Outside, the holy hallooing was winding down. I knowed that meant I’d have to go, and that’s what the young girl whispered, touching my hand with her bound ones and fairly melting my bones. “My father will be coming back now and he is a mighty hard man.” But I couldn’t move. I was desperate for something, but I didn’t know what.
“If I pin my white hair ribbon on the back flap, it means it’s safe for you to stop by,” she whispered. She bent forwards and kissed me on the cheek, damping it with her tears. It warn’t much but it was something never happened to me before. “Now hurry! Here he comes!”
I didn’t know where I was, but I knowed I had to be somewheres else. I slipped out the back, scrouched down for a second betwixt the big wagon wheels, then scaddled over to Jim’s chuck wagon and crept inside. I laid down behind the chuck box in all the gear I’d stowed there, touching my cheek where her wet lips had been and feeling marvelous sick, till the others found me. Love. I knowed then what it was and knowed I was most ruined by it.
CHAPTER X
FTER THAT SMACK, all I could think about was that pretty girl and her plan for us to run off together from her monster father. I passed back and forth behind her wagon, my eyes peeled for the hair ribbon. I didn’t even know her name, but I couldn’t think who to ask without drawing trouble down on the both of us. I tried to recollect what Tom said about distressid damzuls and what you was directed to do when one landed on you. I judged it probably warn’t the properest thing to squeeze them, but I didn’t want to do nothing else. Such thoughts was making me feel dreadful restless and uncomfortable, but whenever I rode out to ca’m myself, I rode straight back in again and went a-looking for the ribbon, aching all over.
I done what all I was hired on to do, pushing their wagons off in the right direction each morning, guiding them and scouting and hunting for them by day, and then helping them set their wagons at night to circle round their livestock. Whilst they was into their nightly religious rollabouts, old Jim yelping away amongst them, I unyoked and scrubbed down their oxes and done the same for Jackson. But it was like some other body was a-doing it all. People asked me questions and I couldn’t think what they was asking.
For the first time ever, I wanted that money Judge Thatcher was holding for me so’s I could buy the girl away from her pap and the Mormons like the reverend and his missus bought Jim. I was mighty grateful to that lady for saving me from them soldier boys, and whenever I passed her wagon I bowed my head and touched my hat brim, but if ever I sneaked towards the back of the girl’s wagon to spy around, I knowed that old lady’s eyes was on me, and could judge what was laying on my mind.
Jim was watching me, too, but like a friend watches a friend, and I reckoned he was a body I could talk to, so one night when we was having our usual gabble under the stars like we always used to done, I asked him if he was ever in love, and he says, “Sho. Mos’ all de time.”
“Did you ever get in trouble?”
“Awluz tried to.” He grinned his grin, then he closed up and shrugged. “But, praise Jesus, not de kiner trouble dat you is in, chile.”
I heard him and I didn’t hear him. I didn’t have no time for it. I had to go see if that white hair ribbon was on the back of her wagon. It still warn’t. I’d begun to s’pose she’d forgot me. And then one night, there it was, pinned to the drop curtain at the back of her covered wagon. It most made me jump. I’d been wandering the circled wagons, thinking about her and practicing what I’d say when I seen her again if ever I did, but I disremembered everything with that ribbon blazing up the night. Her little roped hands poked through the flap like a puppet’s, one finger beckoning. When I drawed nigh, I could hear her pap snoring. She didn’t show herself, but whispered behind the flap that we couldn’t wait till Fort Laramie to run off because her father had learnt about some Mormon traders up ahead who steal babies and buy young girls to use for wicked purposes. “Oh sir, I’m so afraid!”