Shortgrass Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

west.
    â€œBut … Does she speak English?”
    â€œShe does not speak. The Comanche cut her tongue out. She knows the hand signs. She will teach you some. Go, hurry. Your wagon goes like the wind pushes it. It goes like a cloud without you.” He blew through the harmonica again.
    Buster nodded, forced a smile, and ran after his milk wagon, feeling most uncomfortable about his trade. He hoped Ab Holcomb would know what to do with the former Comanche slave.
    â€œWhy did you give Snake Woman to Buffalo Head?” Kicking Dog asked as the black man ran away. “I have told you many times to trade her to me.”
    â€œI had nothing else to give to him. I would not trade him a horse for what he gave me. A horse makes better music than this harp. A horse would have been a bad trade.”
    â€œYou could have given him one of your robes. We will kill some more buffalo soon, and you could have a new robe.”
    â€œI like the robes I have now. I have slept on them enough with my wife and now they feel just right. But you are not old enough to know about that.”
    They watched the wagon become a speck in the west.
    â€œI would like to drive a wagon,” Long Fingers said. “It is a good way to move things. Maybe so I will trade for one.”
    Kicking Dog scoffed and tossed a fur-wrapped braid over his shoulder. “My lodge poles are my wagons.”

FOUR
    Ella Holcomb put the bucket of water down at the door of the dugout and sat on a three-legged stool to rest. She would have to catch her breath before she carried the burden up the steepest part of the cutbank.
    She had her homesite chosen above, and Ab had promised to build her a cabin after he planted. She had already started her flower garden near the site. She meant to make sure the lily and tulip bulbs got enough water to take root.
    She turned her ear to the door of the dugout but heard no sounds from Caleb. She figured he must have cried himself to sleep after his near-fatal fall from the roof. She decided to let the poor little thing rest.
    Ella would have enjoyed a rest herself. But the flowers needed water, and no one would carry the bucket if she didn’t. Ab was too busy breaking ground, while Matthew and Pete were trying to keep the cows together out on the plains. She stood, hefted the bucket, and scrambled up the cutbank, sloshing water.
    As she poured the water, her eyes swept the plains for signs of her boys, or the cattle, or Indians. She saw only Ab, breaking virgin ground behind the oxen. He had given up everything he loved because of her and she knew it. Yet she wondered sometimes why she had married him. She took a broad view of the world—its cultures and its peoples. Ab saw only that which passed under his heels.
    Poor Ab missed his farm in Pennsylvania. He missed his frame house and his toolshed and his forge. He missed his rail fences and his neighbors and his church. The only things he didn’t miss were the roots that snagged his plowshares as he turned the soil over. There were no roots on the plains except for grass roots. There were no trees to clear, no stumps to pull. But this rootlessness was virtually the only advantage he saw to living in the West.
    There was plenty of excitement in the wilderness, what with wolves killing his calves, and Indians visiting his dugout, and rough characters malingering about from time to time. But what did he need with excitement? He had left plenty of that back in Pennsylvania, harboring the runaways the Underground Railroad sent north, hiding them from slave hunters, moving them on midnight runs to the freedom boats waiting on Lake Erie. Even that excitement was more of Ella’s doing than his own.
    Only once in his life had Ab truly sought adventure, and that was as a young fool who joined the army to fight in the Mexican war. He hadn’t intended to go to war until he made a trip to Washington, D.C., and fell under the influence of Captain Samuel H.