Alex Scarrow - October skies

Daphne waved her over.

‘All yours,’ she cheerfully whispered as Rose sat down at the machine. ‘That’s Craig, my nephew.’ She nodded towards him. ‘Better he hangs out here, where I can keep an eye on him, than elsewhere. Library’s a good place for him; all these books and learning around him.’

Rose nodded, but wondered if there was a great deal of learning going on there.

Daphne left Rose and returned a moment later with a shimmering gold disc in one hand. She slotted it into the PC and a title page popped up on the screen.

The Report: Archives 1842-1939

‘We got two discs of material,’ she said. ‘Now, our recent history, from the war right up to, well… yesterday, I guess, is on the other disc. You want that one as well?’

‘Just the first disc’ll be fine, thanks.’

‘Okay, well then, if you click on this,’ she said, moving the mouse over a search dialogue box, ‘you can enter a date here or an issue number, or you can even do a word search. Now’ — she clasped her hands together — ‘what specifically can I help you to look for?’

Rose felt awkward. Daphne Ryan had been exceedingly nice, but right now she needed a little space in which to think. She really didn’t know specifically what she was looking for, not yet.

‘I’m just going to browse a little.’ She looked up at her. ‘If that’s all right?’

‘Sure.’

Daphne hovered, waiting to be of further assistance. Rose was thinking how she was going to politely ask Daphne to give her a bit of room, when an old boy sidled up to the counter with a small stack of Clancy novels to check out. Daphne placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘You shout if you need anything else, okay?’

Rose nodded. ‘Thanks, Daphne,’ and watched her head back to the counter. She faced the screen again.

Right.

Aaron Pohenz said the Rag Man left the town of Blue Valley, then known as Pelorsky’s Farm, in the spring of 1857. He left on foot. If he headed north-west, then Fort Casey was only a week or so away.

So… from perhaps February 1857 onwards?

She typed a broad window of time into the date fields; February of that year to February of the next.

But what am I looking for?

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.

He was dressed in ill-fitting clothes that appeared borrowed from another, better-nourished man, and with not a single possession in his hands. The Pilgrim, whoever he was, is a face this scribe will never forget.

When I asked this mysterious traveller where he was headed, his reply, dear reader, was one enigmatic word. A word that perhaps sums up the single-minded, dogged spirit and willpower of these brave, hardy folk.

He said to me, ‘Oregon.’

He then shuffled away from me, little more than a crow-scare in tattered clothes and not a single thing to call his own. I soon lost sight of him amongst the busy throng of traders and overlanders that fill our main thoroughfare on any given day of the week…