The Crossed Sabres (10 page)

Everyone, including her family, agreed she was making a terrible mistake. The mission board felt the same, and it was apparent they were not going to support her. “A single woman can’t go to the mission field, Miss Jamison,” the chairman insisted. “It’s a world of men, and you’d be without protection.”

But to Faith’s surprise, Reverend Thomas had come to her rescue. He’d talked with her several times, and at the final meeting of the board had simply overpowered the rest of the members—including the chairman. “God has called Miss Jamison to take His gospel to the savages,” he’d said firmly. “I am convinced of it, and it will not do for our board to fight against God!”

So she had packed her clothing, her books, the small supply of tracts, and had ignored all pleas to remain. It had been difficult, especially parting from her mother, and Faith was able to leave her only because she would be going to live with Faith’s brother, Sherman, in Hannibal. He and his wife and three children had been begging her to move there. She
would be happy, Faith knew, for the love they all had for one another was beautiful. So, secure in that knowledge, Faith said goodbye without regrets.

Throughout the long afternoon she dozed off and on until the conductor tapped her on the shoulder. “Curtisville, miss. Time to get off.”

The train ground to a halt, and Faith stepped off. To her surprise, the town had no shape. It was simply a cluster of six or seven buildings scattered on the prairie at the eastern edge of Dakota. Now, at the day’s end, they looked gaunt and hard-angled in the fading light.

Faith was accustomed to crowds and buildings. This stark contrast, the utter emptiness, left her almost dizzy as she looked around. The town was set in a dusty space, buildings running outward in all directions, giving no indication where the earth ended and the sky began. There were no trees, no hills, nothing to relieve the eye; nothing but gray soil and patches of short brown grass turned crisp and now ready to fade when the winter frost touched it.

She stood on the platform—alone. Not only had nobody met the train, but the utter desolation of the place hit her with force as she faced the mute buildings where yellow lamplight shone faintly through the windows. Then she turned and saw a man and a small girl who had evidently gotten out of the rear car. He spoke to the child, and the two approached Faith. “I guess we’re all going over to the hotel,” he said. “If you’ll pick out your light luggage, I’ll come back for the rest later.”

“Thank you,” Faith said. He was tall and in his early thirties, she judged, with black hair and a wedge-shaped face. He wore a light brown suit, a white shirt, and a low-crowned brown hat with a broad brim. He moved lightly, picked up the suitcase she indicated, and led the way down a winding pathway toward the buildings.

It had been hot all day, but as darkness fell, the air grew brittle. Winter lay just over the hills, which would soon feel the touch of a killing frost, shriveling the grass in one night.

The hotel had one door and a set of windows. A single railroad tie served as the doorstep. The man opened the door and nodded to Faith, permitting her to enter first. A narrow hall and a steep stairway led to the second floor. The hotel keeper looked up, a man so fat he was spilling out of his clothes. “Together?” he asked in a raspy tenor voice.

“Two rooms,” the man said.

“You can take room eight,” he nodded to Faith. “And you can have room four,” he said to the man. “Sign here.” When she had signed, she was close enough to see the man’s writing: Thomas Winslow. He hesitated, then added: Richmond, Virginia. She saw him glance down at the register and knew that he was reading her name.

“Breakfast at four,” the clerk said indifferently. “The stage leaves at four-thirty.” He tossed a key to each of them, and sat down heavily, picking up a newspaper.

The three of them moved toward the stairs, and Winslow stepped aside to let Faith go first, then the girl. When Faith reached her room, she unlocked the door, and he entered with her luggage. “I’ll go get the rest.” He paused slightly, adding, “My name is Tom Winslow. This is my daughter, Laurie.”

“I’m Faith Jamison.” She smiled at the girl, whose solemn gray eyes watched her carefully. “I wish I knew how to make braids like yours, Laurie,” she said. “I could never learn to do it.”

The man grinned. “I’ll get your luggage.”

After they left, Faith wondered where his wife was and what he did for a living. He certainly had been kind to her. She stood by the window looking at the fading light. The sun soon dipped behind the horizon, clothing the land with a dark curtain. With it came the sense of aloneness, uncertainty. But God had sent her on this mission. She would trust Him. Bringing her thoughts back, she hurriedly washed the fine coating of dust and cinders from her face, brushed her hair, every stroke reminding her of the strain of the journey, and was ready when she heard the knock announcing Winslow’s
return with her baggage. “I brought your trunk and the rest of the bags to the hotel. I left them downstairs, unless you want some of it.” He hesitated, then asked, “Would you care to join Laurie and me for supper?”

“That would be nice.”

She accompanied the pair to the dining room, where they sat at a long table already occupied by four men, who were just finishing their meal and left with a nod to the new customers. The menu was sparse—eggs, steak, and apple pie. The steak was tough and the eggs hard. But they were all so hungry they devoured the food quickly. After the meal, Winslow drank coffee, while Faith and Laurie sipped at the warm milk.

Faith said, “I’ve never ridden on a stagecoach. I suppose it’s much rougher than the train?”

Laurie looked up, a mustache of white milk on her upper lip. “Sure is! It’ll wear your bottom out in a hurry if you ain’t used to it!”

Tom Winslow saw Faith flinch, and said gently, “Laurie, I don’t think it’s polite to mention a lady’s bottom in public.”

Laurie looked surprised. “Why not?”

“A rule somebody made up.”

The youngster’s obvious contempt for such foolishness made Faith smile. The relationship between the father and daughter was intriguing—more like adult to adult. The girl had obviously been brought up “by hand,” as Faith’s grandmother would have called it. She had an easy way with her father, not disrespectful, but open and frank. There was little about the girl that was feminine. Her clothing was obviously designed for a boy, and she had few feminine mannerisms that a young girl would ordinarily have.

“Guess we’ll get to bed,” Winslow said, rising to his feet. “Four o’clock is fairly early, and it’ll be a rough trip. Good-night, Miss Jamison.”

“Good-night.” Faith lingered for a time, but there was nothing to see, no one to talk to, so she soon retired to her
room. Stripping off her dusty clothing, she sponged off in the tepid water, put on the thinnest nightgown she had, and lay down on the lumpy mattress. Sleep came quickly, and it seemed as if she had only closed her eyes when a knock at the door startled her awake. “Breakfast in ten minutes!”

She dressed quickly and hurried downstairs. Winslow and Laurie were seated at the table, along with three men. She nodded to the pair, then ate the breakfast of bacon, hot cakes, fried potatoes, and bitter coffee—or tried to. The food was heavy and greasy, so she consumed very little. Winslow and his daughter had already finished and were outside by the waiting stage. When she emerged, Winslow said, “I put your luggage aboard.” Holding out his hand, he helped her into the coach, then nodded to the girl, who scrambled inside and sat down beside a window opposite Faith. Her father climbed aboard and sat beside Laurie; then the other three passengers, heeding a warning call from the driver, came out of the hotel and got inside, one of them beside Winslow and the other, a large man, on the seat with Faith. The third man, tall and lean, crawled up to sit with the driver.

The driver spoke to the horses, and the stage moved out of the yard with a lurch. They lumbered across the baked earth, turned sharply around the corner of the hotel, then picked up speed, the coach wheels lifting and dripping an acrid dust. The coach swayed and shuddered as it struck deeper depressions, shaking the passengers jammed together on the two seats. The rolling of the coach sent the huge man roughly against Faith. He grunted an apology, but the seat was so narrow, he couldn’t prevent the jostling.

The scenery at first was interesting to Faith, but as time dragged on, the day grew warm. The four horses went at a walk, at a run, at a walk, each change of pace producing its agreeable break and its new discomforts. By ten o’clock the dust had rolled inside the coach, laying its fine film on everything as the heat shot up. At noon the coach drew up before a small drab building in a yard littered with tin cans and empty
bottles. Faith got out of the coach slowly, stiff from the ride, and after a quick dinner, climbed back in with everyone else for the second half of the day’s journey.

The heavy man joined the driver and the other passenger this time, so Faith was a little more comfortable. “Would you like to sit with me, Laurie?” she asked the girl. “There’s a little more room here.”

“No thank you.” The answer was polite, but firm.
She won’t get too far away from her father,
Faith thought.
Those two are very close.

By late afternoon the heat was almost unbearable, the dust like a screen through which the passengers viewed one another. Their faces grew oil-slick, the mixture of sweat and dust making small rivulets down their dirty faces. The smell of the coach grew rank with the odors of bodies, and Faith grew faint from the discomfort.

At last the driver’s voice called out, “Whoa up!” and the stage stopped abruptly. The driver got down and called, “Night stop.” Faith let the others get out first, and was grateful for Winslow’s hand as she stepped down. Her legs, numb by now, betrayed her, and she fell against him as her feet touched the ground. For one moment she held him; then embarrassed, she stepped away.

This station was worse than the hotel where they’d stopped the previous night. Two-storied and square, it was hard for her to picture any structure more graceless. They walked into the long front room and were met by a taciturn man with three days’ growth of whiskers and a fetid smell. “Only got one room left,” he muttered.

Winslow stared at him, but Faith said, “Laurie, maybe you wouldn’t mind sharing it with me, just for one night.”

Laurie looked up at her father, who nodded. “Yes, ma’am, that’ll be fine.” Then she asked, “Where will you sleep, Daddy?”

“Curl up in the coach, I guess.”

They went up rickety stairs that moaned and creaked under
their weight. The room was the worst Faith had ever seen. The ceiling was thrown together with rough lumber whose edges never quite lay together. A single window with a green discolored roller shade provided the only ventilation. A small lamp and a wash basin and pitcher sat on a table made of fragments of wood. Above that a blemished mirror hung askew. The bed was a four-poster made of solid mahogany, strangely out of place in the rough room, and on it lay lumpy quilts and two pillows without slips.

Faith bent over to stare closely at the blankets, then peeled them back to study the mattress. “At least I don’t see any bedbugs,” she announced.

“A rough place,” Winslow muttered.

“Yes, but the only place. It’ll be all right for one night, won’t it, Laurie?”

“Guess so.”

“Laurie,” Winslow said, “you wash up and we’ll eat.”

Depressed by its ugliness, he left the room and walked outside. He found the pump, took off his shirt and shook the dust out of it, then plunged his head under the rush of cool water, savoring it as it sluiced over his chest and back. After washing up, he sat on the steps and watched as riders came in, tied their horses to the hitching rail, and entered the place. Something troubled him, and he went to the stage, climbed into the boot and found his valise. He removed a gun belt with a Navy .44 in a worn holster, fastened it around his waist, then moved back to the hotel.

When Faith came down the stairs with Laurie, she saw the gun, but made no comment. The dinner triangle set up a series of raucous hammering sounds, and they went into the dining room. At one of the tables three women were seated. Heavily made up and speaking shrilly, they uttered harsh, jarring laughter at the remarks from men at the table. Winslow pulled out a chair for Faith at the far end of a long table, placed Laurie next to her, then seated himself between them and the others.

The meal was brief, for the others at the table soon finished and moved out of the dining room into the saloon across the hall.

When the meal was finished, Faith asked, “Could we walk for a while?”

“Sure,” he nodded, and seemed relieved to get outside. The stars shone brightly, and a sickle moon, turned butter yellow by the haze in the air, lay low in the sky.

They walked far enough down the road so the sounds of the tinny piano and the raucous laughter from the saloon faded. The quiet flowed over the darkened desert, formless and mysterious.

“Do you live in the West?” Faith asked.

“Yes,” he answered, then added, “My home was in Virginia—but we’ve been out here for quite a while.”

“It’s new to me,” Faith murmured. Peering into the darkness, she said, “It’s a bigger world than I’m used to. Back home you can’t see for the buildings and the hills. Here, during the day, I think you must be able to see a hundred miles!”

He smiled in the moonlight. “Makes a person feel sort of small, doesn’t it?”

“Very small.” She looked up at the stars, adding, “They seem so close!”

As she watched, a falling star traced a silver line across the velvet blackness, and Winslow said, “Make a wish, Laurie.”

The girl looked up at him. “Will it really come true?”

“Well, I guess sometimes wishes come true—not too often.”

Faith realized he was teaching the girl something. Perhaps not to expect too much. Maybe not to trust in stars, but to lean on her own efforts. She thought of her own childhood, how she’d been at Laurie’s age, and felt a trace of pity for her.
She needs a woman. She seems sturdy, but I’ll bet she gets afraid at times.