Dream West by David Nevin

Author:David Nevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

PARTING

The last morning came quickly as in a dream. It seemed impossible, but here the men were lining up in the final departure camp on Boone Creek to tell her good-bye. She had come up to Westport with them; she and Charles had stayed with Major Cummins and his wife at the Delaware Indian Agency. Charles had reclaimed Sacramento from a year’s pasturage in Westport and was busy assembling the last of the livestock and supplies. Each morning she had accompanied him over to Boone Creek. The men had treated her like some rare ornament.

They were thirty-five strong, mostly Charles’ old men, Godey and massive Raffie Proue, and young Henry King, who’d married a girl in Georgetown just before they left Washington and worked every conversation with Jessie around to his bride. Most of them had been on the Third Expedition, a few on the Second—and Raffie had been on them all.

“I wish Louie were with us,” she had told Proue softly, and he’d looked pleased, as if due had been given, and said, “Yes’m, I know…” but they hadn’t spoken of it again.

Ned Kern, now a veteran, had brought his brother, a Philadelphia physician. On her first day in camp he’d sketched her portrait and handed it to her with a flourish, and she’d seen that he had made her very beautiful.

It had been a happy time there on Boone Creek. Two of the party were French voyageurs, survivors of a dying breed. Antoine Morin and Vincent Tabeau, called Sorrel for hair that once had been red, had given her reassurance. Years of experience and hard times lay behind them; nothing could go wrong with such men. She chatted with them in French, which had moved even old Sorrel to a smile and a quick, oblique compliment.

And there was Captain Andrew Cathcart, one of those whipcord Englishmen with a fine education and a taste for action, who had just given up a commission in Prince Albert’s Own Hussars and come to America for a bit of adventure. He was a Scotsman, actually, one of the Cathcarts of Carleton, and he’d charmed her with his tales of growing up in Killochan Castle. He had come over in the spring with that dashing British adventurer George Frederick Ruxton, who’d written so nobly of the West. What Jessie hadn’t known was that only two months before, Ruxton had died of dysentery in a Planter’s House room at the age of twenty-seven while Cathcart bathed his face. Cathcart had buried Ruxton in St. Louis, and signed on with the expedition, anxious for his own taste of the West.

Alex Godey built a lean-to and dug a fire pit where he roasted the quail the young hunter, John Scott, brought down with his scattergun. She knew that she would never think of quail without remembering Boone Creek and the lean-to and Godey’s silky hair. It was the first thing she’d noticed about him, falling to his shoulders, black and shiny, and impulsively she’d said: “Why,

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