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Settlers' Hope

By Kathleen D. Bailey

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1

January 1847
Hall's Mill, The Oregon Country
In his career, Pace Williams had confronted Mexican bandits, wagon train mutinies, white men's pistols, red men's tomahawks, and a man in the Canadian lumber camp who had gone berserk and charged the entire company with an axe. But he'd never been pushed into a water trough by a woman with a perfect face and eyes the color of a mountain stream.
He struggled to his feet, shaking himself like a dog. The water was cold enough. At least it wasn’t raining, the rain that dripped or pounded its way through every day of an Oregon Country winter.
This woman knew how to get a man's attention, he'd give her that. Although there must be easier ways.
His best friend, Michael Moriarty, clambered out of the trough, with his wife, Caroline, clinging to him as though she could lift two hundred pounds of muscled Irishman. Mike looked as sorry as Pace felt, with his denims and plaid shirt sticking to him. Their friends' and neighbors' laughter didn't help any.
Mike leveled a glare at them before focusing it on the newcomer.
“Moriarty, who is she?” someone from the crowd called out.
“She's Oona Cathleen Moriarty, my sister. And she's supposed to be in a convent in Dublin, not pushing me into horses' troughs.”
The woman matched him, scowl for scowl. “After what you did to me, 'tis a blessing I didn't drown you. Putting me in a convent? Could not even you have thought of something better?” Her voice was melodious with Mike's Irish lilt, sweeter than her words or her expression.
She looked like a scarecrow in a wool coat with a button missing, stall-mucking boots, and a man's shapeless felt hat. But the face under the hat was the best one Pace had seen in a while. An oval face, with full red lips, skin like fresh cream, and big eyes with long dark lashes.
And angry. Very angry.
Mike crossed his soggy arms. “How did you get here?”
“Steerage ship, wagon train, freighter.” Oona Moriarty ticked them off on her fingers. “And a few interesting conveyances in between. I hitched one ride with a man who was driving a hearse. An empty one—he was delivering it to a funeral parlor,” she clarified.
She was playing the crowd, and they loved it. Whatever she’d been, whatever she’d become, she was still a Moriarty, this performance marking her more than the blue eyes and black hair. Mike always loved an audience, even in the darkest of times.
Mike shivered as he stared at her.
“Maybe we should get you into some dry clothes,” Caroline murmured, her gaze locked on this unexpected sister-in-law as if Oona would burst into flames.
But their friend, Jenny Thatcher, took charge. “Michael, go home, get into some dry duds. I’ll take your sister back to the hotel and find her something to eat.” Jenny always knew what was best for everyone and wasn’t shy about showing it.
The townspeople continued to point, to chuckle. It’d be nice if they all went home, but Pace knew his neighbors. That was too much to ask.
Every person who could walk, or be carried, was in the village today to watch the freighters from the east roll in. They were wagons like the “prairie schooners” that had brought most of Hall's Mill west, but larger and without the canvas roofs. These wagons bulged with crates, barrels, and indefinable shapes, all lashed together with stout ropes. Teams of oxen pulled the wagons, and huge, weary-looking men trudged beside them, goads at the ready. Teamsterin'. One of the few legal things Pace hadn't done.
Pace's glance passed over a pigtailed Chinese man, a smattering of Injuns. The settlement’s only black family stood a little apart as they always did.
The faces differed in color, but had one thing in common. None of them were old. Any elderly had been weeded out on the sixth-month overland journey, or had sense enough not to come in the first place. The West was young people’s country.
It wasn’t raining. But the air was still damp, mixed with the odor of smoke struggling from the poorly ventilated shacks and the heady smell of new-cut lumber from the mill. And the mud churned up by the teamsters’ wheels.
A shiver ran through Pace.
A logger from one of the camps slapped him on the back. “You all right, Mr. Williams?”
“Yeah, Owens. Thanks.”
People liked him here. Might be a good place to put down roots, if only he'd had roots. If anyone had the skills to wrest a living from these green forests, this rich land, Pace did. He had farmed, ranched, logged, and worked on the docks of a seaport city. And he'd led wagonloads of starry-eyed fools from the States to here. Make a living in the Oregon Territory? Child's play.
Would it be today? Would these wagons bring direction for the next step of his journey? Did he want them to? Pace was thirty. He’d been on the run for nineteen years. Maybe the trip would end here, at the edge of the known world. He was tired of running, tired of checking every wagon train for their faces. The prison term was up this year. Yeah, he’d kept count. What would they look like now? Old. Mean. The meanness that had been as much a part of them as breathing. The kind of meanness a body didn’t outgrow, didn’t have beaten out of them.
Nobody came to Hall’s Mill without a reason. Few people even knew it existed. They’d never track him here. Would they?
Well, he couldn’t stand around all day. He had a run to make. But first he had to find some dry clothes. And second—he mentally rubbed his hands together—he had words to have with Mike's sister.

****

Oona allowed the one called Jenny to shepherd her toward a single-story building that Jenny assured her was a hotel. The building looked like the doll houses she and her sister Orla used to make out of packing crates. She'd take Jenny's word for it. Nothing in Hall's Mill looked as though it was built to last, but it didn't matter. She wouldn't be here long enough to find out.
Could she pull it off? This trip had taken everything Oona had, financially, emotionally, physically.
And Michael was married. Well, that was a complication, but nothing she couldn’t handle. She’d spent three, no, four years planning for this, and a lifetime before that sharpening her wits against five brothers and three sisters. She could manage Michael.
How could Michael live in a place like this? Worse than she’d expected, worse than the other pilgrims had told her, with its one street of mud and the ramshackle buildings, with the rain that broke for maybe an hour a day. Was this why the people on the wagon trains sold their farms and businesses, said good-bye to loved ones forever? This was their Promised Land?
Some parts of it could be tolerable. She peered over her shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of the tall man she'd dunked along with Michael. Teach him to laugh at her.
He was good-looking enough, but she had no intention of getting mixed up with some cowboy. Not with the job she had to do. Get what she came for, that's what she'd do, and leave this raw and dirty place behind. Shake off the dust from her feet.
Or the mud.

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