The Way West Read Free Page B

hands."
   They had another drink -all except Tadlock and Fairman and then Evans went and untied his mule. Riding home, he told himself he had let the whisky talk, but still he wondered what he would do and still didn't wonder, either. It was as if the course had been set all along, and he had been playing that it wasn't, acting like he could say yes or no. He would go if Dick wwent, and, maybe, by hell, he would anyway. Free men, brave men in a great, new nation. A new way of things. Soil good. Hunting good. Climate good. No fever. Hurrah for Oregon! He wouldn't figure too much why it was he went. The head got tired, figuring. He would just go because he wanted to, for all sorts of reasons. He would go if he felt the same as now after the fire died in him.
   He unsaddled the mule and turned it loose and made for the cabin, remembering of a sudden that he hadn't eaten and was hungry. The sun was sliding down the western sky, showing through the tail of a cloud. Likely it would be fair tomorrow and he would have to dig and grub and split and bend and lift and jolt as if his life depended on it, which it did. A man didn't make history, staying close to home.
   Old Rock welcomed him, as if asking what was up, and he opened the door and saw Rebecca stooping at the fireplace. "Get your breeches on, Becky," he called out. "We're goin' to Oregon
 

    Chapter Two
    AFTER EVANS had left the store, the others drifted away. Tadlock announced he had business to attend to at the Noland House, and McBee guessed he'd go see what it was his woman wanted, and Mack excused himself by saying he was figuring on buying some cattle.
   As they walked out the door, leaving Hitchcock staring moodily after them, Tadlock halted and watched Evans riding away on his mule. "There's a man I'd like to have in my company," he said.
It was what Charles Fairman had been thinking. He liked this big man with the easygoing manner, liked the signs of good humor in the broad and fleshy face, the indications of physical competence in the stout hands and big frame. He was, Fairman thought a little enviously, what a man should be who contemplated a long, hard, dangerous trip. He gave promise of being a better companion than Tadlock, who would be officious, or than Mack, who would be difficult to know, or than McBee, the poor white.
   "My bet is that Evans will come along, after that sermon you preached him," Mack said to Tadlock.
   "It was the God's truth."
   "God's truth on Tadlock's tongue," Mack said, smiling, and settled his hat on his head and began to walk away.
   Fairman signaled a goodbye and set off for what he called home. It was two rooms in a ramshackle house, but better, at that, than a tent. He doubted that Tod could have survived in a tent, the way the fever raged in him. He had to have shelter and care- but more than anything he had to have the high, dry air, such as people said you found in the valley of the high Platte, in the mountains, in Oregon, where there was no fever at all.
   Looking around him, seeing the cabins breasting into the mud, feeling the wetness in the air in spite of the high-riding sun, Fairman wished they could start at once. Independence was as miasmal as the lowlands of Kentucky. Sometimes he wondered why his father had left Virginia, to travel through the Gap to the canebrakes of Kentucky and, by stages, to the Ohio. Virginia was healthier country. At any rate his father had admitted as much in his later days, when the push of adventure had died in him and old, remembered things filled his mind. People didn't yawn and stretch there, he said, and stand slumped as if they couldn't move.
   As Fairman approached, the woman of the house opened the door and with a split broom fanned out the dirt she had swept tip. As always, the tip of her nose was red from cooking. "Oh, it's you," she said, stopping her sweeping and letting her arms hang loose from her hold on the broom handle. "They was a man