Where Trails Run Out

By Anna Prince Redd

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Chapter 12

It was August 1884. Twilight fell and deepened the already sultry night.

“It is too hot to last!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “There will be a bad storm somewhere tonight, though I doubt if it will be here.”

The darkness that had fallen over the landscape was more than just a natural withdrawal of light. Elizabeth felt lonely and afraid, not of anything she could name, exactly, but of the things she couldn’t hear or see. And most of all, she was afraid of her thoughts. Afraid of the years ahead.

The air was unusually fragrant with ripening fruit, yet oppressive and ominously heavy. She looked at the sky. Not a star showed through the heavy clouds that were rolling up like billows.

“What a night for Indian devilment,” she said to herself. “I’m glad the children are all asleep and that Henry will soon be home.”

She was fascinated by the elemental fury that seemed to be held in check only because there was no reason for unleashing it. And when she heard the long, hollow cry that preceded the rumble of distant thunder, she showed no surprise. Rather, there was a profound interest. The cry was cavernous in its intensity, yet seemed to come from a long way off. it was the same weird warning that had come at Lost Spring, announcing the coming of the famished water scouts. The same mysterious, half-human, half-animal cry that she had waited so long to hear.

Henry came running from the river. “Bethy, are you there?” he cried. “Bethy!”

“What has happened, Henry?” Elizabeth asked, dazed by his sudden appearance, brought to reality by the excitement in his voice.

“I don’t’ know, Bethy! But listen!”

The long, hollow cry was repeated. Elizabeth, listening to it, sensitive to its least inflection, was shocked at the agitated warning it conveyed.

“Someone is running stealthily in the darkness!” Henry whispered.

‘Yes. The lamps are lighted at James’ store. Whoever it is is running in that direction!”

“I can’t see anything,” Henry confided. “If there is trouble James will need me. Bethy, you go inside and bolt the door.”

“I’m not afraid, Henry. do you remember hearing that strange cry ever before?”

Henry stopped, just as he had turned to go to James’ assistance. “Yes. Yes!” he cried, growing more excited. “It’s the same cry we heard at Lost Spring!”

“It’s a warning, Henry. I don’t think it is Indians. It’s something to do with this impending storm, or earthquake, or whatever it is that is shaping around us. It is a terrible force, Henry. Whatever it is we’ll be powerless against it!”

“Bolt the door, Bethy. And don’t make a sound. An Indian was killed at Mitchell’s ranch today, and I’m still fearful that there will be an uprising. The Indians are being badly treated by scheming white men and traders in wool and sheep, and by unwise cowboys, to say nothing of the bungling of the soldiers. There’ll be trouble at the store, I’m sure. They seem to congregate there, Indians as well as whites.”

“James and his family have nothing to fear from the Indians, Henry. And I feel safer out of the fort than I did when we were in it. Fair treatment is essential to peace, in this mission. And the Indians have had it from all of us, here at Montezuma. Go quickly to the store, Henry, if it will make you feel better. But come back as soon as you can.”

Elizabeth went inside and bolted the door. She listened till she could not hear Henry’s footsteps, and then she threw herself, face down, across her bed. All the bitter homesickness of the years welled up to choke her. Neither she nor Mary had known an hour of complete contentment since they had come to San Juan. Tlie river bed had proved to be no place to build homes, and the farther back they would build, the more ravenous the ”Devil Ditch” had become. One day the river would be flowing peacefully toward the Colorado, the next it would have bitten out a chunk of beautiful farm land, green with grain, and be going in another direction. Not satisfied with its daily gorging, periodically it would rise and devour everything in its path, leaving islands of quicksand to ensnare more prey.

“We’ll never be safe,” Elizabeth wailed, as she thought of the river’s ravages. “Never!”

Henry came back. He gave the door a sharp rap, followed by a light one— a signal that it was he.

Elizabeth opened the door. “What time is it?” she asked, as if she had forgotten why he had been away.

“It’s midnight,” Henry answered. “The Indians are gathering at Mitchell’s ranch. I think we had better move back to the fort.”

“And I think that we’d better stay right here!” Elizabeth replied emphatically. “Henry, I feel uneasy about the flood. Can you tell if it has been raining, up country?”

“It doesn’t look like it,” Henry answered. “But you never can tell.” He looked at the black canopy overhead. “We could have a deluge here, though. I never saw things so black!” He waited, then went on, “I don’t like the sultry heaviness in the air.”

“Come inside, Henry!” Elizabeth warned, drawing him within. “There is another stealthy prowler!”

Henry whispered, “Could you see anything?”

“No. It’s nerve-wracking.”

A quick rap at the door startled them. Elizabeth caught Henry’s hand in the darkness. Neither spoke. There was a listening pause, and the knock was repeated. Henry reached for his gun. “Make a light,” he ordered, “and stand back!”

Elizabeth complied. The door swung open, creaking on its dry, leather hinges, concealing Elizabeth as she followed its arc.

“How!” The low guttural was impatient and sharp. “White man wait too long. Me knock. Most times no see!”

Elizabeth came from behind the door. “Se Kish!” she cried. “My friend!”

Henry looked from the majestic Indian to Ehzabeth.

“Friend!” The Indian began talking directly to Henry. “White man take squaw and papooses to high land. River he come. Maybe so daylight. No house here! No house there!” His arms described his
words. “Homes all go. No fence. No land!”

Henry shook his head in disbelief.

“I believe him, Henry!” Elizabeth cried. “Let me talk to him.” She pushed Henry aside and went closer to the Indian. “You Jim Joe?” she asked.

The Indian drew back, surprised. “How you know?” he questioned.

“White Mary told me. Jim Joe, does White Mary know about the flood?”

“White Mary will be safe from river. One more house. Missionary Haskell, he safe, too.”

“When will river take house?” Elizabeth asked, conviction growing with her excitement.

“Maybe so nine, maybe so ten,” the Indian answered. He gave Henry a slight, but imperative shove. “White man stand too long. Talk too much!”

“Ya tah!” he said to Elizabeth, and was gone. The blackness enveloped him, even against the candlelight and the open door.

Elizabeth pushed the heavy door shut. “We’ll have no home at all,” she cried. “The river! I hate it!” She covered her face with her shaking hands.

“I don’t know what to think,” Henry said. “It’s hard to believe that there will be a flood, when there isn’t, or hasn’t been a drop of rain.”

“Just the same, Henry Harriman, the flood will come. And when it does, Henry, we’ll not have a chance.”

Elizabeth looked around at her pioneer home, grown suddenly very important, very dear. There were all her cooking pans and kettles, hanging above the chimney; her cupboard, with its pretty dishes brought from home; her braided rugs, her Indian blankets, soft and lovely in the candlelit room. She went to the bedroom and, holding her hand around the candle flame so it would not shine in the children’s faces, she looked at the wooden bedsteads, the handmade chest, the bright rag carpet on the floor.

“This is all we have,” she told Henry, who had followed her. “And the ‘Devil Ditch’ will get it, just as it has taken everything else!”

“Elizabeth, I’m not taking any strange Indian’s word on a thing like this. It’s a trick. I don’t believe him.”

“The dawn is coming soon, Henry,” Elizabeth reminded him. “I’ll wake the children. You get the wagon ready.”

The finality in her voice was too convincing to argue against, and Henry went to get the wagon.

Elizabeth put all the food they had into sacks and cans, boxes, and buckets, remembering how little they had had during those first hard months, remembering the little grave on the hillside. “That is one thing the river won’t take,” she spoke softly. “Little brown-eyed lamb of a child!”

She folded the rugs, the bedding that was not in use, and, last of all. do, or not, it was breaking Elizabeth’s heart. He took an armload of the things and put them in the wagon. She put their few clothes on top of the stack, ready for loading.

“We’ll have no room for furniture,” she said, watching Henry as his eyes went lingeringly from piece to piece of the things his hands had made.

He shook his head in perplexity. “What will the neighbors say?” he asked Elizabeth. “This is a silly thing to do.”

“Start loading, Henry,” was all Elizabeth could say. She placed a crocheted doily exactly in the center of the hewn-log table, and put a vase of wild flowers exactly in the center of the doily. She stood back and surveyed the entire poorly furnished room. “I never thought it was pretty before,” she confessed, and wiped the mist from her eyes. “It’s time to wake the children, Henry.”

Henry looked at her pityingly. Whether this was a foolish thing to

Higher and higher the “Devil Ditch” rose. Old banks caved into the boiling, half-mile wide river, to be followed in turn by the new banks. The floors of houses floated like rafts on the gray, tossing waters of the river. On one of these was a rocking chair, swinging madly back and forth, its cushions gay and dry, for the house had been lifted, land and all, and carried away. Chunk by chunk, the earth had loosened and tumbled into the swirling water, leaving the floor to float downstream. The roof and wall logs had one by one toppled off, in the bad bouncing of the floor, till only the rocking chair remained.

Houses, furniture, haystacks, wagons—everything that goes to make a home— careened by, jamming the river with debris. The Montezuma water wheel went out. The dam buckled and shivered. It held the wall of water for one defiant second, and then loosened and tossed the floating water wheel into the air, received it as it fell, and then flattened out, just another broken mass of trees and rocks and logs. Hens squawked in floating chicken coops; dogs and cats tried to climb to the tops of the houses, screeching in terror.

From vantage points of safety, the hapless settlers watched their last remaining possessions go by. For thirty miles up the river where the cloudburst had started, not a house was left standing. At Montezuma, only two houses remained, those of James Davis and Thales Haskell.

There was a half hour of tense excitement when it was discovered that the Allen family was not among the rescued ones who starkly watched the ravage of their lands.

”Sister Allen is missing!” Ted Davis cried. “I saw her son Bob up at the fort, trying to pacify the Indians.”

”And Brother Allen is in Fruitland, New Mexico!” James Davis exclaimed. “The family will be surrounded! Get help, Ted, and follow me!”

“There’s no time to lose. Pa!” Ted cried. “I’d better come with you!”

“That may be so,” James agreed,
jumping on his horse, and riding at top speed toward the Allen ranch. Ted followed him, keeping his eyes open for any men who might be able to go along to help, but he saw no one who was not already fully occupied with his own problems.

“Thank goodness their house is on a small mound,” James shouted, as they raced along.

“Yes, but there’s a swale on three sides of it!” Ted reminded his father. “It will be completely flooded. Pa.”

And it was. The little house, up to the window sills in water, looked forlorn and dejected. Two of the girls, Annie and Lizzie, were floundering in water up to their arm-pits, trying to rescue their chickens and a pig.

“Mother’s inside,” Annie shouted. “The water is covering everything!”

James and Ted swung from their saddles and opened the door. There stood Mrs. Allen, holding her two young children out of the water. She had put the chairs on the bed and the children on the chairs.

She was thoroughly frightened, alone and helpless.

“Oh, Brother Davis,” she cried, “I’m thankful that you have come! How are we going to keep from drowning?”

“We’ll get you out somehow. Aunt Jane,” Ted Davis assured her. “But I don’t know how!”

The water was rising rapidly. The chairs on top of the bed were almost covered.

“We’ve got to get out of the house,” James said. “But where to go, is the next thing. We can’t all six of us ride our two horses out, and there’s not time enough to make two trips!”

“I know, Pa!” Ted cried. He had been looking around for something that would solve the problem for them. “There’s the molasses boiler. We could use it as a boat!”

“But then how would we get it to dry land, Ted? Our horses can’t carry us and pull the boiler, too, for they’ll have to swim out.”

Ted scratched his head in puzzlement. “Gosh, Pa, it looks like I’ll have to go for help.”

There was a splashing in the water in the yard, and shouts from the two girls who were trying to save the chickens.

“It’s our father!” Lizzie cried. “He’s come home!”

James turned in time to see Brother Allen leaping from his saddle, anxious for the safety of his family.

“We were planning to use the molasses boiler for a boat,” Ted explained. “How can we pull it out?”

“My team is up on top of the ridge,” Brother Allen replied quickly. “I borrowed this horse, so I could get here faster. My son is driving them on. He’ll be here any minute.”

“There goes our lovely painted water wheel!” Annie Allen wailed.

“And our orchard is almost gone, Father!” Lizzie cried. “All our good fruit will be spoiled!”

“There’s no time to worry about water wheels and peaches!” Brother Allen cried. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

The team was hitched to the molasses boiler, and the four children were put inside of it. Being about four feet wide and six or seven feet long, it made a sizable boat, but it rocked perilously.

“I’ll never ride in a contraption like that!” Mrs. Allen cried. “We’d tip over and get all wet!”

Ted Davis chuckled. Already as wet as the chickens that had given up and floated downstream, the family was in a laughable plight.

After much persuasion, Mrs. Allen waded out to the boat and was lifted in. The girls laughed and shouted encouragement to the horses, and the ride to safety began. But it was not all funny. There were unnerving moments when the swimming team, whipped around by the bobbing boiler, prodded by broken logs and furniture, all but went under. There was a sigh of relief when at last the teams found solid footing and began clambering ashore.

* * *

Mary Davis watched block after block of their land sink into the river. “My orchard!” she screamed. “James! Ted!”

And then she remembered where James and Ted were. “I can’t let my new peach trees go!” she cried, running from the knoll where the house stood, down to the river’s edge, where the trees had been planted for moisture. Three years she had watched them grow – from pit to yard-high trees. The “Devil Ditch” was not going to get them now!”

The river had already begun to cut under the bank where the trees were planted. the roar of water was in her ears; the land trembled under her feet. A crack had begun to encircle the tiny orchard, widening by the minute. Mary jumped the crack and began pulling her precious trees up by the roots. She had five of them in her arms, when there was a slipping of the ground on which she stood. She looked back to the mainland in horror. the crack was a foot wide! She was on an island that was going to start down the river in one more minute! “But I’ll have my trees!” she decided grimly, and jerked the last four of them up. With the trees in her arms, she leaped for solid ground. the bank caved off and it was all that she could do to keep from being pulled down with it. But she threw herself backward, and regained her footing on the little island. A sickening lurch of earth brought her to a sudden realization that she had but a second between her and death. The ground on which she stood was moving! The crack was now four feet wide. She took a deep breath, lifted her skirts, and leaped for solid ground, landing with a force that knocked the breath out of her. There was a slow, sucking sound, and the little island was pulled into the river.

Mary could hear nothing but the cries of her five children as Emily and Orson tried to pull her back from the caved-off bank. She got slowly to her feet and stood facing the rampaging river. “I got my trees!” she asserted weakly. “You brute of a thing!”

She carried her trees – Nine beautiful young saplings – to the house, standing high and dry on its knoll.

They all went up the steps to the porch, where Mary paused to look her frightened brood over. she named them in her mind. At the third one down, she exclaimed, “My goodness, Child, you aren’t dressed yet.”

* * *

Lined along the banks of the San Juan River, a hundred war-painted warriors watched the little settlement pass on – with time and the river. The attack they had planned would never come off.

The Montezuma settlers never set foot on their land again. Honorably released from their mission, the saints were given a blessing and told to seek homes elsewhere. Driving out of the valley with the little they could salvage from the wreck of their homes, they filed out of San Juan. Poorer by five years than they were when they entered it. Richer by five years, in a job well done. A mission filled to the last measure.

One permanent town, Bluff City, had been established. And, from the families that sought homes in Southwestern Colorado, other thriving, small towns sprang up. The Indians became friends.

“I have often prayed for us to be delivered from you, old ‘Devil Ditch,’” Mary Davis said. “It was you, by your very cussedness, that answered that prayer!”

Elizabeth stood up in her wagon seat as long as she could see her baby’s grave. “Not all of me is leaving San Juan,” she sighed. “At night when the stars are shining like tinsel, I’ll come back in thought, Baby. And, wherever I go, the wind in the treetops will sigh your name to me. Goodbye … goodbye …”

(The End)