago—Duck, or Kathryne on paper. She had been keeping to herself lately—giving out a dozen or more titles was a daunting task even on a good day—but she and Duck had gotten to know each other over the subject of horses and had simply moved on from there.

"Um," Sapphy said vaguely. "Turnips?"

"No, bacon. It's gonna be gone soon, too."

"Eh. I hate bacon."

"No one hates bacon," Duck said, and it was true.

"You're right. I just hate mornin's."

She sighed, pushing her heavy auburn hair away from her forehead in the same way she always did when she was frustrated. "I'm not gonna to get you out of that washtub for the world, am I?"

"Nope," Sapphy said, yawning in a contented sort of way as she sank further down in the warm water. "Tell me when the others leave, though. I'd rather not be stranded in Kansas for the rest of my life."

"Understandable," Duck said, smiling. Just as she was about to head off towards the campfire, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a green apple, tossing it to Sapphy. "Don't starve," she called over he shoulder.

Catching it without looking up, Sapphy dropped the apple on the ground, then closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and disappeared beneath the surface once more.

--

By the time the wagons had been set in motion and were continuing on their path across Kansas, the sun was beating down hot and dry, but the last thing Shooter wanted to do was wear a bonnet all day. The sun would make her fair skin dry and coarse and no-one wanted a bride who looked like and Indian squaw—that was what her father said, anyway—but her cheeks were already raw with the prairie winds and her lips cracked and parched with dust. She would be walking two thousand miles this summer, her legs lean and aching, the muscles of her shoulder turned to knots. All she wanted today was to feel the warmth of the sun on her face, and that was what she was going to do.

Pushing the thin muslin fabric off of her dark-blonde hair and letting it trail down her back, she wove her way through the stream of travelers and over to a wagon on the side of the caravan, where her friend Hope was sitting, burrowed between a Dutch oven and a barrel of salt pork, quietly reading the crumpled remains of a grease-blackened newspaper that had been used to pack the cooking pots.

Hope and Shooter had grown up together. They had been born in the same month of the same year and grown up in the same Lower Manhattan apartment building, with Hope on the fourth floor and Shooter on the fifth, so that at night, if one of them couldn't sleep, they could talk to each other through the heating grate. Their fathers had known each other from boyhood, and it was Shooter's father who convinced Hope's family to come on the trail. His younger had been gone some ten years and after years of letters extolling the glory of the West, he had finally been worn down.

"No factories," he had said to Hope's father over dinner one night. "No tenements, no pavement, no poverty. Just air and earth and sky."

For two men who had spent a lifetime of bitter toil in the city, breaking their backs just trying to survive, it didn't take long to decide to pack up and move west. Less than a month later, both families were on the trail, heading towards fortune, whatever that might have been.

"Mornin' Hope," Shooter called as she walked over towards the back of the wagon. Hope looked up and smiled a hello.

"Thought you could get through the whole day without stretching your legs, didn't you?"

"I wouldn't put it past you..." Hope sighed as Shooter hopped up onto the back of the wagon.

"Aw, c'mom," Shooter said, taking the rumpled newspaper from Hope's lap and inspecting it carelessly. "What else would you've done? If you've already read Tess of the D'Urbervilles fifteen times and you're down to pawing through all the six-months-old newspaper in the packing crates for something to read...well, a little walking might do you good."

Hope smiled. "That wasn't all I was doing..."

"Oh? What else?"

"Well...I was looking at one of those boys over there..."

Hope still had her bonnet on, its starched white peaks hiding her face in shadow, but Shooter could still see the tips of her ears burn pink as she spoke those words. She looked over to a few yards away, where a few of the boys from the big city group were walking together.

"Oh the New York ones?" she grinned shamelessly. "Which one, then? There are so many, I can never keep track..."

"The lovely one," Hope sighed, her features softening as she looked off into the distance. Shooter followed her gaze to a boy about their age, with dusky skin and fistfuls of dark curls.

"He's got beautiful shoulders," she said.

"He's got beautiful everything."

"A girl in love is a frightening thing to behold," Shooter murmured, grinning as she hopped down from the back of the wagon.

--

The wagon train reached Hollenberg's outpost late that afternoon. It was the first major pit stop after Independence, with a general store, a stables, and a post office. So while the girls looked at new ribbons and the boys looked at licorice and boot laces, Jack went in and picked up a letter from David. It was the first he had had from him since he had decided to go on the trail, and was postmarked March twenty-first, nearly a month before.

Part of him wanted to show it to the boys, to read aloud from it that night so they could hear the words of a friend most could barely remember. But he wanted it to be his and his alone; his secret, somehow—not that there was much to keep a secret, not really. Somehow David's letters to him had been his alone for so long, and he couldn't imagine anyone else reading them now. So he tucked it into his vest and saved reading it until that night, when he could stretch out in his tent, a pale stretch of sky framed by the dusty fabric above him. And then he slit open the envelope, pulled out the letter, and read:

Jack—
The rain has let up for a moment, and we are out on the front porch of the house, watching the sun set. Mattie is sitting next to me, one of the barn cats rubbing up against her legs, waiting for her to feed him. She's from the farm down the road, and now at night the light of the sky is reflecting almost violet against her dark hair and I love her, and there is something about being at the farm at apple-blossom time and loving someone and being loved that is greater than anything that we ever knew back in our newsie days.
When I told the others that you were coming they couldn't quite believe it, and neither can I, not yet. It seems like the strangest thing there is to think of you and everyone else out on the trail blazing west. But in a way, it's the only right thing. It will be October by the time you get here. It almost seems like nothing at all. But at the same time, I know you've waited long enough.

Always,
David

Jack set down the letter, folding it carefully along its creases and slipping it back into the envelope. Rummaging through his things, he pulled out a worn down stub of a pencil and a slip of paper, and began to write just as he had dozens of times before, with simply one detail different: this time, he had something to say.

--

Sapphy was outside when it began to snow that night, and for a moment she almost didn't believe it. It had been a warm spring day, a perfect April afternoon, and never had she known for it to snow so late in spring, but there they were—big, melting-sweet flakes, drifting down, touching her cheeks for just an instant before they melted. She wandered between the wagons, almost entranced, staring up at the sky as they drifted down like the feathers of angelic birds. The campsite was deserted, everyone back at the outpost having a warm meal and picking up letters from the post office. It was almost with surprise, really, when she finally did come across someone else—a boy lying flat on his back, looking up, the snow melting on his face.

It was almost without a thought that she lay down next to him. He had dark hair and deep chocolate eyes like a doe's, and he didn't talk, and neither did she. They lay next to each other on the ground and watched the snow come down, never more than fleeting. And for a long time they stayed that way, just looking up at the sky, together on the grass.