Fortune's Journey by Bruce Coville

Author:Bruce Coville
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781497668560
Publisher: Open Road Media

Chapter Twelve

The journey continued. As they traveled farther west, away from all that Fortune had known, she began to feel both lonely and more free. Though she missed the world she had grown up in, at the same time she—and, she could sense, many other females in the train as well—began to shed some of the strictures that tied women down back East, the things that said, “This a woman must do; this she must not.”

Not that she had paid as much attention to those rules as most women anyway; a life in the theater had already set her on the outskirts of polite society. But on a trip like this, survival came before “must” and “must not,” and she felt the other women in the train begin to accept her and Mrs. Watson in a way she was not used to.

Some days the train made fifteen or twenty miles. Others they spent from sunrise to sunset simply trying to get all the wagons across a river.

Twice they had to cross long stretches that held no water at all. These were dangerous passages, and many of the animals did not survive the second one. Fortune herself was nearly delirious with thirst by the time they reached the shallow river they had been aiming for. They had to filter the dark, muddy water through a cloth before they could drink it. Brown and slightly acrid, it was still the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.

Though their fellow travelers had seemed somewhat wary of the actors when the journey started, shared adversity began to break down those barriers. The troupe made friends with others in the train, Becky Hyatt’s family in particular.

Fortune even came to have a grudging respect for Abner Simpson—not only for his knowledge of the trail, but also for his ability to spin out tall tales, a skill that made him in some ways like a one-man theater.

By the time they had crossed the prairie and entered the mountains, two of the women in the wagon train had given birth. Alas, one of the babies had died after less than a day. Its grave joined the hundreds of others that lined the trail, and the parents said nothing more about it.

Some days they had passed as many as fifteen or twenty such graves, most of them marked by simple wooden crosses. The majority of them, according to Mr. Hyatt, were victims of cholera, which occasionally swept through a wagon train with terrible suddenness, wiping out travelers by the dozen.

Fortune heard much talk of the disease—more than she cared to, really—and by the time they came upon a lone child whose family had been cut down by it, she knew that the cholera’s onset was swift and vicious; that vomiting and diarrhea robbed the body of fluid, making dehydration a great danger; that of those who contracted it, far more died than recovered.

The child, a little girl of about six, was half dead with weeping herself. She was taken in by the family that had lost their boy in the wagon accident near the beginning of the journey.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.