them. As the sun began to slip into the last quadrant of the sky, off behind their left shoulders, the time had come for one of the old trappers to select a camping ground for the night. A spot near wood and water, with enough dry, brittle grass available that the stock would not become too restless because of the lack of forage by morning.
More than four and a half days had passed since Roman Burwell pulled himself out of that wagon bed and rose on his own two shaky legs, standing up to Hargrove long enough for the rest of them to get up their gumption too. Not that any of these farmers weren’t man enough. Just, sometimes, most men need others to prod them, to give them permission to stand up for themselves. If Roman wasn’t the sort who would ever make a charismatic leader, at least he was the kind of man who had inspired others to be what any new land needed.
For those first two painful days after the train broke apart, Burwell had remained in the back of his wagon as it bounced and rumbled through the valley of the Bear River. And for the last four and a half agonizing days, Roman had mustered the strength to walk beside the plodding oxen, grumbling that as much as it hurt to trudge through the rocky soil, it still was nowhere near as painful as the hammering he had taken in the back of that wagon box, no matter how many comforters Amanda piled around him. The wounded farmer ended up covering the last eighty miles to Soda Springs on foot.
“Pa!” Amanda cried. “Get outta that food box!” She and the Indian women were going about preparations for supper.
“I’m just lookin’ for something,” he admitted as he retreated a step back from the rear gate of the wagon, bumping against his accomplice, Shadrach Sweete. “One’a them sugar bags o’ your’n.”
She eyed him suspiciously as Roman hobbled up, asking her father, “You got a sweet tooth I didn’t know about?”
“Not really. Just thought I’d make the young’uns a treat,” he confessed.
“Sugar? For what?” Roman asked.
“Shad an’ me gonna go fetch some of that soda water in our cups,” Titus explained with a playful grin. “We come back, gonna stir some sugar in.”
Sweete added, “Makes a tasty drink, it does.”
The pair were back at the wagon within minutes, each of them holding two pint tin cups filled with the bubbly water. Scratch asked, “You got my sugar ready?”
Amanda set an enameled-tin bowl on the gate, filled with a mound of sugar. “Here you go, Pa. Something to soothe that sweet tooth of yours.”
“I ain’t got a sweet tooth,” he snapped at her as he dipped a big pewter spoon into the bowl and dragged the scoop over to dump it into the first of the four cups.
Shad watched Scratch stir and stir before he took a sip of the effervescent liquid.
“Needs li’l more,” Titus admitted.
After another heaping spoon of sugar was stirred in, he tried it again. “That’s more like it!” And he handed Shadrach the spoon. “Waits! C’mere an’ try this treat I made for you.”
His wife took the cup from him, sniffed at it, then wrinkled up her nose with a giggle. In Crow she said, “It tickles me!”
“Taste it,” he prodded in English. “Sweet.”
“Like me!” Shadrach said as he finished tasting his and handed the cup to Shell Woman.
Bass took the spoon and began to mix some sugar into the other two cups. “Call them young’uns over here,” he suggested. “All of ’em.”
“You’re gonna make some for every one?” Roman asked.
“Got all the water we’d ever need,” Titus said with a wink. “How much sugar you got for me to drink up tonight?”
Amanda relented and said, “Go ahead on and use the rest of that bag for the children. I figure I’ve got enough left for coffee and baking till we get to Fort Hall.”
“Sugar there gonna be high as a silk top hat!” Bass exclaimed.
“So if we can’t afford the price and have to run out before we get to Oregon,” Burwell commented, “then we’ll drink our coffee straight and eat our biscuits sour!”
“Lemuel,” Titus called the youngster over. “Go fetch us this kettle full of water at that spring yonder where we brung the cups from.”
It wasn’t long before they were all standing at the tailgate, dipping cups in the kettle of cold, bubbling water—mixing in sugar and stirring, taking a drink before passing the cups around—wriggling their noses and giggling with the burst of tiny bubbles.
Scratch looked over the jostling of the children all around them. “Magpie? You see’d your li’l brother and that Lucas?”
“They play out there, Popo,” she said in a passable American, pointing out into the sage bottoms that extended toward the lava flats.
“Maybeso you better go fetch ’em both back here to have a treat with us afore all this sugar gets poured down our bellies an’ it’s gone!”
Titus watched Magpie get in one last long drink before she turned away for the open ground beyond the last wagon, out where the happy shouts of emigrant children rang out.
“How’d you ever find out to mix some sugar in with this water, Titus?” asked Burwell.
“Been so many years ago, I can’t rightly recollect,” he confessed. “You had it fixed like this afore, Shadrach?”
Smacking his lips, Sweete declared, “Many a time I come here, but never had no sugar mixed in. This is some!”
“Years and years ago, ever’ mountain man knowed of Sody Springs,” Titus explained as he cast his eyes around this beautiful, lush camping ground. “When a trapper an’ his outfit was anywhere near, they come camp here and drink all this water they could. This here’s some of the best medeecin a man could want going through him. Works its good right on down my gullet, into my paunch, an’ all the way on out.”
“You’d drink this without the sugar?” Roman inquired of Sweete.
Shad answered, “But this here sugar makes the sody a toothsome treat—”
“Popo!”
Scratch whirled at Magpie’s shrill yell, the sound of it making the hair on his arms stand on end. Something about it that instantly spelled danger and trouble. Everyone around him fell silent too and turned with him to watch the girl dashing toward them, the dogs bounding around her legs. Every few steps she took she twisted the top of her body halfway around to point behind her at the open ground where a small knot of children had gathered, all of them bending at the waist, as if looking down at something on the ground. From all directions, more and more of the children were converging on that tiny group.
“Po-
As she screamed for him a second time and lunged closer and closer, more and more adults at the nearby wagons stopped and watched the girl with grave curiosity.
“She hurt herself?” Amanda said as she stepped around the end of the tailgate, dusting her hands on her apron, then bringing both to her brow, shading her eyes from the late-afternoon sun.
Something in his belly immediately told him Magpie wasn’t the one who was hurt. Not the way that girl was bounding over the sage like a doe antelope, all brown legs and fringed skirt flying. So he looked beyond her, to that wide-open patch of rocky sagebrush flat where the small boys had gone to play. No, he was relieved to see that they hadn’t ventured anywhere close to the boulders as he had warned them not to do. So were the two boys in that handful of youngsters knotted around something on the ground? From this distance, Titus could not make out either one of them in that group as the sun slanted its light from the last quarter of the sky.
He started toward Magpie at a walk, leaving the others standing behind without a word of explanation— acting on a gut-hunch that something was terribly wrong. Everyone in this valley seemed frozen, motionless, just watching. Everyone still but for him and Magpie.
“Popo, Popo, Popo!” she was gasping as her knee-length buckskin dress flapped at her skinny copper legs each time she leaped over some brush instead of dodging around it.
With his next breath Titus broke into a trot for her, suddenly aware of the murmuring voices of those emigrants he was leaving behind at their wagons on both sides of the sagebrush bottom. He still could not make out either of the boys in that bunch of youngsters. Worry became dread and began to claw at him. Titus started
