"Plenty of danger, ma'am," Father Villy said.

9 AFTER our meeting with the Bad Faces, Ma let all of us know that she was not going to tolerate any lollygagging or needless delays in our trip to find Pa. The Bad Faces had impressed her, but they didn't fool her.

They could have killed us easy--it was just our luck that all Red Cloud wanted to do was make a speech.

It was Ma's frustration that the country we were moving through just wasn't made for hurry. The harder we tried to pour on the speed, the more the country seemed to work against us. One night four of our mules slipped their hobbles--it took Charlie half a day to track them and bring them back.

Then it rained for three straight days. All the way we had hugged the Platte River, to be sure of water, but lack of water ceased to be our problem: too much water was our problem. Every little trickle of a creek became a river; ground that had been hard as flint became mud. If we had not had four strong mules we would never have got the wagon out of some of the mud holes it sank into. At least there were trees here and there again, so we could enjoy a good wood fire at night.

When we first saw the mountains way up ahead, after such a stretch of time on the plains, we didn't really know what we were seeing. The minute the first mountains appeared G.T. wanted to run on and climb one--he had to be persuaded that they were still forty miles away.

Ma was often vexed by the rain and the mud, but she never wavered; she drove the wagon all day, refusing to let anyone spell her--at least, she did until we finally came to Laramie Fork--with the fort at last in sight--and faced a regular flood of water, moving too fast for even a strong mule team to try and struggle through.

"Damn the luck," Uncle Seth said. "We could all sleep warm and dry in Fort Laramie tonight if this little creek wasn't up.

"Most of the time a man can jump this creek-- but now look!" he added.

"I see a washtub," G.T. said, pointing into the froth of the water. "Here comes the washboard, too."

"Well, grab it, somebody," Ma said. "We can always use an extra washtub."

The fact was, the little river seemed to be floating lots of goods right past us.

"It's a regular store," Ma said. "Grab that rolling pin."

"That wagon train probably tried to cross up stream," Father Villy said. "Somebody's wagon turned over."

At Ma's urging, me and G.T. partly stripped off and got in the water, which was so cold it turned us numb in a minute. I did manage to grab the wash-tub, though, and G.T. caught the washboard. Charlie reached in and 90

snagged a pitchfork without even getting wet. When G.T. and I finally got out of the water our teeth were chattering like bones.

"So what do we do now, Seth?" Ma asked.

"We do the thing you hate most: wait," Uncle Seth said. "We'll wait for the water to go down."

"When do you expect it to fall?" Ma asked.

"I can't predict," he said. "Maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. What do you think, Charlie?"

"Tomorrow," Charlie said. "Unless it rains more."

"I can't wait that long," Ma said. "We've been traveling all this time to get to Fort Laramie, and there it is. This is not deep water. I believe I can get through it if I push hard."

We could all see that Uncle Seth was nearly to the point of losing his temper with Ma. The big vein on his nose was wiggling like a worm.

"It ain't how deep it is, it's how fast it's flowing, Mary Margaret," he said. "It might push this wagon right over, and then you and the baby and everything else we own will just float away."

It was clear that Ma didn't believe him. She still had the reins in her hand, and it seemed that any minute she might defy his advice and take the plunge.

Uncle Seth was so vexed by her stubbornness that it looked for a minute like he meant to jump up on the wagon seat and grab the reins from her before she could pop the mules. Ma had something in her--something terrible--that just wouldn't be stopped--not by Pa or Uncle Seth or argument or a raging river or anything else; but this time, before it came to a crisis between the two of them, there was a commotion upstream.

"Look, Arapaho," Father Villy said. While we had been dragging washtubs out of the creek what seemed like a whole Indian village had arrived upstream. It was the howling of all their dogs that we finally heard, over the sound of the water. The roaring creek that had stopped us made no impression on the Arapaho: the water was just boiling with them. The women had long poles attached to their horses, with baskets of some kind hung between them.

"I want to see this," Ma said, turning the wagon. We all went up to watch--a stretch of the river was just full of dogs and horses and Indians. Some of the dogs even had skinny little poles attached to them, with smaller baskets between their poles. The large baskets, the ones the horses were pulling, had babies in them, and puppies, and here and there an old man or an old woman, sitting as high in the baskets and bundles as they could get, but not high enough to keep them out of the water. Soon babies were screeching and spluttering at the shock of the icy water.

Puppies were whining, dogs howling, horses whinnying; but the Indian women were mainly quiet. Once I saw a baby pop out of its basket but its mother just reached back and plucked it out of the water. She settled it back in its basket as if it had been a puppy.

91

The dogs were having the hardest time making the crossing, especially those with the drag poles attached to them. The current carried some of the dogs down abreast of us, but the dogs kept struggling and all of them finally reached shore.

"It's only women--where are the men?" Ma asked.

"Oh, the men are most likely already at Fort Laramie, loafing," Uncle Seth said. "If not, they might be hunting, or making a little war, somewhere. They wouldn't concern themselves with a little thing like getting their wives and babies through a flood."

So far as I could tell the Indians didn't lose a baby, or an old person, or even a dog, in crossing the raging stream. This fact was not lost on Ma.

"Well, if their menfolk ain't concerned I don't guess you need to be either, Seth," Ma said, and she immediately put our wagon in the water right behind the last of the Indian women. Just before she hit the river Uncle Seth jumped on Sally and grabbed Marcy out of the wagon--he didn't want to risk having her pop out like the Indian baby had.

"Let's go, boys--there's no stopping her!" he said.

Ma had hitched two mules to the wagon, which left G.T. and I each a mule.

Neva was up on the wagon seat, beside Ma--Father Villy and Charlie Seven Days just had to wade it. Ma had crossed quite a few creeks by this time, and knew how to urge on the mules. Soon she was in midstream and doing fine. The only trouble came when one of the last of the Indian dogs took a dislike to Little Nicky and came swimming back to snarl and nip at him.

Little Nicky didn't appreciate this attention--he tried to paw the dog, which, for a moment, threatened to tip the wagon. Uncle Seth was too far back to help. What saved the situation was an Indian woman, who saw Ma's predicament and turned back to help her. She grabbed the snarly dog by its scruff and pulled him off. It looked for a minute or two that the mules might balk anyway, but Ma yelled at them and popped them hard with the reins, which convinced them that the better move would be to get out of the chilly water. The helpful Arapaho woman stayed right in front of them and guided them across. The dog soon escaped her, but he didn't bother Nicky again--he had enough to do just getting on across the creek.