October skies

She typed ‘Rag Man’ into the word search, hoping for an early hit. The DVD drive whirred but the search threw up nothing. Which was what she expected. The Rag Man was a Blue Valley myth — unknown here.

She decided to think things through from another angle. A paper like this, a town like this back then, would have focused its attention on the people passing through; the overlanders coming from the east. That’s how news travelled back then, not over some twenty-four-hour news network, but from the mouths of travellers on their way through. Every new wagon train of people stopping to resupply, to repair damaged or weakened wheels, reshoe horses and oxen, would have a tale to tell of their journey, of any Indian encounters, of the latest news and fashions from Europe, the latest political manoeuvrings back in Washington.

She wondered if a lone traveller, no doubt still gaunt from a winter of malnutrition, a troubled man with little to say to anyone, would have attracted the curiosity of this small town.

A search for ‘loner’ produced an article about a local farmer who had decided to introduce sheep to graze on his land, arousing the anger of local cattlemen who viewed the creatures as un-American and had hounded the poor man out of town.

Perhaps the Rag Man had talked of his experience in the hills?

‘Survivor’ yielded a dozen eye-witness accounts of Indian raids, undoubtedly exaggerated to sound more heroic for the paper. Rose also stumbled upon a heartbreaking story of three small children dying of thirst and hunger and found clinging to the bodies of their parents. A whole party of seven wagons had been stranded on the salt flats of Utah after their horses had perished from drinking foul water. The children, two young sisters and a baby brother, were picked up by the passing emigrants, but died one by one over the following week.

‘Cursed’ spewed out hundreds of printed sermons from the town’s lay preacher, Duncan Hodgekiss, who it seemed spent more time admonishing the wicked and godless from the offices of the paper than he did from the pulpit of his church.

Rose bit her lip with frustration, suspecting the twenty-minute drive down the interstate from Blue Valley, and the last half-hour in the library, had turned out to be something of a wild goose chase. The odds of tracing a nameless man from a hundred and fifty years ago amongst the spurious tales printed in a local rag were long, to say the least. In all likelihood, this weakened, troubled man… this cursed man, most probably had died by the wayside traipsing north-west on foot.

She wondered if he had been one of the names she’d picked out of the journal: Keats, Preston, Weyland, Vander, Hussein… or perhaps even the author himself, Lambert? There was no telling. This survivor might have been one of them, or one of the other Mormon men.

Or nothing at all to do with the Preston party?

She indulged the thought for a moment and then dismissed it. The Rag Man had wandered out of the very same mountains in the spring of the following year. Given the remote location off the beaten track, it was unlikely the two events weren’t linked.

She sighed, frustrated. ‘Which one of them were you?’

Searching randomly with tag words was getting her nowhere. She noticed once a week there was a regular column in the paper entitled ‘What the Wind Blows In’. It was penned by the same author each time, one Theodore Feillebois, the paper’s editor. It was a gossipy column that catalogued the more interesting arrivals of the week. Rose decided to focus her attention on those.

She was into May editions when she finally hit upon something that stirred the fair hair on her forearms.

… came into town on the dawn like a ghostly phantom. This intrepid reporter, always the keen hunting dog for the exciting tales that can be told by these courageous citizens who have braved the elephant’s tail and the deadly Indian savage, I approached the man.

He was, I found, the most curious of passers-through that I have encountered in the service of this paper of ours. A tall, gaunt, silent man, with eyes that appeared to have seen things that this reporter would be unable to commit to paper for fear of frightening the fair ladies of this town.

A pilgrim crossing this untamed continent of ours alone is either very brave or very foolish, and I have no doubt that he must have experienced much that would blanch the faces of even the brave troops who garrison our fort and protect our souls day and night.

When I asked him for the story of his crossing, the man’s response was a silence and an intense stare that I can only describe as haunted. I persisted in encouraging this man — whom I shall refer to hereon in as The Pilgrim, as I have no name for him, unwilling as he was to provide me with one — to tell me something of his adventurous crossing. But alas he declined.