N
ow would come the difficult part, but Hiram Peacock was not born to avoid trouble. He had written of his plans to the commanding officer at Fort Laramie many months ago and had gotten no response. But he hadn't really expected any. The mails were uncertain, especially when sent to the ends of the earth.
The hubbub at Fort Laramie was exactly what he had been told to expect this time of year, when scores of wagons, each bearing a family or more, were rolling west. All this had been vividly described to him by Nathaniel Wyeth, a New Englander like himself, who had walked these very paths and knew everything there was to know about traversing the unexplored and unknown continent.
Peacock needed to find that odd duck, Mister Skye, and find him fast before his services were contracted by someone else. No one but Skye could fill the bill, or so he had heard not only from Wyeth back there in Massachusetts, but also from various contacts in Independence. Skye it had to be, though if Skye was not available, one of the veteran fur-trade menâa
Sublette, or Fitzpatrick, or maybe Bridgerâmight suffice. Peacock had perishable cargo and could not afford delay, nor could he afford any mismanagement.
Of course they had warned him not to judge Skye at face value. Peacock would, they said, meet a barrel-shaped man with a huge nose and squinty blue eyes, wearing a battered silk top hat and trail-stained buckskins. The top hat would be ventilated by two or three bullet holes. Skye would have a profane Crow Indian wife and a truly monstrous gray horse. There would still be some London in his voice. But he was the best man, the man who had survived for decades in a land where men perished daily. He had always delivered, getting his clients wherever they were going.
Peacock's wagons were parked as close as he could get to the post sutler's store, where, he was informed, all transactions of this sort would be sealed. In his party were ten persons in addition to himself and his hired man, mostly youths, every one of them gravely ill. They had consumption, that terrible lung disease that slowly strangled them and put them in their graves. He himself was healthy enough for the moment, but only for the moment. His wife, Emma, had perished of that very ailment, and now was gone forever from his benign gaze. “I'm gone now, Mister Peacock,” she had whispered hoarsely a year earlier, and breathed her last.
He had with him one healthy man, Enoch Bright, a cartwright and wheelwright, whose mechanical genius could see his party through. Bright was one of those sturdy New England men who had mastered a trade and was rock solid in it, and then added two or three more trades for good measure. He had only one peculiarity, and that was his habit of wearing heavy woolen clothing, layers thick, because he always was cold, even on a hot summer's day. On this warm
May day, the man was buttoned tight in his union suit. The man would wear wool on Tahiti, if he could.
Peacock worked his way past gaunt ox teams, heavy wagons with grimy canvas over bows, squalling children, racing mutts, anxious women in blue bonnets and muslin aprons who were amazed that they had walked seven hundred miles from civilization and were still alive; and hollow-cheeked males, most of whom, Peacock knew, were shocked by the tariffs placed on any goods for sale here. Peacock had been forewarned. The price of everything would be treble or quadruple what it would bring in the States. They all had come seven hundred miles by ox team.
There were squinty loungers crowding the veranda, and he thought to begin with them. He approached an affable freckled fellow who looked a bit less forbidding than the others.
“I say, sir. Hiram Peacock here. I'm looking for a certain fellow named Skye, Barnaby Skye. I wonder if you might have word of him.”
The gent smiled. “Millard Manville, my friend.” He extended a freckled hand and caught Peacock's in a firm and pleasant grip, a sure sign of good character. Never trust a man with a clammy hand or, even worse, a limp one. Peacock could spot a bad apple anywhere. Years in the anthracite and whale oil business had taught him all he needed to know of human nature. This fellow Manville was most promising and his gaze was direct and his demeanor manly.
“And what would you want Skye for?” Manville asked.
“To guide me, sir. I have a need for the very best, a man so reliable and wise to the ways of nature that there will be no failure to get me where I'm going.”
Manville sighed, frowned, and looked a little embarrassed. “Well, Peacock, it's not quite like that. I know who he
is. Skye hasn't been at this post for some while, just disappeared. And not by getting a client, either â¦â³ Manville eyed Peacock, and lowered his voice so the rest was confidential between them. “I'm not sure you would want a drinking man like that. Not if you want someone truly reliable and sound.”
That didn't sound good. “Well, how might I find him. I'm a good judge of character and I'll make that decision after I interview him.”
Manville shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “The bozo hung around here and got into trouble, got booted off the military reservation. That's the last anyone's seen of him.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Oh, I'm not sure. Maybe the bottle again. Maybe he ran up too much debt. Maybe those filthy squaws. He's got two dusky concubines, you know. I hear he lives off them.”
“One wife is what I heard. Well, more power to him.”
Manville smiled. “That sentiment isn't the usual, sir. Most white people are offended by such things, two women in one small lodge. What's the world coming to?”
“I'll make that decision after I find him. He must be somewhere, unless he was hired.”
“If he was hired, I'd hear about it, my friend. I'm going to do you a big favor and warn you away from Skye. He's a bad apple. He's a deserter from the Royal Navy, not even an American. What you want, sir, is a reliable United States citizen, not some low-life border man without a country. He's a drunk, a womanizer, and closely allied to Injuns, not white people. I hear he left London under a cloud.”
Peacock nodded.
“What you want is a fine, reliable Missouri man. Now, it just happens that I run a guide service. I have several veteran wagon captains in my employ, and as fine a group of seasoned
knights of the trail as you'll ever come across. What might you be interested in doing? We can set a fair tariff, and you can take your pick of some of the finest guides and captains in the entire world.”
Peacock dodged all that. “Where might I get more information about Skye? They tell me in Independence that Skye's the only one. I had a long visit with Wyeth, and he told me to get Skye.”
“I don't know the name, Peacock.”
“If you don't know who Wyeth is, then you don't know much about this western country, sir.”
Manville looked faintly annoyed. “I have been twice to California, once to Oregon, captaining three large trains, and I never heard of Wyeth. I never heard of Skye, either, until I got here. Now tell me, where is it you're going. I'm sure to have a man who's been there.”
“That's what I want to see Skye about. I'm not sure just where I'm going. It's a matter of climate. I'm a believer in the vision of Ezekiel Throckmorton, whose pamphlet, âA Salubrious Climate,' is my guide. He, sir, is the rising light at the Worchester College of Hermeneutics. I have in my company, sir, ten consumptives, mostly young. Sad to say, we lost two en route here. Throckmorton recommends a cure based on a desert climate, very dry, neither too hot nor too cold, the air benign, the winters mild. He cites scores of cases in which consumption has been cured with ample bed rest in a salubrious climate.”
“Let me get this straight. You're taking consumptive children to a desert place?”
“Exactly. A desert place, but not a hot desert that might blister the life out of these fragile people. Two of them are my own children. I lost one en route. Proximity does it, you
know. Let one person in a household become consumptive and the rest will follow. My poor Emma contracted the disease, coughed up her lungs until she bloodied every rag in her drawer, and soon left us, but not before infecting her children. I don't know why I was spared, but I have been. At least for the moment. That may change. I resolved, sir, to do something about it if it was humanly possible. Bringing these people to a land of hope proved to be exacting but not impossible. Most consumptives can walk, you know. It's only in the final stages that they sink. We've walked our way this far.”
“You've got a gaggle of sick people in those wagons?”
“I do. It's the most hopeful and rewarding enterprise of my life. With a little help from Providence, sir, we may spare these young lives. There are examples everywhere. Throckmorton researched it, supplied the proofs, and advised what to do. I put great stock in his counsel, and so do several physicians I consulted before we left New Bedford. Would you care to see the text? I have a copy.”
“I suspect, my friend, that any guides I might recommend would charge a high fee for so risky a trip.”
“Well, that's why I need Skye. He charges very reasonably, I'm told, and we have but little. I've sunk every cent I could spare in this.”
Manville ran his freckled paw through his brown locks and smiled. “Well, now, I reckon we're not the ones for you, though I hate to pass by a good price. These men, they're inclined to move too fast for your party. I tell you what. You just head in there and corral the post sutler, Colonel Bullock. He's likely to know where Skye skedaddled to; I sure don't.”
Manville cast a worried glance at Peacock's equipage, which consisted of an enameled green wagon drawn by a pair of handsome horses, and a heavy wagon with canvas over
bows drawn by an ox-team. The light wagon had a gilded legend painted on its box: New Bedford Infirmary Company.
“Good luck to yuh,” Manville said. “Seems like I'll end up this day with more offers than I have guides. Never did see such a bunch arrive here in one day. We have our pick, you know.”
Peacock watched the man hasten away. He wasn't surprised. Manville smiled too much. Whenever he told anyone he had a group of lungers, they swiftly put distance between themselves and his party. He and Enoch Bright had brought them across seven hundred miles of prairie; no wagon company wanted anything to do with sick people, especially consumptives, so they had traveled by themselves. But he had expected that too. Getting to Fort Laramie was not difficult; that was the known world, and he had mastered all he could of it for months beforehand. The sickest lay in the green wagon. The healthiest walked. The ones in between walked when they could and rode the tailgates when they were weary. There had been sickness all the way: bloody spittle, coughing, chest pain, furious fevers that came and went, night sweats, and some of them hardly ate a bite.
Twice they had paused beside the trail as it wound through prairie beside the Platte River. Enoch Bright had dug a shallow grave, and they had lowered one of their company into the hard and unforgiving clay. One was Doretta Milbank, a sweet girl of sixteen, on the brink of womanhood until she coughed her lungs out, fevered and died in central Nebraska. The other was his own second son, Raphael, twelve years of age. Each day he sickened. Then he stopped eating, gasped for breath as he lay in the green wagon, and one evening he just slid away, his eyes open, staring at his pa. Peacock could not think of it without coming to tears.
He headed into the sutlerâ²s store, his heart heavy. Maybe this had been utter madness. Maybe he should have let them all die in the cold damp salt air of New England. Maybe he shouldn't have bet on something he knew so little about.
He pushed such doubts from his mind and hiked through ransacked shelves and casks and bags. Already the migrating crowds had gutted this store's merchandise. Its proprietor, in shirt sleeves, with a black sleeve garter, sat at his desk, looking haggard. This was the Colonel Bullock that Wyeth and others told him to look up. Maybe he would have word of Skye. If Skye was not the scoundrel they were saying he was. Men changed, and maybe Skye had too. But Bullock would know.
T
he sutler rose at once, and Peacock beheld a graying man with a Vandyke; erect and civil.
“Colonel Bullock?”
“At your service.”
“I'm Hiram Peacock, and I'm trying to locate a certain Barnaby Skye. I gather you might know of his whereabouts.”
“I might. Why do you seek him?”
“To guide me, sir. He comes highly recommended. In fact, from what I was told, there's no man in all the West who can match him.”
“Sit down, sah, and let us talk. A bit of brandy?”
“No, not just now, thank you. You see, I'm taking a group of consumptives to the desert, two of them my own dear children. Every minute counts.”
“Consumptives, you say? Lungers?”
“Exactly. I've a rolling infirmary out there. I have it on the best advice that desert air is the only known cure, and desert air is what these poor wretches will have if it is within my power.”
“Tell me about this, Mister Peacock.”
The Massachusetts merchant did, in great detail.
“And what happens when you reach this remote desert place? You must still subsist yourself and your patients.”
“I've laid plans, sir. We shall have an irrigated farm. I have enough to get started. I have a letter of credit as well, which ought to guarantee some supplies for a few months.”
“You will put the consumptives to work? Instead of bedrest?”
“No, my hired man, Enoch Bright, and I will do what we can, and I may be able to hire more help.”
“All in a remote desert place? I'd advise you, sah, to establish this infirmary close to a city.”
“And be driven away? Let me tell you, Colonel, how the thought of a colony of consumptives excites dark passions in the breasts of others. It must be remote. There is no choice in the matter.”
“You yourself are not sick?”
“I wish I could tell you I don't have it. But I suspect it may take root in me.”
Bullock sat, silently, until Peacock wondered if he had drifted away. But then the sutler reached some sort of conclusion. “I'm not sure, Mister Peacock, that Barnaby Skye is your man. His wives are Indians, and Indians are unusually vulnerable to white men's diseases.”
“I'm aware of it. Quarantine is the expedient. They need only to guide us, ensure our passage. They need not even be close at hand. They could stay far ahead of us if necessary. Sir, if I may, I would like to interview this man and let him decide. And for that matter, I'll wish to examine him and draw my own conclusions. The local comment about this man was not as favorable.”
Bullock grunted. “Rivals. All right, saddle up.”
“Right now?”
“I have a competent clerk. Let's be off.”
Swiftly, Peacock unhitched one of the Morgans from his light wagon, saddled it, told his company he would be gone awhile, and met the colonel in front of the store, under the hooded gaze of a dozen curious men.
“I am a great admirer of Justin Morgan's horse,” Bullock said, surveying the fine chestnut that carried Peacock.
“This one has drawn our light wagon seven hundred miles and doesn't even show it,” Peacock said.
They rode straight through the post, across the weedy parade, past adobe warehouses and plank barracks, until they reached the North Platte, which was roiling its angry way east, charged with spring runoff.
“We will have to ford,” the colonel said, heading upstream. A mile later they hit a broad gravelly stretch where the water rippled over rock, and the colonel turned his horse into the water.
“A little dip at the far side will wet your boots, Mister Peacock.”
The dip never reached the Morgan's belly, and then they were urging their mounts up a steep, obscure trail that led into pine-carpeted hills. A great silence wrapped them. It struck Peacock that this trail was so furtive that it was no trail at all, and he wondered where he was being led and why Skye's camp would be this way. But at last they topped a forested ridge and descended into a grassy valley, not more than two or three miles from Fort Laramie. And there, in that peaceful flat, was a tan lodge with a smoke-blackened top, some grazing horses, and some savages.
The visitors attracted attention, and a burly man with a
battered top hat awaited them, a rifle loosely held in hand. Beyond, around a small fire, were two slender Indian women, one with gray in her jet hair, the other much younger. She was holding an infant.
Peacock knew somehow that he was being intensively surveyed, and didn't mind it.
“Gentlemen,” said Skye, “it's our pleasure.”
“Mister Skye, sah, let me introduce Hiram Peacock. He has a proposition for you. This, sir, is Mister Skye, his wives Victoria, who's a Crow, and Mary, who's Snake, and yonder is a horse unlike any other on earth, and his name is Jawbone.”
Jawbone clacked his yellow teeth and sawed his head up and down.
Peacock lifted his slouch hat. “This is a landmark in my life, Colonel. I've never before been introduced to a horse.”
A gesture from Skye urged them off their mounts, and Skye watched as Colonel Bullock collected both reins.
It didn't take long for Peacock to make his mission known. He watched the deepening skepticism in the guide's eye and knew this mountain man might well turn him down.
“We are halfway there, sir. We can't turn back. We must forge ahead but we don't know the country. Delay would be fatal. Would you consider guiding us?”
“How do you transport these sick people?” Skye asked.
“A light wagon, well made of the finest hickory by a master, drawn by the two Morgans that double as saddle horses. The wagon's so light one horse can draw it. There's room for four reposing in it, and the healthier ones ride the tailgates or walk. Some lungers do walk, you know. We've a large wagon drawn by an ox team of three spans that carries our tents and supplies.”
“And what do you want of me, exactly, sir?”
“Take us to a place of healing, Mister Skye. Take us to a place where the air is dry and clean and warm. Where there are no vapors rising from swamps, no miasmas from vegetation. Not too hot, for heat kills, and not too cold, for cold is even worse. These young people can scarcely draw a breath, but the best advice we've found is that a mild desert place is their salvation.”
“Getting there is only the beginning, sir,” Skye said.
“We have tenting to shelter us, a plowshare, seed, and rakes and hoes.”
Skye plainly doubted. “And how many will survive past the first winter?”
Peacock understood and had no good answer. “Consumption is a slow death, sir, but near the end it often hastens its course, and the time of death comes with shocking speed, the person suffering terribly, unable to breathe, coughing up blood and lung, fevered, aching in every bone, his mouth and throat ulcerated, desolated by the loss of all hope and the rejection of all prayer.
“If they die out here, wherever we end up, they will die in dry warm air, not in some cruel northern climate that sends the damps straight into their bones. Whether or not you guide us, we will go on, for we live not only in our bodies, but also by our visions and hopes, and it is in us to live in the desert with hope as the spirit that quickens us.”
Skye gazed at the distant pine-clad ridges.
“You talked to Wyeth. What did he tell you. Did you have a place in mind?”
“The Virgin River, Mister Skye. He said we should go to the Virgin River on the edge of the great southwestern desert and there we would find the very place we are seeking. Jedediah Smith passed that way when he went to Mexican California.
There are river flats that might be cultivated and irrigated with waters diverted from the river. Some of the local Indians do just that. There's a mild dry climate. There's wood and grass. It's on or near the California Trail, the southern one, so we would not be isolated. It fits the very model described by a scholar I trust who has examined the disease and its cures.”
Skye thought about it. “I've never been anywhere near there. The Virgin River is far from any settlement that I know of. You think you'll survive there, isolated, far from supplies, from food and clothing, from meat, from medicine? From roving bands of Paiutes who may or may not be friendly? From outlaws and brigands and desperadoes?”
“Yes, sir, that is our plan.”
The colonel turned the talk in a new direction. “I told him, Mister Skye, that American Indians are vulnerable to the diseases of white men, and surely that includes your wives, and that it must be considered.”
“And my response, Mister Skye, was that you and your ladies need not come close to my party. We are self-contained. All the evidence suggests that the disease is transmitted by close contact, but who knows? Saliva, touching, whatever. And we would quarantine ourselves for the sake of your family.”
Skye looked doubtful.
“There is something else not yet discussed, Mister Peacock,” the colonel said. “Mister Skye's services are not cheap. I'm his agent and negotiate for him, but perhaps you can deal directly with him now.”
“We budgeted two hundred dollars.”
The colonel shook his head. “Two hundred dollars. That doesn't even begin to make it a proposition for Mister Skye.”
“It's what we budgeted. It's what we will pay.”
A great quiet fell over them. Skye obviously got much
more, especially if the prospects were grim. A breeze stirred his unkempt gray hair.
“We have some maps, crude as they may be,” Peacock said, breaking the silence. “We come from New Bedford, on the Atlantic coast. We made our way from Independence to here. We will make our way to what, for us, is a biblical Zion, a place of refuge in the benign air of the desert. We will find our way without a guide. Thank you for your time, Mister Skye. You have many admirers who speak in the highest terms of you.”
He turned toward his Morgan gelding.
“Wait one moment, Mister Peacock,” Skye said. He turned toward his women. “Victoria, Mary, we have the chance to help bring some very sick people to a place of healing. They have a white man's disease. It would be dangerous for you. This disease destroys lungs until people cannot breathe, and their lungs fill up and they die. It would be dangerous for our boy as well.”
Mary deferred to Victoria with a small nod. Victoria walked slowly toward Hiram Peacock. “The people of all the world are one people, and the sickness of your people makes my heart heavy. If there is a place of good spirits, let us take them there.”
“That will be our reward,” Skye said. “We'll get by. We always do.”
Peacock had no words in him. He just nodded. But then he stepped forward and clasped the small hands of Victoria, the young hands of Mary, and the big rough hands of Skye.
“Mister Peacock, you've got yourself the finest guide and counselor in the world,” said Colonel Bullock. “He will get you to your home in the desert, and he won't leave you until you are settled there and he knows you are safe. Count yourself blessed.”