Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston Read Free Book Online

distant.
    “We don’t need no part of your wagon, Reed. You can keep your boards.”
    He watches their team haul the wagon up and over the brow of the sandy slope, then shuts his eyes against the light, against the throb within.
    Patty says, “Does your head feel better, papa?”
    “Sit with me, girls,” he says. “Don’t nobody talk right now. Just sit here with me till my strength comes back.”

Law and Order
    W HEN GEORGE AND Jacob Donner and two other families pushed ahead, that left Jim in charge of the rear contingent. And who now will take his place? Something has to be decided. Everyone feels the need for a meeting, though no one announces it. They unhitch their animals. They slake their thirst. They tell their children to sit still and keep out of the way. One by one they move out from the wagons.
    It is still early afternoon. The sun is bright. The scorched terrain looks as if at any moment it could burst into flame. But the air is not so hot now as it was a few days back. They stand in the sun and look at one another, derailed by this turn of events, twenty people who have come so far together stand in the midst of a treeless desert, strangers again, more estranged than before they met, estranged and abandoned. The Donners are out of sight somewhere ahead of them, and behind them there is no one left on the long trail, no one between here and Fort Bridger, three hundred and fifty miles east. Each family wishes they had never seen the other, yet by this isolation and by this killing they are bound. They have all been wounded today, a little community of the wounded, who need some kind of atonement.
    The silence is broken by a heaving sob from Mary Graves. She stands behind her father, her pretty face bent with anguish.
    He says, “John Snyder was a mighty good man.”
    Grunts and nods encourage him to continue. His voice breaks, in part from grief, in part from fear of speaking. In Illinois Graves was an able farmer, the father of ten, good with his hands and a good provider, never one to speak out like this, but with the Donners gone, he is the elder here. He is nearly sixty, and since all his children travel with him, as well as the husbands of two older daughters, he presides over the largest clan.
    “I have lost a driver,” he says at last. “And a good friend. Mary here … she has lost … She is hardly twenty, and now she has lost more….”
    “It’s a crime against nature,” says his wife, Elizabeth, who stands close to the sobbing daughter.
    A burly fellow named William Eddy speaks up. “Did you see it happen?”
    “I see the life gone out of John’s body,” the mother says. “I see Jim Reed with blood running down his hand.”
    William Eddy asks again, “But did you see it happen?”
    “I saw it all,” says Uncle Billy, indignant, coming to his wife’s defense. “I was watching from the hill. I saw Jim pull out his Bowie knife and shove it in Johnny’s chest like he’d just been waiting for the chance to run him through.”
    Patrick Breen the Irishman speaks up, an ardent Catholic and another family man, with seven children in his party. “We can’t have a killing,” he says. “We can’t let one man kill another.”
    This starts heads nodding again.
    “A man who has killed another has to pay,” says Breen.
    “That’s right,” says Graves. “If you ask me, Jim Reed has it coming to him.”
    “He’s a willful and overbearing man,” says Elizabeth Graves. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be stuck out here.”
    A dozen voices swell in loud agreement, the loudest among them that of Lewis Keseberg who stands with his hands on his hips and his hat shoved back. His blond hair is matted across his brow.
    “In Independence,” he says, “I saw a man kill another man in a bar with a knife. And the very next day they hung him.”
    Patrick Breen says, “I heard about that fight.”
    Uncle Billy likes this idea. “An eye for an eye,” he says.
    Keseberg smiles with