Smoke Signals

Chapter 1: The Bargain

The white men's money felt strange in Jacob's palm—cold where wampum was warm, silent where shells would have whispered against each other. He counted the coins twice, not because he didn't trust the amount, but because his fingers needed time to accept what his mind had already decided.

"Twenty dollars now," the wagon master said, his voice carrying the flat certainty of a man who expected agreement. "Twenty more when we reach Fort Laramie. That's generous for a scout."

Jacob looked up from the coins. William Hartley was a large man, thick through the shoulders and belly both, with a beard the color of rusted iron. He stood in front of his lead wagon with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders, surveying Jacob the way a man might examine a horse he wasn't sure about purchasing.

"It is fair," Jacob said. He'd learned years ago that white men grew uncomfortable with silence, so he'd learned to fill it. "I know the land between here and the mountains. I know where the water runs sweet and where it runs bitter. I know which tribes will trade and which will fight."

"That's what Henderson said." Hartley jerked his chin toward the trading post behind them, where the old trader had made the introduction an hour earlier. "Said you're the best scout between the Missouri and the Rockies. Said your English is better than most white men's."

"Mr. Henderson is kind."

"He also said you're Pawnee." Hartley's eyes narrowed slightly. "Said your people have been fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne for generations."

"This is true."

"Then you'll know how to avoid them."

Jacob slipped the coins into the leather pouch at his belt. "I will know how to find them, Mr. Hartley. Avoiding them is a different skill. One that requires listening."

Hartley's expression flickered—annoyance, perhaps, or simply the discomfort of a man unused to being corrected. But he nodded once, sharply, and extended his hand. Jacob took it, feeling the calluses of a farmer or tradesman, not a frontiersman.

"We leave at dawn," Hartley said. "Twelve wagons, forty-three souls. Women and children among them. I expect you to keep them safe."

"I will do what I can, Mr. Hartley. The rest is in hands greater than mine."

He left the wagon master standing by his team and walked back through the small settlement that had grown up around Henderson's trading post. It wasn't much—a handful of rough buildings, a blacksmith's forge, a sad little saloon that served whiskey so raw it could strip paint. But it sat at the edge of the frontier, the last gasp of what white men called civilization before the great ocean of grass that rolled westward to the mountains.

Jacob had been coming here since he was fourteen, first with his father and then alone, trading furs and hides for the things his village needed. Cloth and needles. Iron pots. Gunpowder and lead. The things the Pawnee had once made for themselves or traded for with other tribes, before the world began to change.

Now he was twenty-three, and his father had been dead for two winters, killed by a fever that had swept through the village like fire through dry grass. His mother had survived that sickness only to fall ill again this past spring, her lungs filling with fluid that no medicine man's prayers could clear.

The white doctor at the fort wanted fifteen dollars for the medicine that might save her. Another ten for the iron tools the village needed—plows and hoes and axes—now that so many of their young men had left for the reservations or died in the wars that never seemed to end.

Forty dollars would buy his mother's life and his village's survival for another year. Forty dollars was what William Hartley had offered for six weeks of work.

Jacob had said yes before the wagon master finished speaking.

He found his horse where he'd left her, a spotted mare named Kira in the Pawnee tongue, which meant "dust" for the color of her coat. She nickered softly as he approached, and he ran his hand along her neck, feeling the warmth of her beneath his palm.

"We have work," he told her in his own language. "Hard work, but good pay. Mother will have her medicine. The village will have its tools. And then..." He trailed off, because he didn't know what came after. He never did, these days. The future had become a fog that grew thicker with each passing season.

He mounted and rode back toward the wagon camp, wanting to survey the people he'd be guiding before night fell. The wagons had circled in a meadow half a mile from the trading post, their white canvas covers glowing amber in the late afternoon light. Smoke rose from cooking fires, and the sound of children's laughter drifted across the grass.

Jacob circled the camp slowly, staying far enough away that he wouldn't alarm anyone but close enough to observe. Most of the travelers were families—farmers, by the look of them, with the weathered hands and patient eyes of people who understood that growth took time. There were a few single men, probably heading west to seek their fortunes in the goldfields or the timber camps. And there were two wagons that stood apart from the others, their occupants moving with the purposeful efficiency of people who had done this before.

One of these wagons drew his attention. It was smaller than the others, painted a faded blue that reminded him of summer sky, with a wooden sign hanging from its side that read "BOOKS" in careful letters. A woman stood beside it, hanging laundry on a line strung between the wagon and a nearby tree.

She was young—perhaps twenty, perhaps a few years more—with hair the color of autumn leaves and a face that seemed designed for smiling, though she wasn't smiling now. She moved with an economy of motion that suggested practicality rather than grace, her dress plain and serviceable, her sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms that had seen work.

As Jacob watched, she paused in her task and looked up, directly at him.

He expected her to flinch, to call out in alarm, to retreat to the safety of her wagon. White women usually did, when they saw a Pawnee watching them from horseback. But this woman simply looked at him for a long moment, her expression curious rather than frightened, and then she raised one hand in a small wave.

Jacob found himself raising his hand in return before he quite knew what he was doing.

The woman smiled then—a quick, bright thing that transformed her face—and turned back to her laundry. Jacob watched her for a moment longer, something stirring in his chest that he didn't have a name for, and then he nudged his horse forward and continued his circuit of the camp.

He had work to do. The wagon train would leave at dawn, and there was much to prepare.

But as he rode, he found his thoughts returning to that wave, that smile, that woman with the book wagon who hadn't been afraid.