Crossing Purgatory Read Online Free Page B

walk without falling into the trance of despair. For a night, sometimes, sleep came without visitation from the army of bones beating their muffled drums.
    Although settlement thinned, traffic on the road increased. Thompson encountered growing numbers of emigrants striking for the western territories, small groups driving wagons drawn by oxen and mules. The traces, trails, and highways of the east converged at the bank of the Missouri on the border of Kansas Territory. He went by ferry into Westport the evening of July 2nd, passing through the city only because there existed no convenient detour. He did not stop, did not tarry, but hurried though a town that seemed constructed solely for commerce. Near the landing a tangle of ramshackle plank dwellings provided housing, he imagined, for the dockworkers, a cock-fighting pit and several taverns their entertainment. Above the landing, on either side of Westport Road, mercantile shops offered a dizzying array of goods to outfit the emigrants. Through glass display windows Thompson inventoried bolts of calico and flannel; kits of mackerel and dried codfish; coffee beans in hundredweight sacks; camp kettles of Russian iron; kegs of brandy; hardware, tools, rope and tackle. The household goods reminded him of his own home left behind, his family, his Rachel and Matthew and Daniel, and a wave of grief like a sudden nausea washed over him. He slumped against a hitching post until it passed, and then pushed on.
    At town center, he stopped to fill his water skin at the community well. The water—clean-tasting, cool, and free of tang—refreshed him. He watched a merchant bargain with two aboriginals over a stack of pelts. The Indians were unlike any Thompson had encountered in the East. Taller, with long-muscled lines and skin more darkened by the sun. The strange ritual of trade, hands gesturing in pantomime, facial contortions, a few guttural syllables, were unintelligible to him, but obviously conveyed meaning for the participants. He left them haggling and on his way out of town passed a group of four Mexicans wearing wide cloth hats and colorful sashes. They played cards, laughing and talking in a melodic tongue, full of rolling consonants and soft vowels. Their skin was dark as some of the Reverend’s field hands, and it occurred to Thompson that he was about to enter a territory populated by natives so attuned to their surroundings that they took on its shading.
    Thompson followed the Westport Road past fenced corrals holding mules, oxen, horses, and a few sheep. The day was growing short but he wanted quit of the town before stopping. Toward evening he came across a large assemblage camped on open pasture that held good grass and a clear spring running through it. Livestock grazed, some picketed, some free-ranging. Smoke from scores of cook fires drifted above the pasture in a thin shelf of haze. The wagons appeared themselves almost living things with their long wooden tongues lowered to the ground and with canvas stretched over their arched ribs. Osnaburg-hided animals resting alongside the oxen and mules. The company appeared divided into two groups, a large congregation of sixty or so wagons and, to the near side of the meadow, a much smaller grouping of twelve to fifteen.
    Thompson walked into the clearing, and to avoid concern, made himself seen to three men coming in from the animals. He raised a hand in greeting, although he did not stop to engage them. Instead, he retreated to the tree line, cleared a small patch of ground and built a fire. In his tin cup he cooked cornmeal mush. Just before sunset a man approached from the smaller gathering of wagons. He threw a long shadow as he walked across the grass. Thompson judged the man almost as tall as himself and heavier through the chest and shoulders. He wore buckskin pants, a dark shirt, black boots, and a hat with a large, flat brim. Thompson set his cup on the ground beside the fire and stood to meet