‘I’d like to look at that,’ said Rose. ‘Your paper, how far does it go back?’
‘Oh, golly, it goes back ages and ages. As far back as the town does. We have the archives, every page of every issue on our DVD.’
Rose had already done some homework on the town. It dated from the 1840s when land was purchased for a song by the army, on Paiute territory, to build an outpost and oversee the trickle of settlers emerging from the pass and heading north-west on the final leg towards Oregon. Being directly on the most travelled route from Emigrant Pass, it had developed more quickly than Blue Valley. By the late fifties the small military outpost had been swamped by a bustling town full of traders, merchants and craftsmen looking to resupply and tend to the unending procession of weary overlanders streaming out of the wilderness.
Fort Casey was an unavoidable next stop for anyone heading for Oregon. Rose was curious where this apparently real Rag Man had disappeared to. Presumably his journey would have taken him away from the mountains from which he’d emerged.
That meant north-west. That meant passing through here.
‘Can I look at this DVD?’
‘Sure, I can fix you up on our internet station,’ Daphne said, pointing towards the library’s solitary PC, sitting in an ill-lit corner and currently being used by a sullen teenage lad. ‘Lemme sort that out for you,’ she said, heading out from behind the counter. She approached the boy on the computer, muttered something quietly to him and pointed Rose’s way. He turned to look at her, a dark mop of hair covering his face except the pout of a bottom lip. He shrugged a whatever, closed down the MSN chat box, and shuffled towards the graphic novels and manga section of the library.
Daphne waved her over.
‘All yours,’ she cheerfully whispered as Rose sat down at the machine. ‘That’s Craig, my nephew.’ She nodded towards him. ‘Better he hangs out here, where I can keep an eye on him, than elsewhere. Library’s a good place for him; all these books and learning around him.’
Rose nodded, but wondered if there was a great deal of learning going on there.
Daphne left Rose and returned a moment later with a shimmering gold disc in one hand. She slotted it into the PC and a title page popped up on the screen.
The Report: Archives 1842-1939
‘We got two discs of material,’ she said. ‘Now, our recent history, from the war right up to, well . . . yesterday, I guess, is on the other disc. You want that one as well?’
‘Just the first disc’ll be fine, thanks.’
‘Okay, well then, if you click on this,’ she said, moving the mouse over a search dialogue box, ‘you can enter a date here or an issue number, or you can even do a word search. Now’ - she clasped her hands together - ‘what specifically can I help you to look for?’
Rose felt awkward. Daphne Ryan had been exceedingly nice, but right now she needed a little space in which to think. She really didn’t know specifically what she was looking for, not yet.
‘I’m just going to browse a little.’ She looked up at her. ‘If that’s all right?’
‘Sure.’
Daphne hovered, waiting to be of further assistance. Rose was thinking how she was going to politely ask Daphne to give her a bit of room, when an old boy sidled up to the counter with a small stack of Clancy novels to check out. Daphne placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘You shout if you need anything else, okay?’
Rose nodded. ‘Thanks, Daphne,’ and watched her head back to the counter. She faced the screen again.
Right.
Aaron Pohenz said the Rag Man left the town of Blue Valley, then known as Pelorsky’s Farm, in the spring of 1857. He left on foot. If he headed north-west, then Fort Casey was only a week or so away.
So . . . from perhaps February 1857 onwards?
She typed a broad window of time into the date fields; February of that year to February of the next.
But what am I looking for?
She typed ‘Rag Man’ into the word search, hoping for an early hit. The DVD drive whirred but the search threw up nothing. Which was what she expected. The Rag Man was a Blue Valley myth - unknown here.
She decided to think things through from another angle. A paper like this, a town like this back then, would have focused its attention on the people passing through; the overlanders coming from the east. That’s how news travelled back then, not over some twenty-four-hour news network, but from the mouths of travellers on their way through. Every new wagon train of people stopping to resupply, to repair damaged or weakened wheels, reshoe horses and oxen, would have a tale to tell of their journey, of any Indian encounters, of the latest news and fashions from Europe, the latest political manoeuvrings back in Washington.
She wondered if a lone traveller, no doubt still gaunt from a winter of malnutrition, a troubled man with little to say to anyone, would have attracted the curiosity of this small town.
A search for ‘loner’ produced an article about a local farmer who had decided to introduce sheep to graze on his land, arousing the anger of local cattlemen who viewed the creatures as un-American and had hounded the poor man out of town.
Perhaps the Rag Man had talked of his experience in the hills?
‘Survivor’ yielded a dozen eye-witness accounts of Indian raids, undoubtedly exaggerated to sound more heroic for the paper. Rose also stumbled upon a heartbreaking story of three small children dying of thirst and hunger and found clinging to the bodies of their parents. A whole party of seven wagons had been stranded on the salt flats of Utah after their horses had perished from drinking foul water. The children, two young sisters and a baby brother, were picked up by the passing emigrants, but died one by one over the following week.
‘Cursed’ spewed out hundreds of printed sermons from the town’s lay preacher, Duncan Hodgekiss, who it seemed spent more time admonishing the wicked and godless from the offices of the paper than he did from the pulpit of his church.
Rose bit her lip with frustration, suspecting the twenty-minute drive down the interstate from Blue Valley, and the last half-hour in the library, had turned out to be something of a wild goose chase. The odds of tracing a nameless man from a hundred and fifty years ago amongst the spurious tales printed in a local rag were long, to say the least. In all likelihood, this weakened, troubled man . . . this cursed man, most probably had died by the wayside traipsing north-west on foot.
She wondered if he had been one of the names she’d picked out of the journal: Keats, Preston, Weyland, Vander, Hussein . . . or perhaps even the author himself, Lambert? There was no telling. This survivor might have been one of them, or one of the other Mormon men.
Or nothing at all to do with the Preston party?
She indulged the thought for a moment and then dismissed it. The Rag Man had wandered out of the very same mountains in the spring of the following year. Given the remote location off the beaten track, it was unlikely the two events weren’t linked.
She sighed, frustrated. ‘Which one of them were you?’
Searching randomly with tag words was getting her nowhere. She noticed once a week there was a regular column in the paper entitled ‘What the Wind Blows In’. It was penned by the same author each time, one Theodore Feillebois, the paper’s editor. It was a gossipy column that catalogued the more interesting arrivals of the week. Rose decided to focus her attention on those.
She was into May editions when she finally hit upon something that stirred the fair hair on her forearms.
. . . came into town on the dawn like a ghostly phantom. This intrepid reporter, always the keen hunting dog for the exciting tales that can be told by these courageous citizens who have braved the elephant’s tail and the deadly Indian savage, I approached the man.
He was, I found, the most curious of passers-through that I have encountered in the service of this paper of ours. A tall, gaunt, silent man, with eyes that appeared to have seen things that this reporter would be unable to commit to paper for fear of frightening the fair ladies of
this town.
A pilgrim crossing this untamed continent of ours alone is either very brave or very foolish, and I have no doubt that he must have experienced much that would blanch the faces of even the brave troops who garrison our fort and protect our souls day and night.
When I asked him for the story of his crossing, the man’s response was a silence and an intense stare that I can only describe as haunted. I persisted in encouraging this man - whom I shall refer to hereon in as The Pilgrim, as I have no name for him, unwilling as he was to provide me with one - to tell me something of his adventurous crossing. But alas he declined.
He was dressed in ill-fitting clothes that appeared borrowed from another, better-nourished man, and with not a single possession in his hands. The Pilgrim, whoever he was, is a face this scribe will never forget.
When I asked this mysterious traveller where he was headed, his reply, dear reader, was one enigmatic word. A word that perhaps sums up the single-minded, dogged spirit and willpower of these brave, hardy folk.
He said to me, ‘Oregon.’
He then shuffled away from me, little more than a crow-scare in tattered clothes and not a single thing to call his own. I soon lost sight of him amongst the busy throng of traders and overlanders that fill our main thoroughfare on any given day of the week . . .
‘Oh my God,’ Rose whispered. ‘I think I’ve found him.’
CHAPTER 44
24 October, 1856
Preston turned to Vander. ‘You saw it?’
He nodded. ‘Yes I did, William.’
‘For all his dirty sins,’ he said, lowering his voice. Outside, Preston could hear the muted voices of his people. They were gathered around the men that had returned, hearing various versions of what had been discovered. Uneasy rumours would be spreading amongst them, the men scaring their wives, their wives terrifying their children.
He was relieved that only he and Eric from their party had gone inside and seen poor Saul’s body. To some degree, it was better that the awful things done to him were not common knowledge. As only he and Eric had seen, he could control what his people were allowed to know.
Preston clamped his lips tightly and swallowed. ‘Someone knows.’
Eric nodded, ashen faced. ‘My God! What if it’s not one of our people?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What if we’re being punished?’ Eric’s voice trembled. ‘What if He’s angry with us, William?’
‘What we did was His will. It was all wrong, his Church, all wrong. Our founder took something sacred and made a mockery of it. Joseph Smith should never have been led to it. It was right that he was killed. That, Eric, that was God’s anger right there.’
‘But we took them. They were not given to us!’
‘No . . . if the Lord hadn’t wished for me to take them, I would not have them with me now.’ Preston turned and nodded at the metal chest. ‘They’re here with me because He wishes that to be so. And Joseph Smith is dead, beaten to death by a mob, his church split amongst greedy rivals. Again, that would not be so unless the Lord wished it.’
Vander looked unconvinced.
‘We are the light, Eric. The good. Be certain of that. If this was not what God wanted, we would have known about it a long time ago.’
‘Then who killed Saul?’
‘Someone who knows.’
‘But who, other than Dorothy?’
Preston sat down heavily, wincing from the sharp tug on his bound wounds. He cast his mind back to the night before last.
Dorothy comes to me, enraged and heartbroken.
‘You took me in when I had no one,’ she cries. ‘I abandoned my faith for you.’
‘Dorothy, listen to me—’
‘I gave you my heart, my soul . . . my body. I gave you my children.’
‘Please, listen to—’
‘We trusted you. We trusted your message from God. You told lies, William. You told us lies! You led us away from God. You’ve led us here to this forsaken place . . . me, my children, and all the others.’
‘Why are you saying these things to me, Dorothy?’
‘Because in your sleep, it came out. The truth. One night after the next, fever made you tell the truth. Fever pushed the truth out of you, as it pushed sour liquid from your wounds. You and Saul and Eric, the three of you . . . are evil!’
‘Whatever I must have said was feverish nonsense.’
Dorothy shakes her head. ‘No, I . . . I’ve suspected some of these things before. Even punished myself for letting the Devil put doubts in my head. But you . . . you are doing what you claim our founder did - taking the words of God and making them your own!’
‘Dorothy!’
‘Your words . . . not God’s!’
‘William?’
Preston looked up at Eric. ‘Yes?’
‘If she knew, because of what she heard you say in your sleep . . . then who else might she have told?’
Preston shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the important question should be who else might have heard me.’
‘Only Saul, Dorothy and myself sat with you.’ Vander turned to look at him. ‘And that doctor, Lambert.’
Preston took a deep breath and nodded slowly. ‘Yes . . . yes, he was with me a few times.’
Vander’s eyes widened. ‘Do you think he might have done this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But he would not know of your work. Our Book.’
Preston considered that for a moment. He had seen Lambert become close to Dorothy’s children over the last few months, particularly Samuel. The lad might have shared with Lambert what their mission was. He might have explained the Book of New Instruction. He might even have shown him a copy. It was possible that Dorothy went to Lambert and told him everything she suspected. But he couldn’t imagine the man killing with such ferocity and anger. He couldn’t imagine Lambert carving those letters into Hearst’s skin with the tip of a knife.
Preston looked up at Vander. ‘I sent Saul to reason with Dorothy not to upset the others with her doubts.’
Vander nodded. ‘Maybe Saul went too far?’
Preston shook his head gravely. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Dorothy could have undone everything with her doubts and suspicions. He must have decided he had no choice.’
Preston sighed. ‘Might be that is so.’
‘Is it possible, William, that Lambert came upon them dead and found Saul there . . . ready to deal with Emily.’
‘And killed him in anger?’
Preston nodded. It was a possible scenario, but one he could only imagine if some greater presence was at work.
‘Eric,’ he said after a few moments, ‘it is quite possible that the Devil is acting through this man to get to us. To stop our work.’
Vander trembled with fear, or rage, or both. ‘The Devil is all around us, isn’t he? He’s in Lambert, the others in that group, the savages out there . . .’
‘Yes, that’s what I sense. We have in that chest what the Devil fears the most: God’s true message waiting to be heard for the first time. And we will make His words known, one way or another.’
‘We should kill Lambert.’
‘No. I’ll not have any more blood shed. I would never have sent Saul if I had known he was going to take a knife to them.’
‘Maybe that was God’s will?’
Preston sighed. ‘I don’t know. I need to rest, and pray. God will talk to me tonight. We shall discuss this further in the morning. ’
Vander nodded. ‘All right.’ He turned to go. ‘Will you take some broth, William? Mrs Lester is cooking some on the campfire. ’
‘I’m not hungry. I just need some rest for now.’
‘As you wish.’
Vander pushed aside the drape and stepped out, letting in the flickering glow of the nearby campfire. The cloth flapped back down, shutting out the light and leaving Preston in the gloom of a single guttering oil lamp.
He settled back on h
is cot and reached for the ceramic flask tucked behind it. He pulled the stopper out and sighed with relief. He could feel the onset of trembling, a cold sweat and light-headedness, but he knew these unfortunate symptoms would be washed away with this last dose of Lambert’s medicine.
He drank the bitter tonic.
I must ask Lambert for some more tomorrow.
‘She’s unchanged?’
‘Yes,’ whispered Mrs Zimmerman, ‘she’s as she was. Not spoken a word, nor moved at all.’
Ben knelt down beside her. She was curled into a foetal ball, her knees pulled up, her hands clasped together between them and her chin, her blue eyes lost, some place far away. There were still dark spots and smudges of dried blood in the creases of her skin that had resisted being sponged away. He wondered how many of those dark flakes of blood had come from her mother and Sam.
Her long blonde hair was still clotted and tangled, although the dress she had worn yesterday, stained appallingly with the Indian’s blood, had been replaced with another. Mrs Zimmerman had done her best to wash the dark spatters from her face, leaving it clean but ghostly white.
‘My husband told me you found the others?’
‘Yes.’ He looked at her, wondering how much her husband had told her - probably she knew of the graves, but nothing about Mr Hearst. Clearly Preston didn’t want the awful scene to be relayed to the others. It would spread a dangerous panic amongst them, and more than likely distrust and enmity would be misdirected at Broken Wing.
‘They were all dead,’ he replied.
‘Was it the savages, do you think?’
No, of course it wasn’t. Indians don’t bury the dead. Nor are they likely to read and write.
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. But that left him considering two very unsettling alternatives. Either it was something he couldn’t accept . . . something beyond science, something that belonged to a time of darkness and ignorance - something supernatural.
Or?
Or it was somebody from the camp.