“Hallee?”
“Sweete go on,” she said in his American tongue, still grinning as she made a gesture. “Ride to post first.”
Shifting himself some off the healing buttock, he inquired, “How far now?”
Waits gazed up at the sun, then concentrated on the distance where they were headed, and finally back to look at him. “Not long, Ti-tuzz. Much light left after we make camp.”
He wanted to see for himself as they crossed the broad, barren ridge and rumbled ever onward. Dragging his weight up by his arms, gripping those crates and boxes roped against both inside walls of the wagon’s box, Bass rolled over with that good leg braced beneath him and found that it did not hurt all that much to put a little weight on the injured hip. Slowly, keeping himself braced with his arms, he inched his way forward to reach the front opening, hoisted himself up on the back of the bench behind the farmer, and peered out. These ox teams did not require the heavy lines and harness of a six-horse hitch. Instead, most of the emigrants did not have to ride at the front of the wagon, but chose to walk alongside their teams, nudging them with a judicious use of a whip or stick to make a change in direction.
“That’s Hallee, Roman,” he announced as those in the lead began to shout and cheer, laugh and whistle, rejoicing at their arrival.
Burwell turned with surprise at the trapper’s sudden appearance, then smiled. “You’re moving around a little more today, I see.”
“Nothin’ much keeps me tied down for long—”
“Is that my father you’re talking to?” Amanda asked as her face came into view on the other side of the plodding team.
Titus asked her, “You know what that is off yonder?”
“Fort Hall?”
“Can’t be nothin’ else.”
“Oh, Roman!” she gushed. “If only we’d …”
Bass watched her face gray with regret; then Amanda dragged a finger under one eye and appeared to give herself a new shot of resolve.
“Happy as I am to reach this place,” she explained, looking up at him as the wagon jostled him from side to side, “it’s a bittersweet arrival.”
“Lucas made it here with you an’ Roman,” Titus reminded. “His spirit goin’ all the way to Oregon with you.”
“But you aren’t,” she complained as some of the rejoicing from other wagons around them died away. “Did you think any more about our offer, Pa?”
“Ever’ damned bump along the way,” he admitted.
Her face registered excitement. “That means you’ve decided to go on with us?”
“No,” he said, watching the glee drain from her sunburned face beneath that bonnet. “Ever’ mile we come closer to Fort Hall, I thought on reasons why I couldn’t go with you two.”
“Waits? And your children?” she prodded.
“Them, yeah. ’Specially them,” he confessed.
She pushed a sprig of her oak-colored hair back under the ribbon of her poke bonnet and gazed up at him from beneath the bill that framed her face. “They’d have a fine place to grow up and live in Oregon, Pa. Safe, once we get to the Willamette.”
“Safe.” He repeated that dream word with a sigh, watching the figures appear at the top of the tall earthen walls of the fort there beneath the fluttering red banner, one small blue Union Jack tucked up in the corner above the three large letters: N B C. “I can’t hardly recollect anymore how it was to live safe, Amanda—I been in this life o’ mine for so long.”
She asked, “You wouldn’t come for your children?”
Then Roman added, “That’s the reason we come to a new land.”
“Much as you make it sound sweet to a man’s ears,” he replied, seeing the first wagon teams starting to curve gracefully away from the walls at Shad’s direction, the big man standing in the stirrups and waving them toward a far pasture, “it’s for my family that I can’t go where the rest of you are headed.”
“But mostly for you,” Amanda said with resignation.
“Mostly for me,” he confessed. “Maybeso, you are comin’ to unnerstand your pa.”
Three stone chimneys were visible over the twenty-foot-high walls, only one of them smoking at this time of day. A large square blockhouse stood at one corner, a smaller one at the opposite corner, both covered by shake roofs drawn up in a peak. Like the adobe stockade constructed by the Bent brothers on the Arkansas, the tops of these walls were rounded in places, crudely scalloped by wind and rain eroding the mud surface clearly in need of repair. Four low doorways penetrated the one wall he inspected as they inched past, causing little stir among the post’s occupants.
“John Bull,” Titus said.
“You know someone here?” Roman asked.
“No. John Bull’s what we call … what we did call the Englishers, the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
Burwell wagged his head as he stared at the mud wall. “Gets my goat to find the English squatting down right here between the United States and Oregon.”
“I knowed a good Englishman or two,” Titus explained as they turned past another wall, where stood the main gate, a double just wide enough to permit entry to a wagon. “As for me, the rest of ’em you could throw into the sea an’ never let ’em set foot this side of Red River of the North!”
“Does my heart good to hear you speak no ill of America, Titus,” Roman said, goading the off-hand ox with his long stick.
“Speak ill of America?” he echoed, brow knitting.
“Wasn’t sure, all this time, where you stood on making Oregon our territory,” Burwell explained. “From what I heard you say to Amanda, sounded to me you were over and done with the country where you were born and raised.”
“I am,” he admitted. “But just because I turned my back on America don’t mean I want John Bull in here!”
“Rally up for Oregon!” Roman cheered as they reached a campground with some untrammeled grass over on the east bank of a river that fed the Snake from the south. “Build it strong for America and toss the British out!”
“Ho, for Oregon!” another emigrant shouted as the wagons peeled off in two directions to pick their camps.
Came a new voice, “Oregon for Americans!”
“Throw the English out on their ass!” a man shouted lustily, their voices echoing from the timber.
Here they would lay over, rest the teams, trade for what they might need in a final push down the Snake to the Columbia before reaching the Willamette. Come so far, they now found themselves no more than eight hundred miles from their promised land. And it was here that Roman Burwell surprised the old trapper when he dragged the oxen to a halt and turned around to lay his arms across the back of the crude plank seat, gazing in at his father-in- law.
“I been wanting to tell you something for the last few days, back as far as the time we took our train away from Hargrove,” he explained. “Wanted to somehow get across that I started out for Oregon with a reason firm in my mind. Was a time I figured I was going simply because it was best for Oregon to belong to America. Later on I thought I was going for the land—land they told us was so rich a man hardly needed to work it.”
“Good land for a farmer, that,” Titus said as Amanda and Lemuel came up to the front wheel.
Burwell’s face went grave with the creases of a simple man not easily given to introspection. “But a strange thing come over me—not sudden, but slow, Titus. Slow, with every mile we come outta Missouri, making our way along the Platte. Farther we went, the more I wanted to see. Not just to get to Oregon—but to really see what new country each new day showed us.”
Slipping her arm through her son’s, Amanda said, “This is country that draws a body on and on and on, making you hungry to see what’s coming next down the river, around the hill, over the ridge.”
Roman dropped his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Used to be, I had me a good reason to take my family to
