The wagon trains continued to pass through, one after the other, day after endless day.  As the summer wore on, they camped farther and farther out to find grass for their cattle and horses.  The fort had moved to restrict its own grazing lands before they were completely stripped by the onslaught.  Men from the wagon trains came into the fort seeking supplies if they’d run perilously low, a smithy to fix a wheel or shoe a horse, a carpenter’s shop where an axle could be retooled or a broken wagon tongue repaired.  Some of the men, the less God-fearing among them, also took a moment to put a foot up at the bar and enjoy just one solitary throat-burning glass of whiskey.

The women arrived to sell off or simply abandon their heirloom furniture that had already been soaked, knocked about, portaged and dragged up cliffs on a rope.  No piece of furniture, they’d decided, however sentimental, was worth all that onerous weight and work and trouble.  Charlotte sometimes wondered what was left by the time they got to Oregon.

She began to understand also how money and connections spoke.  The Family connections would never get her invited to dinner anywhere, quite the opposite, but often certain dignified parties from the wagon trains would arrive on foot, or in a delicate carriage that had been pulled all the way from Missouri, to dine with the Colonel and his lovely wife, and the Major and his not so lovely wife, and the junior officers who owned the required dress uniforms but had no wives at all.  These more privileged men, just a day off the trail, wore handsome frocked coats and silk vests.  The ladies’ skirts rustled and ear bobs were in evidence.

“The world divides,” Charlotte told Ada, watching one of these processions while they folded sun-dried laundry on the porch.

“Why don’t we ever get invited to dine with the Colonel?”

“Something tells me the Colonel would prefer to be as far away from our kind of company as possible.”

“What does he know?”

“Exactly.”

<>

It was a revelation even to themselves how quickly Charlotte and Ada could knit socks.  By the time they were done, everyone in the company owned a new pair and some had extras.  Then Ada conceived the brilliant idea of making mufflers for the winter with the Army unit’s insignia knitted into one end.  Lenore said even the Colonel wanted one.  In the rest of her time Ada concentrated on the letter-writing which soon turned into many requests not just for the letters, but for acquiring the skills necessary to write those letters.

Charlotte consulted with Lenore.

“The previous chaplain used to teach reading and writing for the men who needed it,” Lenore said. “That was before the trouble.”  She paused.  “You know that’s why the Colonel’s here, don’t you?  He wouldn’t normally be posted to a fort in the middle of nowhere.”