Страница 30 из 94
We pulled the cover over the wagon during the day, when we was doing business in there, and the way we done it was me and the girls would stand outside of the wagon modest-like and talk about what we could understand from each other, and I do remember having quite a conversation once about beans. The ugly girl’s name was Wow or some such. She was a good English speaker. She had read some books, some of the same ones Mr. Loving read. She knew, too, about a fellow whose name for a while I thought was Corn Foolish but finally came to realize was Confucius. He turned out to be some wise Chinaman and had a saying or two for just about every situation. Soon as you thought you was getting the hang of old Confucius, he’d turn on you and would mean something other than what it seemed like he was saying, or so Wow explained. I figured if a man had something to say, he ought to just go on and say it and not make it some kind of puzzle. I can honestly say I didn’t care for him much, though the two of us never met, which can make a difference in your opinions.
Now, I suppose you’re wondering about Cramp and where he was during all this time, and the situation is like this. About two days out no one could stay in that wagon but him. He was the sole owner of the wagon bed, and he commanded his area by stench. We finally pulled him out and dug a hole with some tools in the wagon and buried him. Turned out Wow knew a few Christian words, though she was what she called a Buddhist, and we buried him with those words and a rock on his well-covered hole and moved on. Had we done that early on, even without Wow’s words, we would have been a sight better off.
That wagon was full of all ma
One time, after we had traveled all night, we pulled the wagon to a stop just as the morning got bright and put the cover up. But as we was about to crawl in the wagon, Cullen said, “Look yonder.”
Out there on the prairie we could see what looked like a dark sea rolling in with a loud rumble. After a bit of watching, we seen it was a sea of fur. Buffalo. They stretched far as the eye could see. They was right close to us, and we kept our spot, least we might somehow stir and stampede them. We watched them cross near us, and I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was seeing was something that was soon to be no more. It wasn’t but a few years beyond that when near every buffalo that had walked the earth was dead. Some of them buffalo was killed for food, some for hides, and finally just for sport, to be left rotting on the prairie. It was partly done out of greed, and partly for no other reason than to deny the Plains Indians breakfast and supper. It was the destruction of the Indians’ on-the-hoof grocery store, and it done them in surer than smallpox-diseased blankets or repeating rifles.
We needed meat, and we watched for at least an hour as they passed, and then we shot a straggler on the end who looked as if he had already hurt a leg bad enough he would soon be for the wolves. Them buffalo, big and mighty as they are, was also dumb. They didn’t seem to understand what the shot was about. If they missed the old boy on the end, there was no note of it we could see. Maybe at the end of the day one of them would turn and say, “Hey, boys, where’s Bill?”
We ski
Still, all in all, that trip was one of the finest and most measured times of my life. With those China girls and us taking turns in the wagon, living off the land, laughing and hooting and such, Wow telling me about this and that she had read, it was one of the greatest pleasures of my life. The trip took us a long time, from the inside edge of West Texas, across the Panhandle, on through Indian Territory—without seeing any Indians—climbing up to South Dakota. Those days and nights seemed to float by like turtles in the river.
Before we actually seen the town we seen the hills, and they was thick and dark with trees. Along the hills a considerable fire had raged, gnawing up wood like a fiery beaver. I later learned that burned-up dead wood was how the town got its name.
We smelled the place before we come up on it. It was the stink of sewage tossed in the streets and that which had run down from outhouses built on higher land. As we come nearer you could add to that body odor and sweat and whiffs of cooking smells and a waft of burned wood breezing down gently from the trees on the rise above us. That burn smell, compared to the other, was a kind of refreshment.
There was a main road that was so muddy and deep with washouts it made the wagon jump as it come along. We had to pull ourselves to the side to keep from being crushed by an ox team that was rolling out of Deadwood, most likely on its way to gather fresh supplies of some ilk or another. The team was led on foot by a stout woman with a big old whip and a dress that hung over her boots, except for the toes. Her boots and dress was splattered in mud. It was quite a train of critters and wagons and such, and when it passed us we continued into town, though calling it a town seems overly polite, like calling a pimp a gentleman.
The buildings was thrown up willy-nilly along the sides of the street, as if some drunk had been given lumber, hammer, and nails and told to go at it. A few buildings had seen paint at one time or another; some rambled nearly into the street, as if they was trying to slink across it and into the hills and return to timber. Here and there were clusters of lumber due to some buildings having toppled like stacks of dominoes. A number of houses had low-slung wooden fences built around sad gardens where weeds grew and bugs lived, though I figured them bugs was embarrassed at their quarters.
There was placer mines right there in the big middle of things. As we come by, I seen a man at one spot, a woman at another, eyeing us as if they thought we might at any moment fly off the handle and steal whatever goods they had dug up. The woman, who was fifty if she was a day, wearing a big blue bo