The Judgement Vial

Joshua is given what argueably might be the most precious substance on earth, but is it a wonderous gift or a terrible curse? Science fiction or magic? Perhaps neither; perhaps both. Or perhaps it all happened and we just never knew about it. A bit long for a short story, a bit short for a novel, but I hope you will find it entertaining just the same.



The Judgment Vial

A Short Story
By

Tony Killinger


There was, they say, a land bridge that spanned the treacherous waters between Asia and North America, about 20,000 years ago. Horses came across that bridge, lived and died out on this continent. They were reintroduced centuries later, brought in the ships of the Spanish, English, French and Dutch. We have found the skeletal remains of those Asian ponies all across our lands. We have also found the skeletal and cultural evidence of those who lived with them. These were people who came all the way from Mongolia on a migration that lasted thousands of years and more. Hidden within their DNA were clues and markers that we have been unable to read until recent times. The horses died out but the people did not. Today, we find those same markers in the blood of our most ancient inhabitants; we call that line Navajo.
The Navajo will tell you that they did not come from Asia, they came from the center of the earth and emerged into a small area of the southwest, bounded by four sacred mountains, standing on the four corners of the only world they make any claim to. It is a land that has little water but has soaked up the marked blood of these people for as long as history goes back.
If you are to understand this story you must understand the beliefs of the traditional Navajo, because that is where it all began. For the traditional, death is a finality. When the wind of life passes out of the individual the spirit begins a four day journey to join nature. What was good in this person passes with him, the bad remains behind. There is no happy hunting ground in the sky, there is nature and they try to live in harmony with it. They avoid the bad chindi, the remnants of evil in all men’s lives and the name of the dead person is spoken only in hushed tones, or not at all, for fear the evil will come seeking its former dwelling place.
Evil causes sickness. It is best to keep away from evil, avoid it if at all possible. But, no matter how careful one might be, that which is malevolent cannot ever be sidestepped completely. Someone must minister to the dying, bathe the body and wash the hair of the dead, dress the body and slip the ceremonial moccasins on the wrong feet to confuse the following chindi. If one has been exposed to evil there are curing ceremonies, sings, which are performed to restore health to the person so that they may walk in beauty and harmony once more. The sings are as old as the Navajo, the chants and songs brought from the center of the earth.
Perhaps the Judgment Vial came from the center of the earth, perhaps it came from Mongolia, no one knows with certainty. The few who even know of its existence are reluctant to acknowledge it, do not know who possesses it or are even capable of telling you, in detail, all the powers it has. They will, however, admit without reservation, it contains the most precious substance in the universe, capable of curing any illness, extending life far beyond its normal limits and kills without conscious.
Perhaps it would be best if I tell you the tale as it was told to me. I know so little of it because it began so very long ago. The small part I am familiar with begins in the middle-nineteenth century, about the year 1840. You will not believe it because it falls so far outside the realm of what you and I would consider as possible. I have learned to push back those limits, perhaps you will too.

The Death of Francis Many-Suns

As was his custom, Francis Many-Suns stood motionless outside the open door of the cabin, allowing the person inside the opportunity to prepare for his arrival. The old Navajo, a blanket wrapped around his wide shoulders, said nothing, but he appeared to be unsteady on his feet, perhaps on the verge of falling. He was a frequent visitor to this cabin, a friend to the blonde young man who had built it. Francis had drunk coffee there many times, seated at the rough plank table, his back to the warming radiance of the fireplace. He had spoken at length with the person called Blake and knew him to be a man of honor and peace. Today he had come to speak again, this time on a matter of some consequence and urgency.
Francis had badly misread the signs, assumed as he had come to expect, that his own death was far removed from this day. Had he read the signs properly he would have left this country and walked the thousand miles to his ancestral home within the boundaries of the four sacred mountains, found a young shaman who held fast to the proper ways, spent the year necessary to instruct him and then handed over his precious vial. Having given up the responsibility of the vial he would have prepared a sweat bath, cleansed his body and sat beneath the stars until his life wind blew no more. His acolyte would have bathed his body again, in water, soaped his hair with the cleansing froth of the yucca plant, rinsed and combed it. He would have been taken to a remote place where the raven and the coyote would not discover the corpse, and he would be no more. The long journey would come to an end and the vial would be safe once again.

“Francis?” The voice of Joshua Blake came from inside the cabin. “Come in, old friend. Sit and talk and I’ll make fresh coffee.”
The first faltering steps that Francis made toward the cabin brought the young man out, a look of deep concern on his face. “Are you alright?” He grabbed the old man by the elbow and assisted him inside. “Sit here in the big chair and be comfortable.”

Francis smiled and lowered himself into the sprawling chair made of cedar poles with soft deerskin padding on the seat and back. He sighed. The pungent aroma of the cedar brought back old memories and he stroked the smooth wood, thinking of days so long past. “You must not be troubled by my appearance, my young nephew,” he said slowly. I feel no pain and perhaps when this night is over you will not feel it either.”

Josh did not understand the remark but paid little attention to it. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked instead.

The old man continued to smile. The blanket had slipped from his shoulders and he held a small bundle close to his body, lovingly, the way a woman might hold a child. “Always the coffee,” he chuckled. “It is because of your coffee and your company that I have come to value your friendship so highly. You are a man of some honor and sound judgment, and it is rare to see those qualities in one with so few years.”

Again, Josh found the words strange, but he shrugged off the uneasy feeling and went to the hearth and picked up the steaming iron pot. From a nearby shelf he took an earthenware mug and poured the strong black liquid into it. He brought it to the old man and handed it to him. Francis grasped it with both palms, feeling the warmth of the vessel in his hands. The bundle slipped onto his lap.

“I must say, Francis, you don’t look good. Your color is pale. Are you eating well?”

“Your concern is well noted,” Francis said. “The truth is that my time is at hand. With the coming of the sun tomorrow my life wind will be gone. It is important that we talk and that you understand me well. Do you understand me well, Joshua?”

“I’ve always understood you,” Josh nodded. “You speak better English than I do. But, I won’t hear you speak of dying. If we must, I’ll load you into the wagon and drive you the twenty miles to town and we’ll see the doctor.”

“No,” Francis said softly. “The doctor has no cure for me.” He sipped at the coffee and smiled approvingly. “They say,” he continued, never admitting to his own accomplishments, “I speak the language of the Spanish and the French too. I have had so many, many years to learn. It is my mother tongue that is foreign to me now because I have been gone from Dineah. Words come to my mind in many forms now. I sort them out before my lips can form them.” He laughed softly.

The old man stopped speaking for a long moment and looked into the face of his young host. “You have the way of my people about you,” he said. “You don’t interrupt and you listen until the words are done before you answer. I think I have made the best choice possible.”

“I understand your words Francis,” Josh objected, “but I’m confused by what you are saying. Why do you speak of death and choices?”

“Because,” Francis said solemnly, “I am going to ask you to take a heavy burden from me. The burden is a blessing beyond anything you can believe and a curse that no man should have to bear, but I have managed to carry it for two hundred years.”

Josh was shocked back into his chair. “Two hundred years?” He heard himself object. “Is that some sort of special Navajo time?”

Francis laughed. “No,” he said when he had collected his thoughts again. “It is a good thing when two men can laugh together when the morning sun will warm only one of them again. “Tell me my name,” Francis said, thoughtfully.

It was Josh’s turn to laugh. “I haven’t had a drink of whiskey in more than six months, so I’m not likely to forget. You’re name is Francis, or so you’ve led me to believe.”

“My name is Francis Many-Suns,” the old man corrected him. “To the ear of the whites it says I am the father of many male children, and that is true also. But you use the same sound for the name of your sons and the yellow disk in the sky. In my tongue there are different words for those two things. So, the real translation of how I am called would be ‘years without numbers’.”

Joshua Blake’s first reaction was one of disbelief and deep concern for his old friend. They had shared this small mountain for eight years, both living simple and Spartan lives. Josh cut wood and hauled it by wagon to the railway siding. The old man gathered nuts and berries during the appropriate seasons, hunted when he needed to and dug roots from the ground during all months of the year. Josh had built a fine, tight cabin and hauled river rocks for a fireplace. Francis lived in an octagonal building built of flat rocks and chinked with mud mixed with straw. Their lives were intertwined the same as the game trails that wound their way around and up and down the mountain. There had never been a reason for either of them to distrust the other and that simple fact had governed their relationship.

From chance encounters where they only waved to one another, to short greetings along their separate ways, they had built a slow, strong bond between them. The tinkling and creaking of harness leather and the clatter of Josh’s wagon crossing the wide meadow outside Francis’s hogan would bring the old man to his doorway, arms upraised to the sky and a broad smile on his face when he came for a visit. For Josh too, it was always a delight to see the old man standing silently, a respectable distance from his door. Even in winter, his door shut to the elements, he would feel the presence of his friend close by and would have been surprised to find him not there when he opened his cabin.

Francis was a wise, learned man. Josh had never asked but he wondered if the old Indian had been exposed to formal education in some manner. He simply knew too much about too many things for it have been gained through lore.

Francis smiled again. “And now you are wondering if my friend has lost his reason, slipped into the churning waters that sometimes mark the passing of years. Is that right, Joshua?”

“Well,” Josh shifted uncomfortably in his chair, “what you say is difficult to believe, I must admit. A man is hard pressed to live to his sixtieth birthday, and I think you have bettered that mark, but two hundred? How could that be, Francis?”

The old man shifted slightly in his chair. “I will explain it to you the best I can, but it will not seem possible to you, even then.” He clutched the bundle to his breast again. “Let us suppose I had a potion that could prolong life, cure diseases, restore health to the injured and do all sorts of miraculous things. You think it is not possible, but for the sake of your old friend, would you be able to understand then?”

“I guess I could” Joshua Blake said with some skepticism in his voice. “But,” he hesitated, “we both know such a potion does not exist. The Spaniards believed there was a spring, somewhere on the earth, that had those qualities, but they were never able to find it. I’d guess there isn’t a spring or a lake or a river anywhere that hasn’t had man drink from it, there are just too many people around now-a-days. If they had found that water the news would spread faster than a forest fire. Folks would kill just to get a sip of it.”

Francis nodded his head in an approving manner. “It is good that you recognize the potential for the trouble and chaos such a discovery might provoke among the people,” he said. “But I too suspect that a body of water or a spring of that nature does not exist. However,” and the old man smiled more broadly than before in spite of the fact that he was getting increasingly weaker with each passing minute, “the world is nearly empty, my friend. The one who carried this gift, before me, lived even longer than I have and told of times when no trace of men could be found on the land for many days of walking. Now there are cities where thousands live and we speak numbers that, not too long ago, could only be imagined.”

“I suppose that is true,” Joshua admitted. “I once saw nearly a hundred people gathered together at one time and in one place. Frightened the daylights from me; couldn’t read that many faces so I just got away from there.”

“I have walked from the eastern shores to the western seas,” Francis said, his eyes drifting towards the roof above him. “I have seen mountains so high that winter never leaves them and deserts so hot that they never cool. There is emptiness everywhere, and yet, I see a time coming when those places will not remain untouched. If you accept my challenge, your task will be much harder than was mine. I have been able to hide and moved only short distances when it became clear that I was causing suspicion among my neighbors, or when I touched one with the water of life.”

“Why would anyone be suspicions of you? I doubt you have ever done anything of a nature to make anyone suspect anything more of you than catching the eye of a pretty woman.” The men laughed together in unison.

“I will admit to that,” Francis Many-Suns chuckled. “Five times I had taken a wife, each one more beautiful than the last one. A man learns to see the real beauty of women the longer he studies.”

“I wasn’t aware the Navajo allowed you more than one wife at a time,” Josh commented, “but I only know what you have told me in our conversations. This is the first you mentioned being married.”

Francis’ eyes saddened. “Five times a widower; five lovely, plump ladies have gone before me and five times my heart has been broken. But, never more than one wife at a time has made her bed beside my own. Two have died at the hands of raiding war parties, one died beneath an avalanche of snow when I could not reach to touch her, one grew old and died naturally and one I killed when I touched her with the water. She was the first.”

Josh could barely believe what he had just heard. “You killed your wife, Francis?”


“The water killed her; but I had been warned and I should have tried harder to look into her heart. You see, Joshua Blake, the water has power to kill also. It cannot restore life when the breath has gone; those powers are not given to mortals or to any substance. But, I believe, the water is the concentration of many, many good deeds, performed from the times when the world was savage and cruel. Perhaps it is the tears of a great medicine man who cries because of the lack of compassion for the people towards one another. It cannot tolerate evil and when it encounters it the reaction is swift and deadly. She was a lovely, young woman child and I found delight in her, so when the sickness came, the one that causes the blotched skin and the coarse cough, I wanted to save her. I touched the water to her forehead and she was gone.” Francis paused in his narration for a moment, collected his thoughts and caught his faltering breath. “It has happened since that time too. You can never be absolutely sure what is in the heart of the one you wish to save. That is why it is the children who have been the ones to receive it most of the time. Their hearts have not had time to learn the hatred that often hides within the thoughts of adults. You will learn, you will learn.”

The two men sat in silence for a few minutes. The evening sun had gone down, the sky was losing light; soon the darkness would engulf them. Josh got up from his chair and lit two oil lamps that hung on opposite walls and then lit the one that stood on the table. He threw a big piece of wood on the fire and watched it as the edges smoldered and then caught, sending little tongues of fire licking up the sides of the wood. The room brightened and it seemed the old man brightened a bit also. Josh allowed him to lie back in the chair, gently smiling. It was possible he was sleeping, but his color was better and the rest would be good for him.

The exaggerated silence, broken only by the slow, steady breathing of the old man, provided Joshua Blake a recess where he could rein in his thoughts and assess his feelings. For all the uncertainties that raced through his head, one stark, solid thing stood in the way of a complete rejection to what he had heard. Francis would not deliberately lie to him, no more than water would run uphill or the sun rise in the west. If he woke again Josh decided he would listen to more of the story and reevaluate the totality of it. If he did not awaken, he would bury him in the meadow in front of his beloved hogan.

Francis slept for two hours and when he woke his eyes were clear and bright. He looked about the cabin and smiled when his eyes settled on Josh. His voice was resonating when he finally spoke. “I was in error,” he chuckled softly.

Josh moved close to the big cedar chair. “How did you error, my friend?” He asked.

Francis sighed, but the smile did not fade. “I have thought of how it would be done, this passing of the vial from me to the next one. It was my hope that the blessing would be given to one of my own people, one of the Dineh, a Navajo. It seemed like I would have time to return to the sacred land within the four mountains and I would have time to select a suitable candidate and have even more time to explain everything I had learned. But, as I said, I was in error.”

“You are stronger now, Francis,” Josh said with little conviction. “Perhaps your death will not come as soon as you thought. With more rest and a bowl of venison stew you could be strong as an ox by morning.”

Francis laughed again. “The recovery is quite temporary, young Joshua. It will happen as I said it would, and now we must talk about that.”

“I just don’t see a reason for it, Francis,” Josh objected. “We can talk about it some other time; I don’t want to think about your dying tonight.”

“It is the only time given us,” Francis began. “You will know when my end is near. It is important that you take me out, under the stars or into the mist of the morning. The Navajo believes that all of the good from ones life goes with him on the journey into nature, but all that is bad,” and he hesitated and smiled again, almost devilishly, “remains behind. Do not allow my chindi to be trapped within the walls and roof of your cabin. I think my chindi is not very terrible, but to be safe for you, let it run off on its own. Then if you would be so kind, I would ask you to wash my body in water and soap and rinse my hair.” Francis took the bundle from his breast and laid it on his lap and opened it. Inside there was a new cotton shirt and a pair of snow white moccasins of deer hide. “Above my hogan on the rock shelf that faces the setting sun you will find a small cave that I have prepared. There are plenty of stones near the place. Put the body of who I was inside the cave, put the moccasins on my feet wrong, it will help confuse the tracks I leave and my evil will not be able to follow me. The stones will seal the cave and no coyote or ravens will find me. I have opened the gate of the pen where my sheep are kept, they will return to their wild ancestors. The old mule is there, and if you wish you can keep him or turn him loose. For me that is all you must do.”

Josh laid his palm against the man’s forehead; it was cool. “When the time comes, when the time comes, my friend.”

“This thing I ask of you,” Francis whispered, “It is a good thing. You will not notice any change for some time. Live your life as you always have, but mark the years, young Joshua. Look well at the face of your neighbors, note when their hair is traced with silver yours will show no sign of the time passing. If you stay among them they will think you are witched. When you find it necessary to touch someone with the water, do it in secret if you can. If you begin to gain a reputation as a great healer, many will seek you out and the water will not be safe.”
Josh was uncomfortable talking about the potion, if there was such a thing. He had not decided what he would tell his friend, but it did not seem like a good idea, all things taken into consideration. It was all too preposterous anyway. If the old man died he would follow the instruction given to him and he would place the water and his precious vial in the tomb among the rocks.

Francis seemed to sleep again, his face peaceful and serene. Josh made coffee and ate a piece of bread, watched and waited. He was aware that the night was passing, morning but a few hours away, and still he did not know for sure what he would do.
He walked out of the door to his cabin; the night sky was ebony black, stars by the millions shown in the sky, but off to the east a lighter shade of grey was creeping on the horizon. When he returned to the cabin the old man’s eyes were open.
“I said I had made an error,” he said weakly. “This is not the time for the vial to pass to a Navajo; I feel a great calamity will come to them in the years directly ahead. A calamity will also come to your nation, Joshua. Many of your people will die, many of mine also. Watch for the signs. Avoid the evil these days will bring to our peoples. Perhaps, one day, you could be the one to return the vial to the Dineh. Go among them when peace returns, find one who is worthy.”
“Francis,” Josh murmured, his voice dripping with uncertainty and doubt, “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t want to live two hundred years; I don’t want to judge if a person lives or dies, I just want to live my own life, however short or long it is.”

Francis smiled. “It is not you who will decide, that decision has already been made. The good or evil in a person is not your doing. But, I understand your hesitation.” The old man reached inside of his shirt and brought out a small rawhide cord that was around his neck. At the end of the cord was a small pouch made of deer skin with a draw string at the top. He opened it and withdrew a small vial. “We cannot know where this came from and so we must assume there is no more. When this is gone it is gone forever. If you decide that you cannot carry it, pour it on the ground. Perhaps the earth will benefit, I do not know. If you do decide to be the one to take it to a new time, and you cannot complete the journey, for any reason, do the same; pour it out onto the earth.”

With that, Francis rose from the big cedar chair, placed the vial on the table close to Josh, drew his blanket around his shoulders and walked steadily and strongly towards the door. “I go to meet nature,” he said, solemnly. “My heart is glad. Walk in wisdom, young Joshua. You will do the right thing.”

Francis walked outside, into the birth of the morning. He did not go far, Josh had some cottonwood logs that he had planned to split into firewood lying about. The old Indian sat down on one, facing the east. His white hair, thick and tangled, blew slightly in the breeze as night died. Joshua watched from the door of his cabin. The growing light, or the dying darkness, came from the sky to the ground as Francis smiled into the east. At long last, the first rays of the sun burst from the sky in dazzling brightness. Francis rose to his feet, sang a short chant in his own language and sat down again. Josh let him sit for a few minutes, thinking the prediction of death had not come true and the crisis was past. He poured a cup of coffee into the earthen bowl and walked out towards the old man, wondering how Francis would react to still being alive when he had been so certain he would die with the night.

“I’ve brought you a cup of good hot coffee, old friend,” Josh said, chuckling. The morning air is chilly; we need to get you back inside. As he came around in front he could see that he had miscalculated. Francis’s face was gray, like granite. Josh touched the old man’s cheek, it was cold as ice. The old Indian was dead.

It was mid-afternoon as Josh wedged the last stone into the crypt that Francis had scraped and dug out of the side of the rock facing. He dusted his hands off, whispered a soft “good-bye, my friend,” and then scrambled down the fifteen feet, near vertical drop to the ground. It had been more difficult than he had anticipated; the body was dense and heavy. He had noted too, Francis’ hair, when he washed it, thick and lustrous, his skin clear and unblemished. But, there was no sense in wondering about it now, Francis Many-Suns was on his journey to join nature.
The old mule that Francis rode occasionally as he tended his small flock of sheep brayed an objection as he was led away from what had been his home. Tied to the back of Josh’s wagon he kept looking back towards the stone hogan and the pens as though the old man might yet come and save him. Finally he surrendered, dropped his head and fell in with the slow steady trot of Josh’s team.

Joshua Blake had completed everything the old man had asked of him, everything except the one thing that had been most important. The vial stood on the table, the deer-skin bag casually lying beside it. Josh did not put the vial into the grave nor had he emptied the contents onto the ground as Francis had directed. He picked it up and looked at it. The liquid was clear as water; there was no color at all to it. The vial was clear, probably of blown-glass. The top appeared to be closed with a stopper of some sort arrangement. Josh estimated that perhaps four/fifths of the capacity of the bottle was full. He thought about the stories that must be connected to the drops that had been used. How many lives had it saved; how many lives had it taken?

Without be consciously aware of it, Josh pulled the top from the bottle. He had no way of knowing what would happen next, but something inside him demanded to know. He placed his finger of the top of the bottle and tipped it. A bolt of searing pain coursed through his body, fingertips, toes, his eyes, his ears, the flat surfaces of his back and torso, things he had never felt with any definable sensation reacted with shock at what was happening to them. The pain was gone in less than a second and Josh let out the breath that had caught in his throat and lungs. He stood there for a moment and regained his composure. He was not dead, he knew that. He also knew that something profound had just happened to him, in fact it was still happening. He quickly replaced the top on the vial as a warmth unlike anything he had ever experienced before began to spread through his being. He thrust the vial back into its pouch and looped the rawhide over his head. He staggered to the cedar chair and collapsed, but he knew he was not dead, he knew he was not dying.

 

The Early Years of Joshua Blake

Joshua Blake was born in the same year that our young country fought, and won, the second war with the British, 1812. He had never been very far from home, the mountains of western-Pennsylvania, nor had he any desire to see much of anything else. His goals were not unlike those of any other decent young man; work, build, marry a pretty woman, raise his children and die a happy old man. His father had helped him buy his first team of horses and a heavy wagon; the Railroad had made him an offer to cut wood for them and place it on the siding, so he was proceeding down his chosen path quite well. He hadn’t done much work on finding a wife, but that was because he was so remote, tucked away in the foothills with only the old Navajo for a neighbor.

After Francis’ death and the incident with the vial, he knew his life would be different, but there was no immediate need to radically alter his lifestyle that he could see. He kept cutting wood, kept hauling it to the siding for eight more years. While Joshua was content to let history take its course, history itself was about to enter a period where things would happen very quickly. Coal, plentiful in his mountains, was replacing wood as the fuel of choice for the new steam engines.
The people seemed restless. Every day, according to what Josh heard from his fellow teamsters, ships full of people arrived from Europe at the east coast ports and disgorged their human cargo into the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. The same day, more ships would fill with even more people and begin a long journey around South-America and then make their way to California. Miners by the hundreds dug into the earth and came up with iron, copper, tin and lead. Lumberjacks cut down huge tracts of forest and turned the trees to lumber. Farmers cleared the land and planted hundreds of acres in corn and grain and vegetables. Factories in the north-east turned out muskets and rifles, plows and wood saws, ladies hats and jaunty three-piece suits for the gentlemen.

At the same time, ships arrived in Charlestown with a different sort of human cargo; slaves. Black Africans auctioned off like cattle to work the cotton farms of the south. Even to Josh’s uneducated mind this seemed to be something that was wrong. He remembered Francis’ prediction of calamity and he thought it would be something like slavery that would ignite the fires of destruction if they came. “Avoid the evil,” Francis had advised, and Josh wondered how he could do that.

In the spring of 1849 Josh left his mountain. He packed his meager belongings into his wagon, hitched up his team of freshly shod horses, checked and double checked harness integrity, climbed up into the seat and clucked to the horses. A small flock of wild sheep, descendents of Francis’ flock scattered across a meadow as they made their way down to the flatland. They reached the road that led to the rail siding but Josh turned the horses in the opposite direction. They headed north-west. On his first trip down to the siding after the snow broke up he had heard some fellow, all excited with a newspaper in his hands, hollering they had found gold in California. Josh didn’t read or write and except for the vague idea that California was somewhere off in the west, he wasn’t interested in gold and certainly didn’t care about California. But lately some folks had been making remarks about him. He was thirty-seven years old and he hadn’t aged a day since he touched the water.

He worked for two years as a lumberman in the territory they called Michigan. Winters were cold and summers were hot, but nobody paid much attention to him in the camp. One man was a reader and occasionally he would sit and read aloud to the men, sometimes from a newspaper, sometimes from a book. Josh vowed one day he would learn to decipher the marks on the paper. The news from the papers was often about the growing argument over slavery. Southern states that depended on the free labor talked about seceding from the union. The woodsmen didn’t voice an opinion either way, but they all thought if that happened there would be war.

In 1852 Josh moved west again and crossed the Mississippi river. A man, bent on reaching the gold fields of California offered him two-hundred dollars for his wagon and team. It was a harder time of it, carrying all what he needed, but before long he bought a pack mule and learned how to do more with fewer things. The place he was in, called Iowa, was a land of flat farms, milk cows, small stands of hardwood and lots of small towns. At a barber shop one day he heard that a woman who owned a large farm near the town was in dire need of a “big strapping kid like you” to help. Her husband had gone west in search of gold and it was more than the woman and a twelve year old boy could keep up with. Josh went to see the woman. She was in her forties, Josh guessed, a handsome woman. They were probably close to the same age, but he didn’t mention that fact. The farmhouse was filled with books and she noticed him looking at them, longingly.

“Do you read, Mister Blake?” She asked.

“No mam, I don’t, but I would sure like to learn some day,” he answered truthfully.
“I’ll teach you,” she volunteered. “You work for me and when we have the time, I’ll teach you to read and write.” She smiled. “A handsome young man like you should be able to read and write, along with his other natural abilities.”

Joshua Blake took the job. He had his own quarters in a room in the corner of a nice tight barn. It had a good stove, he was close to the stock if something went amiss during the nights and the woman was a good cook. She did teach him to read in the four years he worked for her and she taught him a lot more. Many mornings she would hurry back to the house after having spent the night with him. He left when the boy was old enough to take care of most of the farm chores. Also, it seemed the husband had made quite a bit of money in California and was coming back to collect his family. Josh bought a riding horse and a pack horse and set out for a place they called Kansas.

If there was a hell on earth, Josh thought, it would have been located in Kansas. Those in favor of Free states were already at war with those who favored slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska act of 1851 had pretty well guaranteed that would be the situation. Avoiding the evil was not possible in Kansas and possibly nowhere else. Josh pushed north and west again but the evil was never far enough away.

He drifted into the land of the Sioux, reported by whites to be the meanest people in the world. He was warned many times that his thick blonde hair would be highly valued by young bucks, anxious to prove their bravery. In the summer of 1856 he hunted, trapped and fished along the creeks and runs of Sioux land without any troubles. He sometimes saw the Indians at great distances, but they never acknowledged his presence that he was aware of.

It was about mid-summer when he came across a camp in a big meadow surrounded by aspen trees. As he approached several dogs ran out to challenge him, barking furiously. From a hundred yards upwind he could smell the disease. Josh was learning the extent of his own immunity, and he knew that he had little to fear. He rode into the camp. There were no fires, no signs of life, except for the terribly emaciated dogs. Finally, and old man staggered to the doorway of his tepee, trying his best to brandish a rusty old revolver and scream at him in an unknown tongue. He was too weak to raise the weapon and Josh stepped off his horse.

There were four tepees and a dozen people; men, women and children, all sick and starving. Josh remounted his horse and rode towards the edge of the clearing at a slow lope. He found a snag of cottonwood, tossed a rope on it and drug it back to the camp. There he broke up the wood and prepared an area where he could build a fire. A half hour before he came upon the Indian camp he had spotted an old, bachelor bull buffalo and he knew where the animal would be. He retraced his trail, found the old bull standing next to a wallow and shot him. It took a couple of hours to skin the big bull and then he rigged a travois’ and piled it high with boned out meat.

During the night he boiled the meat, taking small cups of broth to the people in the tepees. He fed the dogs and gathered more firewood. By morning the old man with the pistol and a baby had died, but one woman and a middle aged man were able to at least rise up from their pallets. Josh pulled back the buffalo hide coverings from the lower part of the tepees and let the air circulate through.

By evening the strongest of the men was able to walk. He came out to the fire and sat with Josh. They could not communicate. Another infant died that night but by sunrise there were four sitting by the fire.

Josh rode out into the sagebrush later in the morning and shot two fat grouse with his scattergun, brought them back to camp and cleaned them. He threw the meat into the pot. One young woman smiled at him, an older woman laughed quietly.
He stayed three more days, doing whatever he could to help. The Sioux’s were strong enough to talk to each other, even to smile occasionally. The women had started to work on the hide of the bull buffalo, scraping it and preparing to stretch it.
The evening before he left, Josh shot an antelope and brought it back to the camp. Nobody said anything to him, but the young woman smiled.

The next morning he rolled his pallet and tied it to the back of his saddle. The Indians came from their tepees and watched him. The man who had healed first came to him and took him by the arm. He walked Josh to the entrance of the tepee and he pointed at his eyes. Josh figured that meant he should watch. The man outlined the doorway with his arms and looked back to Josh for acknowledgement. Josh nodded. A woman handed the man a beaded necklace. There were a few feathers, the talon of a hawk, some shiny river rocks and a carved piece of wood shaped like a buffalo. The Indian man pointed at the doorway of the tepee and then at Josh. He draped the necklace over the door of the tepee and then took it down again and offered it to Joshua. Josh understood. It was some totem he should put over the door of his own cabin, or tepee, or shack. Josh put the necklace over his head and smiled. He and the man clasped hands and then Josh mounted his horse and rode away.

During the remainder of that summer he hunted, fished and worked on a cabin at the edge of a clearing much like the ones where the Sioux had suffered their sickness. He wasn’t able to finish the cabin to a point where he could have stood the winter, and he hadn’t been able to devote enough time to hunting to put up stores for so long a time, so when the first snows fell he left the clearing and rode sixty miles to a town some folks on a small wagon team had told him about. He rented a shack on the edge of the town called Lawton.

On the first day of April, 1857 he rode north again, leading a pack horse heavily laden with coffee, salt and wheat flour. When he found his clearing again he was surprised to see that someone had cut a big stack of tamarack poles and left them lying in front of his unfinished cabin. There was full enough to finish the roof and enough more to build a corral and shelter next to the rock cliff behind the building.

Within four weeks he had finished the cabin, including a small fireplace and a sturdy rock chimney. He heated a poker in the fire until it glowed red-hot and used it to burn a small hole over the doorway. He whittled a peg that fit snugly into the hole and hung the totem over the peg. It didn’t look like much, but it was something that Francis Man-Suns would have admired and Josh couldn’t help smile when he thought of him.

It wasn’t a week later that Josh felt the presence of someone outside the door of his cabin, then he heard a dog bark. He opened the door to a sight that he would remember from that day on. The Indian who had given him the totem stood five yards from the front of the cabin, arrayed in the finest buckskin clothing he had ever seen. A full war bonnet of eagle and turkey feathers covered his head and down his back to the top of his knees. When Josh opened the door a great shout rose from seven or eight riders further back in the clearing. Some fired shots into the air.
The man approached him silently with a broad smile on his face. Josh extended his hand and the man grasped it warmly. He spoke some words that Josh did not understand but they had a sound of welcome to them. When he finished speaking the man waved towards the group of riders and a young man mounted on a pinto pony galloped up to the cabin. He was not nearly as finely dressed as the older man, but he was clearly in his finest attire. A braided band of rawhide encircled his head and two turkey feathers were stuck into his reddish-brown hair. The boy was white, Josh was sure of that.

“This one is called Tall-Wolf,” the boy said in perfect English, pointing to the man. Tall-Wolf grinned from ear to ear. “He says you are big medicine; that you walk with courage into the face of sickness and have no fear, that you are not too proud to gather wood like a woman and that you make a fine soup.”

Joshua Blake laughed aloud. “Tell your friend that I am sorry I did not have the herbs and spices to make a really fine soup, but that I did the best I could at the moment.”

The boy relayed the message and Tall-Wolf laughed. Then he launched into a lengthy speech, gesturing to the north, east and west. He made several signs that Josh took to mean big or large, but he waited patiently for the translation he knew would follow.

“Tall-Wolf says you are a holy person,” the boy explained, “and that no one of our people will harm you. You are free to walk the land to the West, North and East, but that you should avoid the South where the wagons travel. They carry sickness and greed.”

Josh nodded his understanding. “And how are you called?” He spoke to the boy.

“I am called Pale-Antelope, for good reason, I guess,” the young man answered. “I fell off a river barge about five years ago and they picked me up and raised me. They’re good people; treated me better than I had with my own kind,” he said, seriously. “You saved a pretty important person when you got Tall-Wolf back on his feet; they aren’t likely to forget that.”

The leader spoke again. When he finished Pale-Antelope translated once more. “They are going to leave a teacher with you, so you can learn the language. She won’t be any problem, they’ll bring meat from time to time to help feed her, but they already know you to be a good provider,” he smiled.

“She?” Joshua questioned.

The white youth was careful not to smile or smirk. “She’s Tall-Wolf’s youngest daughter. She was also one of the sick ones and she figures she owes you her life. I’ve taught her a few words already over the winter, so you shouldn’t have any trouble learning from her.”

Josh tried to keep all emotion from his face when he asked the next question. “I’m not sure I want a woman around; would it be a bad thing if I objected?”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. It would be consider bad manners. You did a great feat, healing those people and they believe it takes a gift equally as big to give you in return.”

Pale-Antelope indicated to his leader that everything had been explained to everyone’s satisfaction. Tall-Wolf grunted his approval and signaled to the riders. Joshua recognized the girl who had smiled at him almost immediately. She rode her sorrel pony to the pen, opened the gate, removed the rawhide bridle from the horse, patted him on the flank and he walked into the pen with the other horses. She walked up to within one step behind Joshua Blake and stood there. Tall-Wolf spoke a few words to the white youth and waited his response.

“He wants to know your white name,” Pale Antelope asked.

“I am Joshua Blake,” Josh said simply.

The boy said a few words in Sioux and they brought an immediate round of laughter from the Indians. “I told him you are called Joshua, for a mighty warrior who could bring down the walls of his enemy by blowing a buffalo horn.”

Tall-Wolf spoke again.

“You will be called Joshua by our people too,” Pale Antelope said. “You are already famous, no need to give you a name you can’t pronounce.”

One of the riders approached leading a tall, white gelding. The Indian leader swung up onto his back and looked down at Josh and his daughter. He whispered a few words to the girl, wheeled his horse and galloped away across the meadow. The white boy lagged behind. “He told her to be a loving woman and not to keep you awake with her nagging.” He laughed. “My white name is Quincy Adams. If you ever run across my family on the river, tell them I’m fine and happy. See you around Joshua Blake.”

Josh turned and faced the girl. She was very beautiful. “This might be a little difficult,” Josh said, more to himself than anything he hoped the girl would understand. “I forgot to even ask them your name.”

“I will be called Joshua’s woman,” she said, smiling.
 
The Middle Years, the Years of Wandering


The happy years among the Sioux lasted a short five years but they were years of peace and contentment for Joshua Blake. They were marked by good hunting, frequent and friendly visits by his Sioux neighbors and the birth of a son. He called the girl Little-Woman because he thought the idea of one person belonging to another was somehow too subjective. The son was called Jeremiah after Joshua’s grandfather, but also because Little-Woman thought it was a strong name, and it matched the baby’s lungs.

He had been hunting, gone three days from the cabin on the clearing. He saw the smoke from three or four miles away, but it was not much smoke, only a thin wisp such as what might come from a chimney. Joshua was not alarmed. As he drew closer the smell of the smoke was strange; it was not firewood, it was logs and pitch and more. He urged his horse and the pack horse into a canter, the pack horse objecting because of the big load of buffalo meat he carried.

From across the clearing Josh could see the front of the cabin had been nearly consumed by fire, the smoke he had seen was just shouldering embers. One horse was tethered to the poles that once had been the corral, its rider invisible. He dropped the lead rope, drew his rifle from it scabbard, cocked it and then spurred the horse into a gallop, flying across the meadow as fast as possible.
He recognized the face and form of Pale-Antelope as he walked out of the ruins of the cabin, holding a tin cup. Josh reined in his horse but ran to the cabin, right past has friend. “They aren’t there, Josh,” Quincy said sadly.

“Where are they? What happened?” Josh screamed.

“The boy is with Tall-Wolf, he’ll be safe there,” Quincy began. “Whites from a wagon train came through a few miles to the south. Hunting party found Little-Woman. They killed her Josh. Wish I could tell you something different, but I can’t. She’s dead and so are they.” Quincy was losing his ability to speak English, but it was easy to see how distraught he was.

Josh was stunned, probably in shock. He couldn’t think of what to do, so he just sat on the ground, cross-legged. “I’ve waited here for you,” Pale-Antelope explained. “We thought I should be the one to tell you and try to keep you from going loco. The ones that did this have paid the price set, there is nothing more to be done.”

Quincy was in his early twenties now, Joshua was fifty, but they looked the same age or nearly so. “I haven’t been exactly truthful with you the last couple of years,” he said, lowering his head. “The whites have been at war with each other, killing at a rate that you can’t believe. And they call us savage,” he snorted. “Armies of tens and hundreds of thousands face each other and blast away with musket, rifle and cannon until one side or the other has had enough, then they separate and fight again another day in some other site. We’ve been hoping they might kill each other off, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to them. The big medicine men think when the whites finish this war between them; they’ll come after us next. If they do we’ll fight, but we can’t win, they are too many now Josh. The plain truth is you should leave this country; find a place where you can avoid as much of it as you can. You are big power to the Sioux, but sooner or later they will see if they can kill you and use that to measure their chances against the soldiers. Its better you just leave. I’ll watch out for your boy; take him to Canada if it comes to that.”

Blake heard the words his friend was saying, but they registered only superficially. He sat there on the ground, looking at the cabin but not seeing it, seeing instead the face of a beautiful girl and a dark-eyed baby boy. Finally he looked at his friend. “Come with me,” Josh suggested, “You have no part in this coming fight. We could go west, find the big mountains and disappear there.”

Quincy squatted next to Josh and handed him the cup; it was coffee, nearly cold. “I’m not blind, my friend,” he spoke in a whisper. “I don’t know what it is, but you got something special. I’ve never seen you with so much as a scratch on you. Your eyes don’t water in the spring when the leaves come, you don’t get the coughs in the winter, I saw you sit on a thorn one time and you didn’t feel it. It’s best you go alone, old friend. And you’re wrong; I do have a part in this fight. If nothing else, just to see they don’t get pushed off the earth. That’s about all I can do, but I’ll do it until I can’t no more. I owe them that.”

The two men sat in silence for long minutes; Joshua going over in his mind what options were given him. There weren’t many. The Sioux had been more than good to him, but he could understand the frustration they must be feeling. The whites just kept coming, in spite of a war that raged over their own lands. Eventually there would be a major clash of societies, not just skirmishes.

If he left, and he knew he must, where would he go? It was apparent that even a few years among the same people led to some sort of suspicion. There was only one place that might be able to hide what in Joshua Blake was different than in other men.
“Take the meat,” Josh told Quincy. “I would give you the packhorse too, but I’ll need him. Take whatever you need from the cabin too, my needs won’t require much.”

Pale-Antelope nodded but said nothing. “I’ll need to shoe this horse of mine before I set out; it will take me a day or so to get ready.”

An hour or so later they had transferred all the meat to Quincy’s horse. “You’ve got a fairly long walk back to the encampment,” Josh observed. “Sure you don’t want to stay until morning and start out then?”

“They’ll send out riders when I don’t show up by nightfall,” Quincy answered. “I’ll be fine.” They stood, face to face, ten feet apart. “You’re about as good a friend as I have, Joshua Blake, I’ll miss you. Fifty or a hundred years ago we could have gone on our whole lives being who we wanted to be. These days I guess they just won’t allow it. I see a lonely time stretched out in front of you, Josh. Mine, I suppose, won’t be quite so bad, but probably won’t last much longer.”

Josh was choked up. “Watch my boy, Quincy. If you make half the man of him that you are, I won’t ask more.”

Quincy Adams, Pale-Antelope, or whoever he was, nodded. He took the reins of his horse and started walking across the meadow, singing a chant in the language of the Sioux. “Be safe, brother of the wind. Find shelter from the cold and shade from the heat. The waters that come from the mountain are sweet and the tongue of the buffalo satisfies the hunger better than any meat on earth. Be safe, brother of the wind.”
* * *
For more than twenty years, the vial and its contents had nestled against Josh’s chest, unused. He had wondered several times if he should have applied it on that first encounter with the gravely ill Sioux, but he hadn’t; there was no sense in second guessing his judgment on that day. He had done the best he could and the results were what they were. It was the infants he wondered about. They might have been saved.

He sat on a high ridge overlooking a heavily traveled road not far from Denver. The products of the west were urgently needed in the east for the war effort. The ores, timber and minerals were in short supply. The railroads were laying track as fast as humanly possible in an effort to link the factories with the raw materials they required, but the manpower to accomplish that task was hard to find. To overcome that shortfall they had sent ships to China, filled them with farmers, beggars, prisoners or anyone else who was willing to risk the long sea voyage on a promise of steady work and ,what must have seemed to them to be, enormous wages. Most were young men, but there were a few families also, and where there were couple there would be babies.

The Chinese woman and her toddler child were walking on the side of the road, their black, cotton clothes nearly white from the powdery dust churned up by the carts and wagons. She carried a large bundle on her head and the child held firmly to her mother’s outstretched hand and fingers. The side of the road dropped away sharply, the slope covered with sage and straggly oak brush. A huge wagon, pulled by two teams of mules, heavily laden with white-pine timbers approached them from the rear. As they drew abreast of the woman, a rear leaf spring on the wagon gave way. At first it only sagged exaggeratedly, but then the load shifted. One log bounded over the top of the wagon’s side-rails, hit the woman on its first bounce and drove her off the roadside and into the ravine below. The toddler, still clutching her mother’s hand was flung like a doll into the same chasm.

The teamster pulled his teams to a stop and got down from his seat, walked to the edge of the road and looked over. Wagons and carts behind the logs were already pulling onto the free side of the road and bypassing the entire event. The driver walked away from the edge and went back to inspect the damage to his wagon. Nobody seemed to care or even notice that two people were probably killed or, at least, severely injured.

The ridge that Josh was riding was not nearly as steep as the one the woman and child had just been thrown into, but it was far enough above the road to avoid the rising cloud of dust. He brought up his mounts head and slapped his long reins onto the horses butt. He jumped into a gallop and the resisting pack horse nearly upset the both of them. They ran parallel on the down side toward the road and then continued on another fifty yards where the roadside slope seemed be less severe. It was still far too dangerous to continue at such a breakneck speed and Josh reined in the animal and they picked their way the last one hundred yards to where he though the woman might be.

The road was not even visible from where she lay, unconscious. The arm and shoulder that had been hit by the log were contorted, bent in places where there should have been no bends. Her head had hit a rock and blood dripped onto her forehead, but she was miraculously alive. Josh stood up and looked around for the baby but she was not to be seen. He ran, at first in a small circle around the mother and he widened the arc with each revolution. And then, protruding from a spreading tangle of sage he saw the flutter of a piece of black cloth. He scooped the child out from the brush and held her limp form in his arms. She seemed light as a feather, as though there was no substance to her. Her face was badly scraped and scratched but there was nothing apparently broken, at least not on the outside. He held his cheek next to the girl’s mouth; there was just a hint of air moving from her lungs.

He ran, the child in his arms, back to the mother. As he laid the baby down the mother coughed, bloody pinkish foam bubbling from her mouth. Ripping at his shirt, Josh grabbed the pouch and brought it over his head. Within seconds he had the vial open and without hesitation he tipped it so that his index finger was moistened. He waited a few precious seconds to see if he would feel that terrible shock he had felt the first time, so many years ago. It did not come. But, what would happen to the woman if he touched her now? She would be dead in seconds if he did nothing; that seemed certain. He cradled her head in his arm and gently touched her forehead.
He felt her body stiffen and a low moan escaped her throat. She remained rigid for several moments and Josh held her and felt her tremble. Just at that moment he heard the child scream and he lowered the woman back onto the ground and picked up the girl. He wasn’t sure if his finger still was moist or not, but he pressed it against the baby’s cheek. Her reaction was minimal, if at all, but he continued holding her. Within a minute or two the girl began to cry, softly, tears running down her bloody cheeks. She opened her eyes; there was no fear in them and she reached out with both arms. Josh raised her to his shoulder and she snuggled close to him. Suddenly he felt her reaching, and when he looked at her she was extending her arms again, only this time she was seeing the woman. She said something Josh was sure must be her word for “mother”.

The woman stirred, moving her body as if she was trying to find a comfortable position, but she made no sound. The young girl struggled against Joshua’s chest, trying to get free of him and go to her mother. Josh let her down. The woman spread her arms away from her body and the shape seemed to become normal again. She dabbed at the froth on her chin and mouth and then felt of her head where the blood had dripped. Josh removed a bandana from around his neck and wiped her face; the woman smiled shyly at him. He handed her the bandana and she wiped her face while the child walked to her and she enclosed it in her arms.

As soon as he had closed the vial and returned it to the pouch Josh stood up. Twenty yards above where they stood he saw what was left of the woman’s bundle. There were some canned goods that had been scattered on the slope and what had apparently been a small bag of rice that had ruptured and dumped its contents onto the earth. He walked up the steep rise and retrieved as many of the goods as he could.

When he came back down the woman was standing, the child in her arms. She watched him approaching with a wondering look on her face. Except for a torn sleeve on her shirt and dried blood in her hair, she looked perfectly normal. Josh put the canned goods into the tattered cloth and retied the bundle. He felt bad he hadn’t tried to scoop up at least some of the rice. He reached in his pocket and found a silver dollar and dropped it into the bundle.

It took a minute or two to gather his saddle horse and the pack animal, but he led them up to where the woman and the child waited. The woman backed away in fear but the child grinned widely. “It will be ok, miss,” Josh said softly. He reached under her arms and in a lifting, swinging motion tossed both of them in the saddle. The child laughed and squealed. Leading both animals Josh retraced their path back up to the road. The muleskinner was cursing his broken wagon when they walked past. He still paid no heed to the woman or the child.

A half mile further down the road the woman began jabbering and pointing off to the right where a very large encampment stood. There were hundreds of tents and shanties and smoke rose from more cook fires than Josh had ever seen. People in the same black cotton suits and cone shaped straw hats on their heads scurried around. This was apparently the woman’s home.

She handed the child down to Josh but the girl wanted to pet the horse, so he let her. She caressed the side of the horses head and giggled, apparently oblivious to the abrasions on her face. The woman swung her leg over and then slipped down into Josh’s grasp. He set her on the ground and she stood, silently, looking deep into his eyes. He knew there were no words they could exchange and perhaps it was better that way. He returned her smile, gathered up the reins and stepped into the saddle. He touched his hat, swung the horse around and started back up the road in the opposite direction from where they had just come. A minute later he looked back. The woman was just standing there, watching him ride away. The little girl waved.

In Denver, Joshua Blake found a job with a freight hauling company. He originally went to work as a teamster but when they learned that he could read and write he was moved to the dispatcher’s office. There were six men and a woman who worked together scheduling loads, supervising care of animals and equipment, buying of hay and feed and the procurement of harness. One of the men was named Tom Morgan.
Tom Morgan lived in a boarding house a short walk from the freight depot and arranged for Josh to get a room there too. They often walked together in the evenings and in the winter usually went to a tavern when Denver’s nights grew far too cold for leisurely walks. The Civil War was entering its last year and it looked as thought the Union would be preserved.

Sitting in Stringham’s bar on evening during January, 1865 the two men had a revealing conversation.

“You know why the cost of shipping has gone through the roof?” Morgan asked, although he apparently was ready to answer his own question.

“Everything costs a lot during a war,” Josh answered.

“Well, that’s true, but that isn’t the main reason,” Morgan admitted. He obviously wanted to drag out this subject a bit more.

“You have any idea how many horses been killed in this fracas, Josh?”

“A lot, I’d expect,” Josh said, although he really had no idea in mind of any actual number.

“Some say a million,” Tom volunteered. “Just think on that for a minute, Josh, a million horses. When this war is over there are going to be farms and plantations that have stood fallow all this time that are going to have to replanted, plowed, cultivated and harvested. And where are they going to get the horses to do it with?”

“I have the feeling you are about to tell me,” Josh smiled.

“I need a partner, Joshua Blake, and if I can get you to go along with it they are going to get a lot of those horses from Morgan and Blake.” Tom relit his cigar and took a drink of his flat beer.

“And just where are Blake and Morgan going to get all these horses?” Josh asked humorously.

“We’ll work out the details of that name thing later,” Tom chuckled. “But to answer your question, you’re going to buy them for us. Just suppose I was to go to some big city back east, Kansas City or Chicago, somewhere like that, set up an outfit that could train, feed and stable stock animals in big numbers.” He blew a cloud of cigar smoke into the air. “And just suppose I had you back here in the west, going all over Colorado and Utah territories, buying up everything with four legs, a head and tail, assembling them here and getting them shipped back to me. There aren’t any mustangs back east Josh, the bulk of all that horseflesh has to come from out here.”

“You’re going to pull a plow with mustangs?” Josh laughed.

“Damned right,” Morgan said, emphatically. “And those farmers will be glad to have them. But, we’ll sweeten the pot a little for them. We’ll also keep a string of damned fine stallions. Thoroughbreds, Percherons, Belgians, and whatever else we think they like. Any mare we sell we sell as bred to one of those stallions, a sort of one and a half for one deal.”

Josh found himself agreeing with everything his friend has said. Personally he knew it was sound; the week before that he had paid $450 in federal gold for a pair of nine-year old geldings for the freight depot.

“One question,” Josh said thoughtfully. “Where do we get the money for this enterprise?”

“Are you in if that were the only thing holding us back?”

“I’d be hard pressed to say no,” Josh admitted.

Tom Morgan extended his hand. “Then let’s shake hands on it, partner.”

They did shake hands and laughed. “One other thing goes with this partnership,” Tom laughed. “You have to be the best man at my wedding. You know Miss Johnson from the office?”

“Yeah,” Josh admitted. “Alice I think her name is.”

“Alice Johnson-Torkelson,” Tom said, being precise. “Her dead husband was a Yankee Colonel, came from New York, big money family. Before that she was Alice Torkelson, daughter of a big lumber tycoon in Minnesota.”

“What is she doing here, working for a freight hauler?” Josh wondered aloud.

“Looking for me,” Tom Morgan laughed.

The whole city was abuzz with the news that Monday morning, April 10th, 1865; the Civil War was over. The two great Generals had met the previous day at an old courthouse in Appomattox Virginia and signed the agreement that ended hostilities. The Yankee whiskey drinker and the Rebel master strategist, Grant and Lee, wanted no more bloodshed. It would be weeks, and sometimes months, before that news would reach troops in the field, particularly in the west where so many units operated independently. Josh knew of divisions of the U.S. Cavalry who were engaged with the Navajo in Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

There, in the land of the four mountains, an entire nation of Indians had been rounded up, or killed, and moved to a place called Bosque Redondo north of Fort Summer in New Mexico territory. Now there were negotiations underway to return the tribe to their ancestral lands. Francis Many-Suns predictions had come true. So many, many had died.

At fifty-three years of age, and looking 30, Joshua Blake was about to begin a trek which would take him forty more years to complete. Thomas Morgan was in St. Louis Missouri building one of the largest and finest horse training facilities in the world. His business minded wife, Alice, was in Denver setting up the western end of the business. Josh was about to step into the saddle atop a fine Arabian-bred gelding that could cover fifty miles a day without raising a sweat. After jostling back and forth over how their enterprise letterhead should read, they gave up any combination of Morgan and Blake and settled on ‘The American Remount Company.

Letters of credit had been telegraphed to most of the banks from Colorado to California. Josh had the authority to contract cowboys, wranglers, Indians and anybody else who wanted to capture mustangs and deliver them to Denver or to a suitable railhead between. A personal account was set up for Josh, he would be able to walk into almost any bank anywhere and get money.
Before mounting his horse, Josh faced the pretty woman whose money had made it all possible; Alice Morgan. She embraced Josh and pushed him back to arms length. “Get going Josh,” she smiled, “make us all rich.”

They had laid out the route carefully. Josh and an assistant named Ramon Devine, a middle-aged prospector and former Army scout would head south-south-west from Denver to Alamosa, skirt the San Juan’s heading west to Durango and Cortez, continue on into Utah and Nevada. After the Colorado plateau and the Humboldt-Toyinabe range were covered they would head south and west again, hunting the Maricopa’s and across Arizona, New Mexico and into the Texas hill country. All along the way they would track the herds of mustangs and contract with cowboys to round them up. It wasn’t expected that the trip would take much more than two years; it turned out it took seven.

Josh carried a pistol in a holster when he wasn’t in a town, and he usually slept with a Winchester close at night. He didn’t look for violence, but the war had turned many mild men into roughnecks. When the war finished they were turned loose with few prospects. So many homes and farms had been burned, so many killed that it was hard to find somebody who hadn’t lost someone from their immediate family and hard feelings smoldered just beneath the surface with a lot of the ex soldiers. And a lot of them came west. Nobody knew it at the time, but it would take thirty-five years to take the wild out of the Wild West.

They had been away from Denver only about two months and had managed to contract with three groups of men to round up horses and deliver them to the railheads. The business was starting to move ahead and they hadn’t even reached the prime mustang territories. Ramon Devine suggested they make camp in an arroyo close to the Utah-Nevada border, a place he had been to before on a mission with the cavalry against the Ute’s. There was water, and from that location they could locate several small bands of horses.

Besides being a good tracker, interpreter and companion, Ramon was a pretty good trail cook. He favored bacon and biscuits over most things, but he could roast a sage hen and fry antelope back straps about as well as anyone. He wasn’t a real tidy man and Josh found it was usually best to stay upwind of him. Ramon wore a pair of old Army trousers and occasionally a blue coat that had once been part of a uniform too. Still, he was an amiable sort of man and Josh liked him.

The rock walls echoed and amplified any sound made below them and they knew riders were approaching fifteen minutes before they arrived.

“Three shod horses,” Devine said softly. “Not injun. Probably hunters or mustangers.” He continued to stir the beans in the iron pot, but he unbuttoned the flap on his old army pistol holster. Josh brought his Winchester closer on the log where he was sitting.

When the three men rounded the last bend that had hidden the visual part of their approach they were a pitiful sight to behold. The horses were thin and gaunt. The men were filthy and unshaven. One wore a flat, grey rebel cavalry hat and a saber jangled at the side of his saddle. He had no shirt, but a tattered top half of long underwear covered part of his torso. He had an old cap and ball revolver hung around his neck with a piece of cord. The other two were not much better outfitted. They carried revolvers though, and both had rifle butts sticking out of saddle scabbards.

Ramon cussed softly and Josh knew what his problem was. His double barreled shotgun was lying across his saddle ten yards away.

“Hi there,” the one in the flat cap said, smiling through black teeth.

“Evening” Ramon replied without looking up. Josh didn’t say anything.

“It’s my duty to inform you that you are now prisoners of the Confederate States of America and if you make a move for your guns we’ll have to kill you.”

Josh smiled. “Maybe you hadn’t heard, but the war has been over for over two months now.”

“Do tell?” Flat cap chuckled. “Who won?”

“Does it make much difference? Josh answered. “You’re free to return to your homes and resume your lives again. The two behind flat cap laughed.
“Killin’ Yankees has been our life for so long now I guess it just comes natural. No offense.”

Ramon stood up from his bean pot. His size made the three a little nervous. “We’d be happy to share a plate of beans with you and put bygones behind us, if you’d like.” He’d said the words but there was no welcome in his face or his manner.

“Neighborly of you,” Flat cap replied. “Truth is we got steak and boiled potatoes in the next canyon. I guess we’ll just eat them and then head back to Georgia.”

“You’re more than welcome to stay,” Josh said, but he was no more sincere than Ramon had been.

Flat cap reined his horse around and the other two did the same. “You wear those pants at either of the Bull Run’s when we tore you up?” He gestured back at Ramon.

Ramon Devine laughed. “I wore that pair plumb out. I got this pair in Atlanta.”

The three men rode back around the bend in the rocks the same way they had come up, their horses making metallic sounds on the stone. As soon as they were out of sight Ramon ran and scooped up the double barrel shotgun and then scampered up the easy slope, cut a wide semi-circle and came to a stop on the rocks overlooking the path the riders had just taken. Josh grabbed the Winchester and slid in behind a man-sized rock that sheltered their horses. By the time he was in place the sound of the hoof beats stopped. Ramon edged his way closer to the edge of the rocks.

They came at a full gallop, guns drawn, flat cap with the saber in one hand the cap and ball gun in the other, reins in his mouth, and all three screaming what had become known as the rebel yell. Ramon’s first blast from the shotgun killed flat cap and unhorsed one of the others. The third rider burst into the mouth of the arroyo firing blindly at the rock where Josh stood, the Winchester cradled in a crevice. Josh fired when the man filled his sights.

Ramon found a way down from the edge of the rocks and approached the second rider from behind. Blood was over the near side of the man’s face where he had absorbed part of the shotgun blast. He hammered back his pistol and fired at Ramon but his arm wavered so badly the bullet struck the ground six feet to the side. Without breaking stride, Ramon fired a shot into the man’s brain.

One of the horses the soldiers had been riding was slightly wounded, a few pellets in the fat part of his neck, or at least the part of his neck that should have been fat. Ramon Devine doctored the horse a bit, put some ointment on the spots. He got out a pair of tongs from one of the packs and proceeded to pull the shoes off all three horses, removed their saddles and bridles and turned them loose. “They’ll do better on their own than they did with that bunch,” he said, and then spat.
Josh hadn’t moved far since he fired the Winchester. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but it wasn’t good.

“You okay?” Ramon asked him.

“A little shaky,” Josh admitted.

“Your first?”

“Yeah, and my last, I hope.”

“It gets easier,” Ramon smiled.

“Lord, I hope not,” Josh said, and then he threw up.

Ramon built the cook fire up using big pieces of mountain cedar. It was a hot fire, hot enough to bend metal. He threw in all the firearms from the three soldiers and later, when they had cooled, he bent the barrels between the rocks.
* * * * *

Ramon Devine knew every water-hole in the south-west, even the ones indoors. Occasionally he would take off for a couple of days and ride into the nearest town, get a belly full of whiskey and beer and then pick up Josh’s trail and find him again. After that he was usually good for another couple of months. For one thing, he didn’t want his hair growing long, so on his trips to civilization he’d have his head shaved. “Too many Ute’s after my hair,” he would explain. “If they get it someday, I want them to feel cheated.”

Josh liked to get back to people too, but he worked the high desert as long as the weather held good. They spent the first winter in a Mormon outpost called St. George. Brigham Young thought maybe his people could grow cotton there but the Red-Rock country was stingy with what it would tolerate planted in its sandy soil; and the Mormon’s were stingy in what they would tolerate in the way of entertainment. It was not to Ramon Devine’s liking, even though the Ute’s, the Apache, the Zuni’s, the Paiutes and all the other red people gave the town a wide berth.

Tall Wolfe and the other medicine men had been right about Indian wars once the Army finished the War Between the States. Except for treaties that usually broke down within a matter of months, the Army was fighting Indians from the Canadian border down into Mexico and from Illinois to California. And the horse business continued for flourish.

The next three winters they spent a hundred and twenty miles south of St. George in a little town that catered to folks who traveled the Mormon highway which went from Salt Lake City to California, and the east-west wagon traffic hauling minerals out of Death Valley and immigrants coming from the east. It was a nice little place that boasted of springs and some grassland where you could stop and graze teams for a few days. The Anglo’s called it ‘the meadows’, the Mexicans referred to it as ‘Las Vegas’. During those couple of months Josh could send and receive letters from Tom Morgan about the business and catch up on his reading. Teamsters always managed to bring along a recent newspaper from their last stop. Josh and Ramon Devine spent most of their time in the empty places, but they could see from that vantage point that the country was filling up on the edges and that the middle would certainly fill one day too. Josh thought about what Francis Many-Suns had said about even the empty places would not remain that way for long.

It probably would not have been necessary for Josh and Ramon to remain in the wilderness after the fifth year. Anybody who had mustangs, or horses of any kind, to sell, knew all they needed to do was to get them to Denver, or Salt Lake City, or Provo, or Winnemucca, or Santa Fe. When they delivered them to a railhead they would receive a voucher, the stock would be shipped east and they would be paid the going price for their animals. The thinning of the herds was beneficial too. At the same time the wild horse bands were being hunted, the government had encouraged the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo as a strategy to starve out the plains Indians. Prairie grass grew thick and lush and the horses left thrived.
But, the arid lands of the west were a dangerous place. The Indian wars kept the red man in a constant state of combat or confinement. Reservations were mismanaged, bred disease and even more discontent, and the flood of settlers never stopped. They came in large and small groups, not well armed and ill prepared for what faced them. The larger groups did better only because of their numbers. Smaller groups were regularly set upon by hostiles, thieves, bandits and renegades.

Ramon had been gone for a few days, one of his visits back to civilization, as he called them. He found Josh sitting in an arroyo, past mid-morning, sipping a cup of coffee.

“You didn’t need to quit, just because I was gone,” Ramon joked.

“I found a big band by three-springs, thought I’d let you get their area staked out and then we can ride to Lowery’s ranch and let his boys know. They can pick up a few dollars.”

“I brought you a telegram,” Ramon said reaching in his shirt pocket. “That coffee fresh today?”

“What do you care?” Josh laughed. “Your pallet set up for town coffee now?”

Josh read the telegram, and then he read it again. The look on his face was one of genuine concern.

“Did you read this?” Josh asked.

“I can’t read, you know that.” Ramon said nastily.

“Did you show it to anybody; have somebody read it to you?”

“No, damn it,” Ramon cussed, “nobody read the gawdamned telegram except the guy at the telegraph office.

Josh read it once more, silently, before he looked up at Ramon Devine and smiled. “Well, in that case, I’ll read it to you, but this is the last time I’ll do that. A rich man like you needs a secretary or somebody to read telegrams and letters, things of that nature.”

“What in hell are you blabbering about, Joshua Blake?”

Josh started. “We have been offered a fair price for the company and all its holdings. Offer remains open for sixty days only. If we sell, your share would come to approximately twenty-thousand dollars. I would expect you to pay Mr. Devine from your portion of the settlement. Telegraph your acceptance or rejection at earliest opportunity. Tom Morgan.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Ramon frowned.

“It means,” Josh said, getting to his feet, “that unless old A-Rab sticks his foot in a hole and breaks his leg, and I’m stranded out in the desert between here and the Army telegraph station at Jessup Springs, you just come into ten-thousand dollars.”

“What the hell am I going to do with ten-thousand dollars?” Ramon grinned.

“Well, I expect you’ll spend nine-thousand on whores, whiskey and bubble baths,” Josh joked, “the rest of it you’ll just fritter away.”

He threw a blanket and saddle on his horse, stuffed the Winchester into its scabbard and tightened everything up snug. “When you’ve rested and recovered, why don’t you ride over to the Lowery ranch and tell them we’re out of business. Might ask them to spread the word too.”

“When will you be back?” Ramon asked.

“Two days, plus a bit,” Josh answered. “When I do we’ll head on in to Tucson, get us a room at a fine hotel and try to decide what happens next.”

* * * *

On his way back, Josh started feeling uneasy when he cut the track of a wagon and many outriders a half day from where he had left Ramon. They seemed headed right for him. He hurried the Arabian a little.

Buzzards circled overhead when he saw the rock formation that had been their camp and he could see two dead horses lying on the ground. He spurred the gelding into a gallop and reached back for his Winchester.

Ramon was alive, but only barely. He was staked to the ground with wooden pegs, his arms and legs bound with rawhide strips. They had also staked his head down. Apparently they had poured hot coals into his palms; the hands were all but burned off. One eye was gouged out and from the amount of blood soaked into the sand around his groin Josh assumed they had castrated him.

“Can you hear me?” Josh whispered into Ramon’s ear. “It’s Joshua.”

“I killed a few of them, Josh.” Ramon croaked. “At least four, but there are plenty left. They hit me this morning.”

“You’re bad off, friend. I’ll do what I can.” Tears flowed down Josh’s cheeks.

“You gotta shoot me, Josh,” Ramon groaned. “I can’t take no more.”

“I’ll make this right, Ramon, I swear I will.”

Josh reached for the deer-skin pouch around his neck. When the v vial was open Josh wetted his forefinger. When he touched Ramon Devine his body twitched slightly and he was dead.

He buried Ramon on the lee side of the rock formation, piled the grave with stones and left the bodies of the others lying in the sun. The buzzards and coyotes could have them. There were five of them. Two were white, one Indian and the other two were Mexican, Josh assumed. He followed the track of the wagon and horses until he was fairly sure where they were headed. Ramon Devine had taught him the locations of water all the way down to old Mexico. He would pick up their trail easily once he had made a few provisions.

He rode into the Lowery ranch shortly after breakfast the next morning. Sam Lowery saw him approaching from a pen where he and few hands were branding, cutting steers and doctoring. Sam wore a pair of stiff leather chaps, soaked in blood and the flies buzzed around him.

Josh rode up to the pen and dismounted. Sam climbed over the top rail of the pen and jumped down, extending his hand.

“Joshua Blake,” he grinned. “It’s good to see you again. Where’s that scoundrel partner of yours?”

“He didn’t come by a day or so before?” Josh asked.

“Nope, haven’t seen him since you was here a year or so ago.”

“Ramon is dead, Sam.” Josh said flatly. “I need a horse, the best you got.”

“You’re already mounted on better than anything I have,” Sam said. “What do you have in mind?”

“I need one that can hang in there and keep going. We’ll be traveling light except for some firepower. I need a long gun too, and all the ammunition you can spare, a big ration of oats too.”

“Sounds as if you’re going to be doing some hard riding, Josh. We’ll do what we can.” Sam waived to one of his hands. “Ride on up to the north ridge,” he told the man. “Shorty is up there on that tall gray; tell him to bring it down here. We need it.”

Sam Lowery walked to the ranch house and returned a few minutes later with a Sharp’s rifle. “This will shoot as far as you can see. Only got about forty cartridges though, will that do you?”

“I’ll make do,” Josh nodded. He told the rancher what had happened and that he intended to track them down and kill the whole lot.

“You can’t take on that many by yourself, Josh.” Sam Lowery opined. “I’ll get some hands and we’ll get after them.”

Josh shook his head. “I got to do this my own way, Sam. I’ll be okay.”

It was shortly after noon when Josh started out. They gray stood a foot taller than his Arab, but he had a look of determination to him. Mrs. Lowery had filled a couple of bags with biscuits and jerked beef. Three canteens of water were tied down on the light pack frame the gray carried, along with a big bag of oats; all the rest was spare cartridges for the Winchester and the two Colt pistols.

They picked up the wagon trail a few miles earlier than Josh expected; the raiders were in no hurry. The wagon tracks were easy to follow, even at a lope or crossing occasional rock footings. The Arab was a wonder when it came to preserving energy, there was no excess head movement, no scuffed hoof drags; the horse put each foot precisely where it was supposed to go and in the most efficient manner. They gray too was a serious traveler. He didn’t hang back on the rope, kept his head tucked next to the flank of the lead horse where he would not breathe dust and adjusted his stride to match that of the Arabian. They ate up miles at an alarming rate right up to dark. Josh stripped off the saddle and the pack frame, rubbed each horse down with a cool, wet cloth, and fed them each a gallon of grain before watering them from a pool on top of the rocks. Josh ate a couple of biscuits and chewed two pieces of the jerky and then slept. He woke up a few hours later and moved the horses onto fresh grass, ate another biscuit and went back to sleep.

The morning was still a dirty gray when Josh looked to the southeast, the ruts of the wagon clearly visible, stretching into the morning mist like a ribbon. The horses were fresh and eager, as though they sensed it was their stamina that was pitted against the unknown vastness laid out in front of them, yet they stood quietly, garnering their strength, drinking in the cool morning air. Joshua Blake stroked the neck of the Arab gelding, settled his seat into the saddle and whispered a curt “hup” into the pre-dawn silence. The gelding moved off, stretching his legs, loosening for what he must have realized would be a long and murderous day. His grey companion took his position on the off side flank without a cue. The Arab walked for about a hundred yards and then hit into a long trot. Two hours later, as the sun rose high above the eastern hills the gelding eased into a ground eating lope, his nostrils flared wide, drinking in the wind. Josh leaned forward to minimize any drag he might have presented. The man and the horses moved as one integral unit, compact in size and light on the surface of the ground. Somewhere up ahead, the raiders were probably drinking coffee they had taken from Ramon and Josh’s supplies, completely unaware that most of them would never see another morning.

The noon-day sun was hot when Josh dismounted to examine the tracks and decipher their meaning. Two riders had separated from the main group clustered around the wagon, heading almost directly east. Joshua searched his memory, or more correctly he searched the memory given him by Ramon Devine. The Arab and the big gray were coated with a light sweat, but not lathered. He soaked a bandana in water from his canteen and bathed each horses muzzle and let them stand quietly while he thought. Suddenly he remembered the slightly alkaline pool in the rocks that Ramon always called ‘Bad-Coffee’. Riders could reach it going east, but a team and wagon would have to take a longer way around because of the steep, steady climb required. That must be where they were headed and they had sent two ahead to make sure the site was safe.

He took the horses into the relative shade of some greasewood brush where small clumps of grass grew in the otherwise sun-baked soil. He would wait a half hour, water the horses and give them a portion of grain and take up the track of the sentries.

The ground rose on an almost constant climb. He scanned the area ahead of him with binoculars, searching between the clumps of greasewood that became more prominent as the altitude increased. When he spotted the first rider he knew he had made the right decision; the man rode a tall sorrel horse with two white stockings on the front legs, two shorter socks on the back legs. It was Ramon Devine’s horse. An hour later he had shortened the distance between them to less than a quarter of a mile. Neither rider looked back, apparently still unaware of Josh’s presence. Ahead of them the land abruptly rose, the long hill that made it impossible for the wagon to come this way.

With a bag of oats as a rest, Josh lay prone on the rocks. The Sharp’s rife secure in its cradle of grain. Josh adjusted the folding sight of the long gun as Sam Lowery had instructed him. They had practiced for an hour before Sam was convinced Josh could hit a fence post at five-hundred yards with consistency. The man riding Ramon’s horse was now in the lead, picking his way among the rocks towards the top of the rise. Josh pulled the set trigger on the big gun, heard it click and then waited until the small speck of man and horse appeared in the tiny peep sight. The big gun belched and for a short second Josh thought he had missed, but the rider suddenly pitched over backwards off his horse. The echo of the shot bounced from rock to rock and came back three times. While that was happening he ejected the spent round and loaded another, the cartridge as big as the little finger of his hand. The thought made him think of Ramon and the cruelty inflicted on him by the coals these very men might have ladled on to Ramon’s hands. The second rider jumped from his horse and made for an outcropping of rocks. The Sharp’s belched again and the man went down.

It took perhaps twenty minutes to repack the Sharp’s and tie the bag of grain down securely. Josh led his gelding; the gray came along on his own. They found the first man lying dead on the sand, a gaping hole almost dead center between his shoulders. Ramon’s horse was standing nearby and moved in, recognizing his former companion. Josh took the man’s colt and put it into Ramon’s saddle bags.
The second man was sitting next to the outcrop he had hoped would give him shelter. He held his side, but blood was oozing through his fingers. The man was little more than a boy. Josh drew his colt from its holster and approached the kid. He raised his hand in a defensive manner as thought he thought it might stop a bullet from the 44. Josh hammered the colt back and shot the kid in the groin. He screamed in agony, one that either Josh did not hear or chose to ignore. His second shot entered the kid’s brain through the right eye socket.

The sun was setting, the rays somewhat in Josh’s eyes, but they would not last much longer, he thought. He had watched as the wagon and seven mounted men approached from the northwest for the last half hour. They were slow and deliberate. He doubted they had heard the two pistol shots from above ‘Bad-Coffee’, but it was entirely possible they heard the big Sharp’s thunderous blasts. No matter, they were already in range, whether they knew it or not.

The wagon, pulled by a nice pair of black stock horses, halted. The outriders milled around, apparently waiting for a signal that it was safe to proceed. Joshua was atop a rock as big as a railroad car with nothing around him for fifty yards or so. There was no place where anyone could get above him. The Sharp’s rifle was lying across the grain sack again and next to it he had two Winchesters, all loaded to full capacity. He had water and a bag of biscuits, a blanket and his binoculars. The four horses had been watered and fed, then stashed in a small box canyon, half-mile back from the pool.

He hadn’t allowed much of any emotion since Ramon’s death, except perhaps the cold contempt that he felt for those on that wagon and their cohort. ‘Avoid the evil’, Francis Many-Suns had told him that night when he died. Joshua had tried to do that, but now he realized that evil could not always be avoided; sometimes it had to be confronted. He had killed three men already in his lifetime, now he was preparing to do it again, do it until they were gone or he perished on top of that rock. He did however, feel a pang of pity as he took aim on the near-side horse hitched to the wagon. The Sharp’s belched; the horse dropped in its tracks.
Riders scurried in all directions, not sure where the shot had come from. One of the men jumped down from the wagon and ran towards the downed horse and began unbuckling harness. The Sharp’s blew him onto the carcass of the black horse. Some people came out from under the canvas and dropped to the side of the wagon. The riders tried to take shelter there too, but the big draft vehicle could not hide them all. Josh shot one in a big Mexican hat that leaned too far in his saddle, attempting to look in the direction of Josh’s rock.

About two minutes later, an Indian riding a black and white pinto and a black man on a flea-bit grey charged the rock. They were three hundred yards away, coming at him at a full gallop. Josh picked up one of the Winchesters and waited. At a hundred yards bullets began hitting the rock half way up to where Josh lay. But Josh waited still. At fifty yards the pinto stumbled and its rider crashed over its head. Josh shot the black man full in the chest just as he was turning his mount to head back towards the wagon. The Indian ran to a nearby mesquite. Josh shot through the tree until he heard a yell. He reloaded the Winchester and waited.

The sun was comfortably low now and did not hinder his vision in any way. Through the binoculars he could see people taking cover behind the wheels of the wagon. His next shot with the Sharp’s shattered a spoke of the front wheel and hit the man behind it. The next two shots did nothing but raise dust, but the people retreated further back. None of them apparently had a rifle capable of hitting him.
The next charge was three riders. The last of them was reluctant to go and a man with a long whip came out and cracked it behind the frightened rider. Josh shot him before he could retreat to safety. The strategy of the second charge was the same, to drive him from this perfect defensive position and expose him to the superiority of the raider’s number. The results were also the same. He cut down the three men as soon as they came within range of the Winchester.

Josh fired the Sharp’s twice more, each shot blowing a large hole near the bottom of the water barrel secured to the side of the wagon. Dusk was settling in when Josh heard three pistol shots in rapid succession from the vicinity of the wagon. A few minutes later the last two outriders, with one other horse in tow, galloped off to the southwest. He had no way of knowing with any certainty, but the shoot-out at ‘Bad-Coffee’ was all but over.

He spent the night atop the rock, remaining awake and constantly alert. Even in the enhanced light offered by the binoculars he detected no movement from the wagon. As the dark of night turned to the grey of morning he slid down the rock and made his way back to the pool. If anyone remained below him they would have seen him move, but there was no response of any kind. He sat down beside the pool, the Winchester across his lap.

It was full daylight when Josh saw the movement. They came slowly, on foot, from the blind side of the wagon. They were women; three of them, their hands empty. The walked, half staggering, up towards the pool; Josh did not pick up the Winchester.

The first woman walked right past him and threw herself head first into the pool and drank heavily. Josh walked over, grabbed her by the back of her dress and pulled her out.

“Too much of it will make you sick,” he stated flatly. “It’s okay for horses and coyotes, but you’re not used to it.” He tossed her a canteen and she drank again.

The other two women watched, not saying anything. One was an older woman, mid-forties Josh figured, and wearing a dress that had long since lost any color or design it ever had to filth and sun bleach. The remaining one, much like the drinker, was younger, terribly thin and frightened to her core.

“We’re captives,” she said, simply. “I’ve been with them over a year, these two for just a couple of months.”

“Is everybody gone from down there?” Josh asked quietly.

“Gone or dead,” the woman scoffed. “When you hit that spoke on the wagon wheel you blew Garza’s face off. The two that lit out shot the only other one for his canteen.”

“Where you with them when they killed my partner, gouged his eye out and cut him?”

“We didn’t see it, but we heard him screaming. I’ve heard a lot of men and women scream though. That bunch liked it that way.”

“You had anything to eat or drink?” He asked her, she seemingly the only one able to speak.

“Hardtack,” the woman replied. “And a sip of water last night.

“Stay here,” Josh ordered. He walked back to the box canyon and brought out the Arab, mounted him and rode down towards the wagon. It was the way the woman had said. He found the few supplies left from the stores they had taken from Ramon and he put them into a cloth bag and tied them to the saddle horn. He took the harness off the big black and left the bridle on, took one revolver he found near the man with no face and stuck it in his belt. Then he rode back up to the pool, pulling the black behind him. He let the beast water at the pool and then put him in the shade of a rock overhang, fed him a handful of oats.

“All I’ve got for feed is some biscuits and jerked beef,” Josh told them. “There is a little water left in that barrel, plus what I’ve got in my canteens. If that isn’t enough, we’ll smash some oats between rocks and make a mush of it. That will get us to Tucson at least.”

“You’re going to take us back?” One of the younger women finally spoke.

“Somebody’s probably been out looking for you, thinking maybe you were dead.” Josh answered.

“You have any idea of what they put us through?” The older woman spoke again.

“I do,” Josh admitted. “But that was then; you got to deal with today.”

“You think my husband is going to welcome me with open arms after I’ve lain with twenty different men, sometimes three or four a night? You think it’s all going to be forgotten?”

“What’s the alternative?” Josh asked her.

“Is that water fit to bathe in?” She said, not looking up.

“Yeah, it’s fine for that.”

“Got any soap?”

“I’ll cut some yucca that lathers up nice.” Josh said.

“That would be kind of you.” She replied.

Josh busied himself with other things once he’d gathered the yucca and smashed it with the handle butt of the revolver. He heard the woman splashing and one time he thought he even heard the sound of laughter. Shortly after that, one of the women screamed. Josh ran towards the pool, pulling his pistol. The oldest of the three women was walking, naked, her shoes pulled loosely on her feet, down towards the derelict wagon. Her hair was wet and shining in the morning sun and she was handsome, except for the bruises and cuts on her body. With her back turned to the others, they could not see the tears running down her face, but they did see the colt that Josh had left lying on the rock where he had smashed the yucca. She hammered the pistol, placed it in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

It took three days to get the two girls to Tucson where Josh delivered them into the hands of the U.S. Marshall. Josh checked into a hotel and stayed for three more days and got provisions at the general store. He visited the bank and had a draft for a thousand dollars made out to Sam Lowery as payment for the grey horse and the Sharp’s rifle. He sent Sam a telegram, but was told it might be months before it could be delivered. It didn’t matter much.

People from all over the west reported seeing Joshua Blake at various locations over the next years, but nobody was certain. There was money withdrawn from his account a few times; once in Salt Lake City, once in Cheyenne, twice in Denver and even once in San Francisco. But, for all practical purposes, Joshua Blake disappeared from the face of the earth for the next twenty five years.
 



The Latter Years


It was 1898 and Joshua Blake was eighty-four years old but physically appeared to be half that age. The Indian Wars had been over for eight years, the last battle happening at Wounded Knee on a cold December morning in 1890. Chief Bigfoot was killed that day, Sitting Bull a while earlier. The Ghost Dancers were dead, the great Apache Chiefs were dead, the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho and Cree subdued. The Navajo had been restored to their sacred lands after years in captivity. So many of the tribes suffered similar fates at the hand of the army; first driven into exile on long death marches onto reservations that killed so many of the survivors, later moved back onto bleak patches of land that could not sustain them. But the country was safe for white settlers and the westward expansion could proceed at breakneck speed.

That expansion had already pushed Josh as far west as it could without shoving him into the Pacific Ocean. He lived a quiet life in a modest boarding house on Desmond Street in San Francisco. The wanderings of the past years had done little to clear his conscious; in his mind he refought the ‘Bad-Coffee’ incident nearly every day. The questions were always the same; had he acted out of some sense of justice or had he only sought revenge for the loss of one of the few close friends of his lifetime? The other question also troubled his mind. Had he, by that single act, taken onto his spirit the evil so abhorrent to the water in the vial?

One thing he had come to realize was that he had little problem keeping body and soul together. He was a fairly well-educated man now and he understood how Francis Many-Suns had accumulated so much knowledge. Josh read and studied. One of the things he learned was that money, like water, seeks out its own level. If you had money, even a modest amount, opportunities to make more money seemed to arise on a regular basis. A good banker helped, and Josh knew many of them. His unchanging appearance necessitated that he reinvent himself frequently. A five to seven year association was about the limit, and then he would move, withdraw his deposits, find new opportunities and begin again.

For the moment at least he was safe. He had been in San Francisco only a bit more than two years, but he was restless. Big cities offered their own brand of seclusion but the loneliness he felt there was uniquely more intense than he felt in the flat, dry places of the desert southwest. He wanted to go back there, but the vastness of the land with so few people offered a different kind of danger. Those few people usually got to know each other, or at least to know of each other. It was not the time; not yet.

One of his fellow boarders was a brash woman by the name of Darcie Forbes. If the rumors were true, and they usually were, Darcie had once owned the biggest and finest bordello in Boston. Joshua had eaten breakfast with her occasionally and they had one or two short conversations on the sprawling front porch that overlooked the bay a mile below Desmond Street. On mornings when the sun was shining, Darcie would leave the house about mid-morning, carrying a large, leather satchel and some sort of apparatus stuffed away in a canvas bag. On towards dinner time she would return, stow her equipment and reappear in time for the evening meal. Her company was highly coveted by the other male boarders and after dinner she would entertain one or two of them over coffee and cake at her table.

It was on one of those fine sunny mornings that Josh found himself wandering aimlessly near the wharfs and piers of the waterfront district. At night it was probably a fearsome place, populated by sailors and ladies of the evening, but during daylight it was a beehive of activity and commerce. There were fishmongers, bakeries, fine restaurants and tiny stalls where you could buy a bowl of chowder or a freshly boiled lobster. The scene on this day was especially busy as one of the clipper ships had just arrived in port. Even tied to her moorings the ship appeared to be flying; she was gorgeous.

As he stood there, taking in the beauty of the ship, he failed to notice a group of artists set up a few yards behind him. They were trying to capture the beauty of the ship in a different way and to lay that image permanent on canvas in strokes and dabs of oil paint.

“Excuse me, Josh,” the small voice said from behind him, “could you move a step or two in either direction, you’re blocking my view of the ship.”

Josh jumped as though somebody had poked him with one of those new electric prods. “I’m very sorry,” he said quickly. “I was caught up in the moment.” When he turned to see who it was that had spoken, and more urgently, who it was that knew his name, he was quite surprised to see that it was Darcie Forbes. She was standing behind an easel and canvas, a paint pallet in her left hand and a brush in the other. She had a plain cotton frock covering her starched white blouse and Scottish plaid, long skirt.

“Come and see my progress,” she smiled.

Josh moved around behind her and did just that. It was very good. The ship had been accurately sketched onto the canvas with charcoal and Darcie was busily fleshing out the drawing with broad strokes of her brush. She worked very fast, much faster than what Josh would have assumed.

“I have always heard that artists did not like to be watched while they were at work.”

“Oh poppy-cock,” Darcie laughed. “If we didn’t want our creations to be viewed, finished or unfinished, we wouldn’t do this.” Her voice was a bit coarse but her laugh was genuine and absolutely delightful. “Do you approve, as far as I’ve gone?” She asked him.

“I do indeed.”

Darcie looked at the sky, studied it for a moment and then submerged her brush in a small jar of turpentine and wiped it on a rag she had stuffed into the pocket of her frock. “Too much light, too much activity for right now,” she frowned. “Lets you and I go for a stroll, perhaps you know a place where we could have some lunch and get a drink of good whiskey.”

“I think there would be lots of places like that in this part of town,” Josh returned her laugh.

Darcie waved to a group of Chinese kids sitting near-by. A ten or twelve year old boy came running up. “You sit here and watch my things,” she said in a firm voice, “and I’ll pay you when I return. You understand?”

“Yes miss,” the Chinese kid smiled. “I take good care.”

“Atta boy,” she laughed. She removed her frock and hung it from one of the legs of the easel; looped her arm through Josh’s and started them off, away from the stately ship.

They walked a while, neither of them saying anything. Josh was not an accomplished conversationalist and Darcie appeared to be content with the quiet. After a block or two she looked at him softly. “What do you know about me, Josh?”

“Factually, not one single thing,” Josh answered truthfully.

“You know I used to be a whore?”

“I’ve heard you owned a place back east, but if somebody had said to me you were a whore I’d probably have taken exception to that.”

“Well, it’s the truth,” she said flatly. “People are more forgiving once you made enough money to buy respectability, but it doesn’t change the fact.”

They walked a ways further, the silence returned. The sun was warm, which was rare for San Francisco. It never seemed to get overly cold or overly warm.

“Facts are facts,” Josh said finally. “I don’t know that any of us end up the way we are except through a whole series of accidents or incidents we have little control over.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Not a bit,” Josh laughed. “Time usually makes it all right, eventually.”

“Do you know what they say about you?” She said, her chuckle jumping from her throat like a rabbit out of a bush.

“Whatever it is, its pure speculation,” Josh answered.

“Well, secretly, you’re one of the richest men in San Francisco. You have a gold mine in Colorado and several oil wells in Pennsylvania. You have a wife in Philadelphia that you can’t stand even though she is supposed to be one of the most beautiful women in the east.”

Josh laughed aloud. “Not a word of fact in the whole bundle,” he laughed again. “I wonder where they come up with such nonsense.”

“You dress well,” Darcie said simply. “Not showy well, but quality well, if you know what I mean. Sometimes the understatement is more powerful than the obvious and it sets people to speculation; they just have to make a story that fits the image.”

They walked on a bit more, the silence returned again. “You’ve never been married have you?” Darcie spoke as if she had some knowledge of what she had just said.

“I suppose not,” Josh said, remembering Little-Woman and the black-eyed baby boy. “We were bound to each other by affection and attraction, but nobody spoke words over us or wrote our names in a book.”

“It was a while ago,” She commented.

“Yes, a lifetime ago,” Josh answered.

They had lunch in a small restaurant that catered to Italian seamen. There really wasn’t that many Italian seamen around, but the Greeks and sailors from the Balkans came there also, along with a group of San Francisco’s fashion set. They ate pasta with tomato sauce, mushrooms and garlic, delicious bread sticks and they drank a light, sweet red wine that the owner said came from not too far outside San Francisco, an area called the Napa Valley. Darcie decided that they would visit the area during the next grape harvest. Josh didn’t object.

The afternoon involved more conversation than Josh could ever remember having done before, but like he had been with Francis and Ramon Devine, he devoted himself to listening.

By the time they got back to the piers the light was fading. The Chinese boy was sitting on a crate watching the world pass from his truncated perch. Darcie had the boy assist her in disassembling the easel, putting it, along with her smock, into the canvas bag. The pallet, paints and the unfinished painting went into the leather satchel. She paid the boy an entire dollar and he dashed off in a state of utter disbelief.

“You disapprove of my squandering of money?” She asked, not seriously because she had consumed most of two bottles of wine not long before.

“Generally you pay for quality, be it clothes or a kid who will be damn sure you’re well looked after the next time you come here,” Josh laughed.

They walked slowly up the hill to Desmond Street. He helped Darcie with her equipment when they arrived at the boarding house and he thanked her for a lovely day. She raised herself on her toes and kissed him lightly on the cheek but said nothing.

Josh did not go down for dinner that night but settled in with a new book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing about a wonderful British Detective called Sherlock Holmes, and a pot of tea he got from the late kitchen. He was quite surprised to hear a very soft tap on his door shortly after nine o’clock. When he opened the door he was even more surprised to see Darcie dressed in a fine lace gown and carrying a silver tray and a crystal decanter.

“We never had that drink of good whiskey,” she whispered. “I do hope it isn’t too late for you.”

“It’s never too late for good whiskey,” Josh smiled as he stepped back and allowed Darcie to enter.

* * * * *

Darcie Forbes died on a beautiful autumn morning in 1903 of an illness no one was ever quite able to diagnose. Josh had sat by her bedside for three lonely days and nights before she passed away peacefully. “Promise me,” she said to him, “you’ll let me go, it’s my time.”

“But there may be another way,” Josh insisted.

“This is what I want,” she protested again. “You will be fine, and I’ll always be with you, even if you go back to the wild horses.” She laughed then, quietly, but with all the sparkle and grace she had, which was monumental.

Just as dawn was breaking, Darcie awoke. Josh was holding her hand. “Will you make me one more promise?”

“You know I will, why do you even ask?”

“Find your son, Josh, or find out what happened to him. For your sake as well as his, find him. You’ve been itching to go, and when you look, you look back east, where you left him. Then you can go back to your desert and be at peace again.”
“I will, I promise,” Josh whispered.

“We’ll meet again,” she smiled. “And you’ll take me to lunch and have a grand conversation; and then we’ll have a drink of good whiskey and make love like we were young.”

“You’ll always be young to me, Darcie,” he said, but she could not hear him.

A few days later a messenger came to the boarding house with a message for Josh. A lawyer wanted to have a meeting with him. Josh told the messenger he would be at the office at the time requested.

“Mister Blake,” the lawyer began, “Miss Darcie Forbes named you as the primary beneficiary of her estate. There are a few small debts to be paid, such as her boarding house fees and the cost of her internment, but I am authorized to dispose of those debts and put the remainder of her monies at your disposal. The sum total should be near forty-thousand dollars. I can pay you the sum in any way you choose, or should you want it deposited with a financial institution, I can accommodate that as well.”

“I’ll drop by with instructions before the end of the week,” Josh said.

It was very unlikely that the world took notice of Darcie’s generosity or that it even cared. The money, in fact, made little difference to Joshua Blake. But the world was soon to discover another gift that Darcie had given Josh, one that would mystify art galleries and art dealers for sixty years or more. In the spring of 1904, with an initial contribution of twenty-thousand dollars, a trust fund was established in New York City called the Darcie Forbes Memorial. Under very specific instructions, the trust fund was set up to provide fees for the education of Native-American children. Over the course of the next half century, and more, various art pieces would show up at auction houses, art galleries and markets where Indian art and handicraft were sold. The instructions were always the same. ‘The enclosed merchandise to be sold at auction to the highest bidder; the proceeds donated to the Darcie Forbes Memorial fund.’

Josh left California that spring, bound for Omaha. Darcie had been right; he had reached that point where staying longer might have caused him problems. She had also been right about making the effort to find his son; delaying any longer would raise more questions that it answered. Jeremiah would over 40 now, if he had survived the Indian Wars. Few that age had survived, especially among the Sioux who had fought up to the very last battle.

Omaha was a growing city with plenty of banks, any and all of them eager to take Josh’s deposit and set up elaborate accounts where he could access his money through a telegraph or through bank drafts. Things like that were becoming commonplace in the modern age.

It was infinitely more difficult to find four good horses. Where once he would have been able to set out for the winter with a saddle horse and a pack animal, all his paraphernalia and equipment now required two more and that would only keep him in the field until late fall. Josh was finally able to put together a good string and in early June he set out, riding the north side of the Missouri River.

The Great Sioux Reservation had been set up as part of the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 which guaranteed this land to the Sioux and their descendents for time and eternity. The treaty was violated when gold was discovered in the Dakotas shortly after. In 1899, what was left of the original reservation was divided into 6 parts. Pine Ridge covered slightly less than 3,500 square miles, an area larger than the combined states of Delaware and Rhode Island. Pine Ridge was the home of the Oglala Sioux, the people of Tall-wolf, Little-Woman and the white warrior Pale-Antelope.

Josh led his string in a north-west direction, pushing steadily until they reached the Smith River, south of the big-bend. He set up good camp, complete with a pole pen for the horses. During the first few days he saw several Indians, but they gave him a wide berth and didn’t stop.

Each day in front of the canvas and easel was another day in which Darcie Forbes played such a large role in his memory. She had given him the greatest gift of his life, the only one in which he found any real solace. “Look at the scene, Josh,” she had told him. “Not like you are looking at the page of a book, look at it all at once. Don’t start in one corner and go across or up and down, see it all. Now,” she whispered, “close your eyes. Do you still see it? See it exactly like it was with your eyes. When you open them again, it will all fit in just like the image in your mind. Do it again,” and when he closed his eyes she lowed his head so that he would be aligned with the canvas. “Now open your eyes and the image will be there, on the canvas; just fill it in with the colors that are already there.”

It was the children who came first. They sat behind him on the grass, watching silently. Their culture put a high value on those who could tell a story or make their exploits live again on smooth side of buffalo hides in drawings and symbols. To them, Joshua was a magician who could reach out and bring the mountains to his canvas. Occasionally, Josh would add in a tepee or an encampment to the scene which delighted the children and sent them running off to tell their parents of the wonders they had seen.

When the older people began to come he would talk to them. They marveled at his knowledge of their language, something few whites bothered to learn. His questions were casual. Did they know of the medicine man called Tall-Wolf, had they heard stories of the white warrior who was part of his band? No one answered him.

When the Aspen trees were covered with gold, Josh made a few short trips among the people, trading money for handicrafts. They could buy corn flour for the winter with money, the handicrafts were things they could replace and Josh paid a fair price for them. When the snow came he took down his camp, removed the pole pens and had the long ride back to Omaha. He spent the winter boxing and crating his paintings and the goods he had purchased and shipped them east to art galleries with the same specific directions.


The following spring, and the spring after that, he went back to the Smith River area, moving his campsite at least a day’s ride from where he had been the previous year. It would be a pattern he would repeat for many, many years. The children would come, the adults later, and by autumn he usually had a daily audience to watch him paint.

It was past the middle of June when Josh first saw the man. He wore denim pants and tall moccasins, a deer-skin vest and a talisman around his neck. His long hair was pulled back in a single braid and he wore a porcupine-quill band about his head. He watched for several days and said nothing. Even when Josh managed to engage in conversation, the middle-aged man did not intrude.

It was Josh’s custom to sit outside his tent in the evenings, when the weather and mosquitoes permitted, and drink a cup of coffee flavored with one shot of whiskey. He owed the practice equally to Darcie and Ramon Devine.

The man came through the woods a hundred yards in front of the tent, riding a thin, short bay horse. At a respectable distance from the camp he stopped, slid down from the old horse and stood with his arms crossed. Josh waved him in. The man came forward and squatted beside the fire and held his hands out toward the flame although the evening was not chilled.

“Coffee?” Josh asked in Sioux.

“Coffee would be nice, whiskey too,” the man smiled.

Josh rolled over a stump aspen and turned it upright. “Sit,” he said gesturing to the man. He retreated to the tent where he brought out a blue enamel cup, took the coffee pot from a rock and poured. He added a small amount of whiskey to the steaming brew and handed it to the man.

He took a sip and smiled. “I froze my fingers many years ago,” he laughed. “Since then it seems they are always cold, even in the summer. Maybe I froze my stomach too; the whiskey warms you all over.”

Josh chuckled. “The spirit of the bottle does not trouble you?” Joshua asked.

“We made a treaty,” the man smiled. “He does not trouble me and I do not trouble him, we have few meetings and they are short.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the fire. Josh judged the man was probably in his late forties or early fifties.

“How are you called?” The man asked after a while.
“Blake” Josh answered, at least a partial truth. “And you?”

The man frowned, slightly. “Spotted fish that jumps the beaver dam,” he answered. “It does not fit well on the tongue of the whites.”

“Trout,” Josh interpreted.

“I think you have cheated me in the trade to your language,” he chuckled.

“Whites have no tolerance for long names with complex meanings,” Josh explained. “We have words that paint pictures so real that you can see them, almost. But names only paint the picture of one face.”

“That is difficult to understand,” Trout said. “There are so many white faces; do you have names for each of them?”

“Not nearly enough,” Joshua admitted. “We use the same ones over and over.”

Trout shook his head and sipped his coffee. “I have watched you, Blake,” he said, quietly. “You have great skill with capturing the hills and meadows yet leaving them there. Most whites have come to capture our land and take it. You know this country, you have ridden it before, and you know the landmarks as well as I do. You know the language of the Sioux, as well as a young child at least, yet you ask the wrong questions. Why is that, Blake?”

“I am sorry,” Josh said mysteriously. “I wasn’t aware I wasn’t asking the questions in the right way.”

“The way is correct, the questions are wrong. This man, Tall-Wolf you seek, what do you know of him?”

Josh thought for a moment. “Not much, I guess. He is Lakota…”

“He was Brule,” Trout corrected. “His wife was Lakota, Oglala of the Wakan’s. He came to the Oglala through his woman’s people.”

“You know him?” Josh said excitedly.

“He has been with the spirits for many years,” Trout said. “Why do you seek him?”

“I seek him because he might have known of a white warrior who rode with him. He was called Pale-Antelope.”

“I have heard of him also.” Trout drank the remainder of his coffee. Josh refilled his cup from the pot and offered him more whiskey. Trout shook his head. “I, for one, keep my treaties. The bottle demon will not find me as willing as some of the weaker ones.”

“Do you know the fate of Pale-Antelope?”

“I will ask,” Trout replied.

Josh knew full well that any further attempt to get information would not be well received. Trout had answered and had indicated he would inquire of others. The subject was closed and would not be reopened until he had something more to say.
“You will pay money for goods this year?” Trout asked.

“I will,” Josh responded. “Before the snows come.”

“Good”, Trout smiled. “This year I will see that you are not cheated.”

Trout stayed perhaps a half-hour longer and then he rode back to his encampment. Josh continued his painting and questioning, but always on a low key. If he showed too much interest that would not sit well with the Sioux and he might be thought of as a spy or a gossip. Trout’s visits in the evening came more often as the summer wore on.

On one particular evening, early in August, when they were already on their second cup of coffee, Trout looked into the fire for several minutes before he spoke. “You know of Tall-Wolf and of the white warrior, do you also know of the one they called ‘Joshua’?”

The question stunned Josh for just a moment, but he tried to recover without showing any sign of his distress. “I believe I have.”

“He was big medicine, they say.”


“In what way?” Josh asked.

“Difficult to say,” Trout said mysteriously. “They say he might have been one of the timeless ones.”

“I don’t understand,” Josh said, although he thought he knew what the answer would be.

“The ones who do not count the years the same as regular people. For every two or three winters, they count only one.” Trout was being vague on purpose.

Josh sipped at his coffee, wanting to be curious, but not too curious. “There are many of these timeless ones?”

“As rare as the white buffalo. Always moving, never stay too long in one place. This is the first I have heard that came from the whites though.”

“I have not heard of one either,” Josh said. “And what of Pale-Antelope?”

“They say that this Joshua may have fathered a child with an Oglala woman who was killed by the wagon people at the time of the war between the whites. The medicine man, Tall-Wolf took the child for a few summers and then the white warrior took the child and fled to Canada. Pale-Antelope might have escaped, but the Cree killed the boy because he was a bad omen. To be born half white, half of the people when the days of war were upon us was not a good sign.”

It was getting near full dark and the fire was not full enough to illuminate the men’s faces. Josh felt his eyes well with tears but he said nothing. A stick of pine that was not fully dry popped in the fire, sending out an ember that landed close to Trout’s foot. He reached out and pressed his toe on it, smothering it. “Maybe a whiskey would be good,” he suggested.

“It might,” Josh nodded. He refilled their coffee cups and added a splash of whiskey to both. They sat in silence for several minutes.

“If I came tomorrow and borrowed your axe,” Trout began, “and I walked to that stand of trees behind us and cut down one, it would not mean the stand would not survive.”

“I don’t understand,” Josh said.

“If tomorrow I take this cup and fill it with earth and plant a seed from the pine cone in it and nurture it and then put the seedling in place of the one I cut down, the stand of trees will not grow faster than it would have left to the Earth Mother.”

“I agree,” Josh nodded, “but what are you saying?”

“I think,” Trout said, smiling broadly, “when our time to pass into the spirit world comes, we will remember the one moment when we had a purpose. Perhaps for a woman it would be when she brings forth new life, perhaps for a man it will be when he kills a grizzly who threatens his family or the time he faces an enemy greater than himself. The other times, the killing of a foe or the saving of a friend is just the things we do. They have little effect on the earth. But that one moment when we have purpose, the earth remembers.”

“Perhaps you are right my friend.”

“I believe I am.” Trout stated with some authority. He threw the last few drops of his coffee and whiskey into the fire, walked out to where he had tethered his small bay horse, mounted and rode away into the night.

Joshua Blake spent two more summers with the Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation and then he left that part of the country. After that he spent some years in the south among the Choctaws and the Seminoles. The paintings in the auctions of the Darcie Forbes Fund took on a noticeable change.

From the southeast Josh went to the opposite corner of the country, to Idaho where he learned about the Flatheads and the Nez Perce.

It wasn’t until after the Second World War that he ventured into the lands of the Navajo and he knew, almost immediately, he had been too long in coming. The Navajo, for all their trials, tribulations and a land that could barely sustain itself embraced perhaps the most regal of all the peoples. The lived as they had always lived and they sought harmony before all other things.

They had the most difficult language on earth, or it seemed so to Joshua. He never did learn the nuances of pronunciation that were so necessary to conversation. Consequently, he had few conversations. He was most taken by their strict adherence to clan association. The Navajo was a matriarchal society, like many other tribes, but just the simple act of an introduction clarified who this person was, what clans he or she claimed and even set up a strict code for marriage. When a man married, outside of his clan, of course, the children of that marriage became members of the mother’s clan, but to keep heredity lines intact they also named the father’s clan. A child was “to” the clan of its mother and born “for” the clan of its father. A few important relatives could then be thrown in for further identification and also to set up some social order.

Depending on their location, the Navajo were usually shepherds, keeping flocks of sheep and goats. If they were lucky enough to live in an area that had sufficient water they also were excellent gardeners. Corn, squash, sweet potatoes and root crops were their favorites. The flocks gave them everything that the buffalo once provided to the plains Indians, except perhaps the building blocks for their hogans. They were just the way Josh remembered Francis Man-Suns home, eight sided, fire pit in the center, an entrance to the east where the residents could welcome the morning sun.

Tending the flocks was a family affair. It taught the children responsibility, patience, knowledge of the land, locations of grass and water and it gave them the time to know who they were. They understood their interdependence with the dogs that helped with the sheep, the horses that carried them, and the earth that sustained them. The Navajo had little use for a horse that was so fast he could outrun a buffalo, they needed one that could be trusted to bring a child and the flock home.

The land within the four mountains was also spectacular. It seemed to the outsider to be devoid of water, yet water defined nearly everything on the desert. It was water that cut the ruts in the rocks, hollowed out caverns under the surface and marked the occasional growths of brush and grass. On summer afternoons great thunderhead clouds would form in the sky and storms would rumble across the horizon at distances too far to be imagined. The tops of these giants, thirty-thousand feet from the desert floor would be snow white, while the bottoms would gradually turn from gray to black. But only occasionally would the clouds give up their precious moisture and wash the dust from the air until the red rocks shined like rubies and the sulphur gleamed bright yellow.

It was on just such an afternoon that Joshua Blake had taken his easel to a low shoulder of a long rock outcropping. One hundred and thirty eight years had passed since 1812 and Josh was no longer a young man. His painting no longer caught the eyes of art speculators back east and he painted now for the sheer joy of it and because it helped him to remember Darcie.

He was painting a rock formation that seemed to defy gravity. A huge boulder, as big as a house, was the foundation. Atop of it stood another boulder, nearly as big and offset to the east and it was capped off by a flat slab of rock that apparently balanced and stabilized the whole structure. It had probably stood there, a half-mile from the graded road that had once been only a game trail, for thousands of years. There seemed to be no reason for Josh to be in any hurry to put the formation to canvas.

A small girl, probably nine or ten years old, rode a fat pinto pony a quarter of a mile away. She was tending four ewes and the growing lambs that had been born in the early spring. The girl was not astride the horse, but sat between the pony’s withers and his rump, her short legs dangling off one side. Behind them, the thunderheads boiled and billowed into the sky, the lightning illuminating the cloud ball with colors no pallet could reproduce. The thunder would come minutes later, rolling across the desert like a thousand cannons in a war that never was. Joshua could not paint fast enough to capture the color and the splendor and he knew it would not last for long.

The girl, the sheep and the pony all knew this storm would never bring rain on this day and they ambled slowly towards the rocks. Josh could hear the lambs bleating and a bell clanging; they paid the clouds no attention.

Josh kept a wide-mouth milk bottle with turpentine in it to wash out his brushes, just as Darcie had once done. That was the first indication. The bottle began to vibrate on the flat rock and then a few seconds later the ground too took up the pulsations. The girl and the pony were next to the rock. Josh jumped to his feet just as the ground lurched; the topmost flat rock teetered and crashed to earth. Josh’s warning was still in his throat.

The pinto pony was dead and the flat rock, as big as a kitchen table and a foot thick, lay perfectly flat on the ground. The edge, closest to the pony was cracked and under the crack was a leg and a small black shoe. Josh dropped to his knees and began to dig and scrape feverishly at the soft sand but he realized it would take far too long to free the girl for her to survive even if he could reach her. He took the pouch from his neck and got out the vial, opened it and wetted his index finger and touched the unmoving leg. And then he dug; throwing dirt behind him like some terrorized badger. It took five minutes before he could touch flesh, but his calculations had been correct, he could feel the outline of the girl’s face. When he scooped the last handful of sand from in front of her mouth the girl coughed. “I’ll get you out of there child,” he said in his imperfect Navajo, “Try to be patient and unafraid.”

“I am alive, Uncle, “the weak, trembling voice from beneath the rock replied. “Please hurry.”

He had to dig a pit big enough for a bear to hibernate in before the girl’s body slid down, free of the tons of rock that held her captive. She was a thousand times more damaged than the Chinese woman had been, but she seemed to be breathing strong and steadily. The sand was soft and warm and Josh decided not to try to move her, she would be as comfortable there as anywhere and he had no idea what else to do. Her eyes were closed and she clutched at Josh’s hand and he spoke softly to her, telling her she was safe. He could not see her legs, they were covered in a long skirt but they seemed distorted. Her head was not round or oval or any other shape you could define, she looked like some grotesque figure he had once seen on a Cathedral back east, a monstrous devil of some sort.

They sat for perhaps half an hour like that, Josh holding the girl’s hand, she just breathing and not moving. The storm passed to the east and dissipated in the early evening stillness. Josh had an automobile parked off the gravel road and he kept enough gear in it to provide for most emergencies. He had a sleeping bag, Army surplus from the War, a canteen, water and a coffee pot. When he was quite sure the girl was sleeping, he put her hand down and ran back towards his car. He could still do that without effort.

He took several rocks from the side of the road and erected a cone in the middle of the gravel road and then laid out an arrow pointing in the direction of the girl. With the gear gathered up he went back through the sage and rabbit brush, using the two remaining rocks as his landmark.

The girl was still sleeping or unconscious when he returned. He spent some time gathering wood because he intended to keep a bright fire burning through the night if necessary. The sheep had scattered, but Josh felt they would know their way home or at least to water, which was where her family would begin a search for her.
He put a small pillow under the girl’s head and covered her with a blanket. Josh built his fire, brewed a pot of coffee and waited.

No cars traveled the gravel road during the night and no one came looking for them either. Two coyotes sang to each other from either end of the small valley where they waited, but there were no other sounds. Still, the girl slept. One time during the night, when Josh was replenishing the fire he looked at her; her face was not as distorted as it had seemed before, or perhaps it was just the way the firelight played on her.

In the full light of day the girl did look better, markedly better. The morning was warm but she was in the shadow of the rock formation and she pulled the blanket close to her chin. Joshua was sitting on his haunches, drinking a cup of coffee when she opened her eyes.

“Well, there is a sight to rival the rising sun,” he smiled. He tried to say the words in Navajo but he could not put them together in the proper sequence or syntax, so he just gave up.

The girl laughed, very weakly, and Josh knew Navajo’s seldom laughed in the company of strangers. “Uncle, you have brought me out of the earth, do not be ashamed of your words, I understand.”

Josh smiled and tried again. “You might be confused yet. I am not your uncle. I only happened to be here when the falling rock killed your pony, I am sorry there was nothing I could do to save him.”

The girl raised herself up on her elbows, her childish face aglow now. “You are perhaps an uncle to us all,” she speculated. “It is the highest rank I can give you.”

Josh poured a little coffee in a cup and gave it to the girl. She took a drink of the unsweetened brew and made a nasty face.

“Bitter?” Josh laughed.

“Bitter, but good,” she kept on smiling. Suddenly her eyes flared open and she started to get up. “I have to find my sheep,” she said excitedly.

Josh put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down. “The sheep scattered when the rock fell,” he explained. “Hopefully they went home or to water where your family will find them. Tell me your name, child, and where your family is and I will take you to them when you are stronger.”

“They will follow the old ewe with the bell,” the girl said. “She will take them home. I went a different way than my father told me to go yesterday; I hope they will not be angry that I got the horse killed.”

“I am sure they will be pleased to find you well,” Josh ventured.

“Our hogan is five miles from here, to the rising sun.”

“And what is your name, daughter of the Dine’?”

“I am Sarah Chee, born of the Mud-People and for the clan of the Red Faced ones.”

Sarah’s family did not appear until about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Two men on horseback came following the tracks the sheep had left. When they spotted the smoke from Josh’s campfire they came in at a gallop. The older and taller of the men saw Sarah and he jumped from his horse and ran to her. She reached out her arms for him.
The conversation was much too fast for Joshua to follow, but he got bits and pieces of it nonetheless. She told about the rock and being covered, unable to breathe. “This uncle,” she said, in conclusion, dug me from the earth and stayed with me for the night, gave me coffee and beans from a can,” she said, laughing.

The other man remained on his horse, eyeing Josh suspiciously. The one who had held Sarah looked seriously at the rock and the diggings before he turned to face Josh. His eyes traveled from the top of Josh’s head to his feet and then he took Josh’s hands and looked at his palms.

“How can this be, old one?” He said to Josh.

“It was not her time,” Josh said, simply. “Perhaps there was a hollow in the earth where she could get air, I don’t really know.”

“My daughter says the rock hit her with all its force, she should have been crushed, yet you have no wounds on your hands from digging in the earth and rocks.”

“The pony took the full brunt of the stone,” Josh offered as an excuse. “Perhaps we are just very lucky.”

“And perhaps today it will rain,” the man laughed.

They took Sarah with them, riding behind her father’s saddle. They had declined Josh’s offer to deliver her by car. Josh gathered his gear and equipment, but when he came to the unfinished painting he left it there. He was getting too old to paint any longer.

 
The Death of Joshua Blake and the Passing of the Vial

Joshua was living in Albuquerque when the first sign came to him. It was a warm day in late spring. It had been so many, many years since his body had told him anything that this feeling came as somewhat of a shock. He thought about it for a few days and the meaning seemed clear to him. He would not be granted the two-hundred years that had been given to his predecessor; still, he had celebrated his century benchmark ninety-three years ago.

It took some days to get his affairs in order and then he knew he must leave, but he had no idea of where it was he should go. One thing he did know, the world was very difficult for one who had no identity. Joshua had no documents or papers, no licenses or certificates. It was good that he preferred to travel by train or bus.
He had only a small suitcase when he went to the train station and still no idea of what he would say when he went to the ticketing window. Scattered around the terminal were some travel posters and the one that caught his eye showed a scene along the shores of Lake Michigan with the skyline of Chicago behind it. He bought a one-way ticket, with sleeping berth for Chicago.

The journey was not stressful, in fact Josh enjoyed watching the land go whizzing by as the train made its way north and east. It was all so different now; even the empty places were no longer vacant. There was nowhere on the globe one could not reach within a matter of a few days, no matter how remote it was.

From the train station in Chicago he hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the lakefront park he had seen on the poster. If that was where his fate was to be revealed he would, at least, be there waiting. The day was warm, but not overly so, the wind from the lake moderated the temperature. Seagulls swooped and swirled around him in the sky looking for tidbits of food that people might throw to them. At a cement table two old men were playing chess, a game Joshua had never learned and was always sorry he hadn’t. He sat at a nearby bench and watched them and they would study, move, and then hit the clock that measured their progress. Perhaps it was just as well that he hadn’t learned after all, time, he had long since discovered, was a quantity not well suited to be squeezed into limits.

Before long an older gentleman joined him on the bench. The man was shabbily dressed and did not look to be in the best of health. Occasionally he would cough and when the spasm was finished his breathing would be labored.

“I’ve lived too damned long,” he said, not necessarily to Josh but there was no one else nearby.

“It’s better than any of the alternatives,” Josh chuckled.

“I suppose you could say that,” the old man smiled. “Didn’t think I’d ever have to stick around quite this long or I might have been better prepared.” Then he cackled a hoarse laugh.

“Have you always lived here in Chicago?” Josh questioned.

“Oh hell no,” the man laughed again. “Been damned near everywhere. Went to Korea even, when we had that war over there. Lived some years in Florida and some in Washington and a few other places in between.” He leaned towards Josh and offered his hand. “Nathan Jerrod,” he nodded.

“Joshua Blake” The two men shook hands.

“Joshua, a name you don’t hear all that often,” Nathan mused.

“Or Nathan either,” Josh joked.

“I’ll be eighty-one years old come September,” Nathan smiled, “so I expect I’m a couple of years older than you, but I’ll bet you’ve been some places and seen some things in your time as well.”

“I have at that,” Josh said, nostalgically. “Mostly in the west, but I’ve left footprints on places far and wide.”

Nathan looked off towards the lake, seeming lost in his thoughts. “It’s a grand old world, wouldn’t you say Joshua?”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

As the minutes went on Josh grew more and more tired, a feeling that was completely alien to him. He had seen it in others, but this was a new experience for him. Perhaps he was just hungry, another feeling that he had seldom felt.

“I think I could do with a bit of supper,” Josh said, being as jovial as he could. “Is there a place close by you could recommend?”

Nathan looked Josh over carefully for the first time. “If you’re up to a five or six block walk I can take you to my favorite place in the whole city,” Nathan laughed. “It might be a little low-caste for you, but they’ll take your donation if you think it’s a worthy meal.”

“If a couple of old dodgers like us can make it five or six blocks I suspect the meal will be just wonderful,” Josh chuckled.

Their walk was leisurely and unhurried, befitting of two older gentlemen. Nathan Jerrod had two or three coughing spells and they would stop and resume once he was able to breathe again. Joshua was aware that he was weakening too.

The place they went to was a neighborhood cafeteria for the elderly who were still mobile enough to come in on their own. Everyone seemed to know Nathan and greeted him warmly. They had a meal of meatloaf served on a plastic tray with several small cavities in it where they had placed some green beans, mashed potatoes and diced carrots. And, of course, there was coffee, although Nathan drank tea. “A habit I picked up in Asia,” he proclaimed.

When they had finished their meal Nathan Jerrod said his goodbyes, stating he had to return to a homeless shelter some four or five blocks away. Joshua sat alone, drinking his remaining coffee.

The employees, or volunteers, were busy cleaning tables and sweeping and mopping floors. It was dusk outside but the lights on the streets made it seem as though it was still mid-day. Josh had not planned his next move, but he noted that people were taking their empty trays to a scullery and laying them in a small widow. He did the same.

He recognized the classic Navajo shape of the woman running huge racks of the plastic trays into an equally large dishwasher. Her back was turned to him and there was a fair amount of noise coming from the machinery.

“Daughter of the dine’,” he said in a rather loud voice, “you have come a long distance from the land of the four mountains.” His Navajo was much better than it was in those early years when he was a young man not yet one hundred and thirty years old.

When the woman turned around he did not recognize her, but she looked at him in amazement. She was probably in her thirties and quite pretty. She was wearing a white frock and big rubber gloves which she began to remove almost instantly. She went to a door that led back into the cafeteria and walked up close to him.

“Uncle,” she said softly, “come and sit at this table and wait for me. I will finish my work and I will take you home.”

Joshua was dumbstruck. Unless he was badly mistaken, he had not claimed any kinship with her in his simple remark, yet she was ready to take him to her home as though he were some expected relative.

When she did reappear she was wearing a big turquoise colored blouse and a long black skirt. She had a modest squash necklace about her neck and without the hair net on her head she did look somewhat familiar. He had not been among the Navajo for any great length of time in many years; perhaps she had been a child when he had seen her before.

She saw the confusion in his eyes almost immediately. “I am Sarah Chee, born of the Mud-People and for the clan of the Red-Faced Ones. My father was called Charlie Two-Horse and my mother was Ingrid Romero. My great-great grandfather was called Francis of a great age. Do you remember me now, uncle?”

“Sarah?”

“Yes uncle,” she said, tears in her eyes. “The small one you dug out of the earth so many years ago.”

An hour later they were in Sarah’s small, ground-floor apartment. They had coffee together while Sarah told him of the fifty plus years that had elapsed since their one and only meeting. “I would have recognized you anywhere,” she smiled. “That thick blonde hair and your thin, straight body.”

They laughed together but Joshua was growing weaker. “Sarah,” he asked her, “do you know why you are still so young?”

“I know only it has to do with you,” she admitted. “Since that day I have not been like others.”

“I fear it has been a burden on you, child.” Josh told her.

“I owe you my life,” she replied simply. “I have learned to cope with the way that life must be lived.”

Joshua Blake took the pouch from around his neck and placed it on the table between them. It took hours to tell the story, ending with how he had been directed to her on this his final day, as he was sure it was. “He gave her the same warnings and instructions that Francis Many-Suns had given him. “If you cannot do this, pour the water onto the earth, no one will know.”

Sarah looked at him with questions in her eyes but she asked only one. “Have you loved, uncle?”

Joshua laughed aloud. “Oh child, if only I could tell you. I have loved every moment of this long, long life, even those that broke my heart. I had a wife who had a smile so wonderful it put the sun to shame, and a lover who had a heart that was bigger than the Rocky Mountains. Yes, I have loved.”

Before the morning light came across the shimmering water, they went outside to a small bench on Sarah’s patio. Joshua was so very tired. Sarah put her arm around his shoulders and stroked his long hair.

As the first rays of the sun bolted across the lake, Joshua Blake felt a shudder go through his body. For a moment everything was the same, but then he felt as though he were floating. He drifted higher; he could see Sarah holding his body and tears streaming down her cheeks. He floated like that for a few moments and then he drifted higher until he was above the buildings. Then, slowly at first, he began to drift off toward the west, rising higher into the clouds. Soon the speed increased until it seemed as though he was inside a great tunnel, flying along at tremendous speeds. There were dark moments followed by blinding lights and always the feeling of ever increasing speed. The lights were tremendously bright and the colors so vibrant he could barely stand them. And then, off in the distance in front of him he saw a group of people approaching. It was Darcie Forbes, walking with a long line of young Native-Americans, dressed in academic gowns. Around their necks hung silver and turquoise, beautiful rocks and braided bands. Darcie smiled and waved and blew him a kiss and the young people cheered. The lightness and the darkness continued, and the speed never decreased. And the he saw Ramon Devine, sitting astride a magnificent Palomino stallion, wearing a fine suit and a broad Stetson hat. Ramon laughed and touched his hat. More lightness and more darkness flashed in his vision until he came upon a Chinese woman in a red silk dress holding a toddler child. The woman laughed and waved, the child clapped her pudgy hands and giggled. And then came Little-Woman and his son, a tall, fine looking boy, resplendent in feathers and bright beads. Tall-Wolf and Quincy Adams watched from a clearing as he passed.

Finally, after what seemed to be a very long time, Joshua felt a slowing. The lights came and went less frequently now and the lights began to have shape and meaning to them. When the motion stopped he saw Francis Many-Suns, his arms raised in a happy greeting. He was young and straight as Joshua Blake had never known him. Francis beckoned to him and Joshua approached. Inside a small corral stood Josh’s Arabian gelding and the noble tall gray. Francis smiled and motioned towards the horses. Josh walked towards them. They were sleek and shinny, their hooves polished and their manes and tails combed smooth. Josh stepped into the stirrup of a silver saddle and swung his leg over the Arab. He touched the reins and the horse whinnied and pranced in sheer delight. They gray answered and they hit out on a long lope.

And suddenly it was all clear, he understood everything. That one moment when there was a purpose had been returned. It was all so completely perfect, all now perfectly complete. The Arab gulped the wind in long drafts, the tall gray shoulder to shoulder with them, matching stride for stride. They could cross the desert, they could cross the mountains, and they could cross the oceans if they wanted. They could plunge headlong into infinity; and they did.

End