death to reality. The reality was yet to come, and in the meantime there was nothing, and Len felt vaguely as though somebody had died. Which, of course, Gran had, and the two things were so closely connected in his mind that he couldn’t think about Bartorstown without thinking about Gran too, and remembering the defiant things she had said that made Pa so mad. He wondered if she knew he was going there. He hoped so. He thought she would be pleased.
They tied up one night by a low bank in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight but the prairie grass and the endless sky, and no sound but the wind that never got tired of blowing, and the ceaseless running of the river. In the morning they started to unload the barge, and around noon Len paused a moment to catch his breath and wipe the sweat out of his eyes. And he saw a pillar of dust moving far off on the prairie, coming toward the river.
Hostetter nodded. “It’s our men, bringing the wagons. We’ll angle up from here to the valley of the Platte, and pick up the rest of our party at a point on the South Fork.”
“And then?” asked Len, with a stir of the old excitement making his heart beat faster.
“Then we’re on the last stretch.”
A few hours later the wagons came in, eight of them, great lumbering things made for the hauling of freight and drawn by mules. The men who drove them were brown and leathery, with the tops of their foreheads all white when they took their hats off, and a network of pale lines around their eyes where the sun hadn’t got to the bottom of the squinted-up wrinkles. They greeted Kovacs and the bargemen as old friends, and shook Hostetter’s hand warmly as a sort of welcome-home. Then one of them, an old fellow with a piercing glance and a pair of shoulders that looked as though they could carry a wagon alone if the mules gave out, peered closely at Len and Esau and said to Hostetter, “So these are your boys.”
“Well,” said Hostetter, coloring slightly.
The old man walked around them slowly, his head on one side. “My son was in the Ohio country couple- three years ago. He said all you heard about was Hostetter’s boys. Where were they, what were they doing, let him know when they moved on.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” said Hostetter. His face was now brick red. “Anyway, a couple of kids—And I’d known them since they were born.”
The old man finished his circuit and stood in front of Len and Esau. He put out a hand like a slab of oak and shook with them gravely in turn. “Hostetter’s boys,” he said, “I’m glad you got here before my old friend Ed had a total breakdown.”
He went away laughing. Hostetter snorted and began to throw boxes and barrels around. Len grinned, and Kovacs burst out laughing.
“He isn’t just joking, either,” said Kovacs, jerking his head toward the old man. “Ed kept every radio in that part of the country hot.”
“Well, damn it,” grumbled Hostetter, “a couple of kids. What would you have done?”
They camped that night beside the river, and next day they loaded the wagons, taking great care with the stowage of each piece in the beds, and leaving a place in one where Amity could ride and sleep. Kovacs was going on into the Upper Missouri, and shortly after noon they got up steam on the barge and chuffed away. The mules were rounded up by two or three of the men, riding small wiry horses of a type Len had not seen before. He helped them to harness up and then took his seat in one of the wagons. The long whips cracked and the drivers shouted. The mules rolled slowly over the prairie grass, with a heavy creaking and complaint of axles. At nightfall, across the flat land, Len could still see the barge on the river. In the morning it was still there, but farther off and sometime during the day he lost it. And the prairie became immensely large and lonely.
The Platte runs wide and shallow between hills of sand. The sun beats down and the wind blows, and the land goes on forever. Len remembered the Ohio with an infinite longing. But after a while, when he got used to it, he became aware of a whole new world here, a way of living that didn’t seem half bad, once you shucked off a habit of thought that called for green woods and green grass, rain and plowing. The dusty cottonwoods that grew by the water became as beautiful as oaks, and the ranch houses that clung close to the river were more welcome than the villages of his own country because they were so much more infrequent. They were rough and sun-bitten, but they were comfortable enough, and Len liked the people, the brown hardy women and the men who seemed to have lost some of themselves when they came apart from their horses. Beyond the sand hills was the prairie, and on the prairie were the great wild herds of cattle and the roving horse bands that made the living of these hunters and traders. Hostetter said that the wild herds were the descendants of the prewar range stock, turned loose in the great upheaval that followed the abandonment of the cities and the consequent breakdown of the system of supply and demand,
“Their range runs clear down to the Mexican border,” he said, “and there isn’t a fence on it now. The dry- farmers all quit long ago. For generations there hasn’t been a single plow to scratch up the plains, and the grass is coming back even in the worst of the man-made deserts, like the good Lord meant it to be.” He took a deep breath, looking all around the horizon. “There’s something about it, isn’t there, Len? I mean, in some ways the East is closed in, with hills and woods and the other side of a river valley.”
“You ain’t going to get me to say I don’t like the East,” said Len. “But I’m getting to like this too. It’s just so big and empty I keep feeling like I’m going to fall in.”
It was dry, too. The wind beat and picked at him, sucking the moisture out of him like a great leech. He drank and drank, and there was always sand in the bottom of the cup, and he was always thirsty. The mules rolled the miles back under the wagon wheels, but so gradually and through such a sameness of country that Len got a feeling they hadn’t moved. Through deep ravines in the sand hills the wild cattle came down to drink, and at night the coyotes yapped and howled and then fell into respectful silence before the deeper and more blood-chilling voice of some wayfaring wolf. Sometimes they would go for days without seeing a ranch house of any sign of human life, and then they would pass a camp where the hunters had made a great kill and were busy jerking or salting down the beef and rough-curing the hides. And time passed. And like the time on the river, it was timeless.
They reached the rendezvous on the South Fork, in a meadow faded and sun-scorched, but still greener than the glaring sandy desolation that spread around it as far as the eye could reach, broken only by the shallow rushing of the river. When they went on again there were thirty-one wagons in the party, and some seventy men. Some of them had come directly across the Great Plains, others had come from the north and west, and they were loaded with everything from wool and iron pigs to gunpowder. Hostetter said that other freight trains like this came up from Arkansas and the wide country to the south and west, and that others still followed the old trail through the South Pass from the country west of the mountains. All the supplies had to be fetched before winter, because the Plains were a cruel place when the northers blew and the single pass into Bartorstown was blocked with snow.
From time to time, at particular points, they would find groups of men encamped and waiting for them, and they would stop to trade, and at one place, where another stream trickled into South Fork and there was a village of four houses, they picked up two more wagons loaded with hides and dried beef. And Len asked,when he was sure he was alone with Hostetter, “Don’t these people ever get suspicious? I mean, about where we’re going.”
Hostetter shook his head.
“They don’t have to. They know.”
“They
“Yes,” said Hostetter, “but they don’t know they know it, You’ll see what I mean when you get there.”
Len did not ask any more, but he thought about it, and it didn’t seem to make any kind of sense.
The wagons lumbered on through the heat and the glare. And on a late afternoon when the Rockies hung blue and misty like a curtain across the west, there came a sudden shout from up ahead. It was flung back all along the line, from driver to driver, and the wagons jolted to a stop. Hostetter reached back for a gun, and Len asked, “What is it?”
Hostetter said, “I suppose you’ve heard of the New Ishmaelites.”
“Yes.”
“Well, now you’re going to see them.”
Len followed Hostetter’s gesture, squinting against the reddening light. And on top of a low and barren bluff
