“I ain’t going,” Hoyt said, taking a bold step away from his wife at their breakfast fire.
Hargrove’s cold eyes narrowed menacingly as Benjamin shifted on his saddle, preparing for what violence loomed. “Trouble happens, Bingham. Folks get hurt, sometimes through no fault of their own. Then there’s folks like you and Burwell—they get hurt because it’s their own stupid undoing.”
“You ain’t gonna bully an’ beat us, not from here on out.” Burwell stood bravely, one arm braced against the bandage that was wrapped tightly around his broken ribs.
That sudden show of bravery appeared to buoy Bingham and some others with renewed courage. Turning back to Hargrove, Hoyt Bingham declared in a clear voice, “Don’t you remember what happened a few days back?”
“You do remember that council meeting you called real clear, don’t you, Hargrove?” Truell asked as he stepped up beside Roman Burwell.
“You was voted out,” Bingham reminded with new backbone.
“Maybe you and what you got left of these toughs oughtta get outta our camp!” cried the smooth-jawed Fenton.
Iverson stepped up to the line slowly being formed against Hargrove and Benjamin. “You and the rest shouldn’t travel with our company no more!”
“You can’t do this to me!” Hargrove bellowed like a wounded bull surrounded by gaunt and hungry wolves. “You said we could accompany your train till we reach Fort Hall!”
Surprising them all, Roman Burwell unsteadily pushed himself away from the wagon’s tailgate, wincing a bit with the movement. “Don’t you hear what these men are saying?” he asked. “That’s the voice of the people saying you been voted out. Now it’s time you got out.”
When Hargrove reined his horse aside so he could look squarely at Burwell, both of Scratch’s dogs growled where they were restrained at a wagon wheel, their neck hair ruffing, as Amanda stepped under her husband’s arm, attempting to support him on her shoulders. Roman gently pushed her away, wagged his head at her, and stood there alone.
The ousted wagon boss jutted his chin out and told the wounded emigrant, “Not one of you farmers here is man enough to go against me—”
“We aren’t gonna force you an’ your hired men out, less’n you make us,” Burwell interrupted. “As for the rest of them who want to go to California with you, all of you can stay with us till we get to Fort Hall. We’ll see your bunch is safe till you get to the Snake. But you ain’t our captain no more.”
At the edge of the gathering crowd a man named Rankin grumbled loudly, “I say the California folks go their own way from here on out!”
“No!” Burwell cried, wincing with a spasm of pain. “We aren’t gonna become the sort of people Hargrove is.”
Titus glanced at his daughter as she stood easily within reach of her weakened husband but gave Roman his stand. Amanda’s cheeks glistened with tears, her eyes shiny with pride in her husband. A pride that had long lain dormant until Hargrove’s unremitting cruelty had reawakened it.
“Why not, Roman?” asked a man named Winston. “He damn well tried to do the same to you!”
“Maybe that’s the way things was for folks back there in the East,” Roman said steadily. “Fact is, that’s the way it was for most all of us. Them with money had the power to rule over the rest. If we was so happy with that way of things back there—why’d any of us decide to strike out for Oregon in the first place?”
“Better lives!”
“That’s right!” Burwell responded to the anonymous cry from the crowd. “But, are any of us gonna have better lives if we all act like Hargrove and his kind when we get where we’re going? What have we made better for our families if we still fight to grab money and power for ourselves?”
Bingham started for the wounded emigrant, saying, “How’re you saying we’re supposed to make things different?”
“This here journey to a new land is our chance to do something good for our women and our children,” he explained to the hushed gathering. “We can make a new life for ourselves—not just new homes and new farms. But a new
Bingham stepped to Roman’s side and laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “My fellow captain is right! We must make new homes in a new land—not live things the way they were back east. We’ll let those who are happy with the Hargroves of the world stay back there and live out their lives, or let them follow Hargrove to California. As for us, we’re on to Oregon!”
Iverson leaped up and shouted, “The Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company!”
“Oregon or bust!” shouted Murray.
Pushing her way through the crowd that immediately surged toward Roman, Amanda threaded her way to his side, grabbed his face in both her hands, and pulled it down to her mouth as she raised herself on her toes. Watching them together at this pivotal moment, Titus felt his heart grow light, weighing far less than it had ever since that day at Bridger’s forge, when she told him about her husband and the troubles they were running from back in Missouri. For days now Scratch had been consumed by the fear that they would never outrun their mistakes, never get beyond the failures of Roman Burwell. Fear that Amanda had married a man who would one day plunge his whole family into disaster, if not with Phineas Hargrove on the road to Oregon, then surely once they had reached the mouth of the Willamette.
But instead, his son-in-law had stood up for the right, as Titus saw it. He had stood up to power, greed, and bullies. Here with the coming of the dawn, Scratch had realized his son-in-law was not so simple a man as one might suspect at first blush. Roman Burwell was as loving a husband as any he could hope for Amanda, as good and kind a father as he himself could be to his own children. The farmer was, in the end, the sort of man Scratch believed he could call friend. And to the old trapper there was no finer distinction than that.
“Oregon or bust!” the crowd echoed again as they washed forward, forcing the two horsemen back from their rejoicing in a swell of noise and a surge of bodies.
Amanda and Roman were going to be all right. For the first time in days, Titus felt that clear to his marrow. They and their children were going to be all right. The family would get to Oregon, and that country would indeed prove to be their promised land.
He felt his eyes sting as he watched that crowd of jubilant men, women, and children tighten around Burwell and Bingham, clapping and singing trail songs of Oregon. How proud he was to witness this moment. Strong, simple, good people—the sort who could surely make that new land thrive the way nothing back east ever would again.
Titus Bass felt as if he was witnessing the birth of a whole new country.
Off in the distance there was no mistaking that narrow, winding tangle of emerald green, luring and seductive against the sere and sunburned sienna of the summer landscape.
“That’s the Bear,” Titus said to Waits in English, holding the first two of those fingers left on his right hand in front of his mouth, pointed down as if they were the mighty canines of the beast.
She repeated in his native tongue, “Bear.”
“You said that good,” he sighed with contentment. “Off in that country, south aways, I first met Jim Bridger.”
“How long?”
“Hmmm,” he considered. “That’s some. Must be … goin’ on twenty winters now.”
“Too-wen-tee?” she mimed. Then asked again, “How long?”
So he balanced his longrifle across the tops of his thighs as the horse rocked beneath him, and held up both hands, fingers extended. Then he quickly closed his fists once and extended the fingers again. “Twenty.”
“Old man, this Ti-tuzz now!”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Some days, I feel so goddamned old I wonder why I’m still livin’.”
She looked at him with worry creasing the crow’s-feet at her eyes. In her own tongue she asked the difficult question, “Your heart … it’s ready to die?”
With a shake of his head, Titus answered, “No. Not ready to die.”
