The Signal Fire

See the low mountain up ahead, the one that doesn't look like much next to all this? Men on this valley floor made a bargain over that hill once. If a fire went up on top of it, they could stop looking. The man they were after carried a name you know. Robert Ray Hamilton, New York lawyer and legislator, a great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton. In January of eighteen eighty-nine he married a woman named Eva Steele in secret, and his friends and family shut the door on him. That August, in Atlantic City, a quarrel ended with Eva trying to stab him and nearly killing their child's nurse. Then the police pulled a thread. The child wasn't his. Eva and her common-law husband had got hold of a newborn to make him believe it was. He'd given up everyone he had for a family that was never there. In May of eighteen ninety he came west to hunt and fetched up at John Sargent's homestead by Jackson Lake, and he liked it so well he meant to send for his belongings. August twenty-third, eighteen ninety. Coming back alone from an antelope hunt, in the dark, he tried to ford the Snake below the outlet of the lake. Sargent was away in Idaho after supplies. Nobody saw it. His horse made it out, saddle turned. When Sargent got home he called in the neighbors, and they spread along the river and agreed on the fire. On the second of September they lit it, on that same hill. He was in the channel, his spurs tangled in the plants. They buried him by the cabin, on ground Jackson Lake has since covered over, and later on he was sent back east. The talk stayed. Sargent had the ranch to himself now, didn't he? One hunter's diary held that all of Jackson's Hole, every scalawag and what one captain called "predestined stinkers," believed Sargent did it. Sargent was off in Idaho. His widow wrote that a coroner's jury found it an accident, and the people who've studied it call those rumors unfounded. Sorrow stayed on that shore, and I'll leave it there. In the nineteen thirties the estate of a later owner had the old cabin pulled down, because it spoiled the look of his grave. So the cabin's gone, Hamilton's first grave is under water, and the hill is what's left. Some evenings on this road I catch myself checking the top of it, the way those men did, for a thin line of smoke.