Page 90 of The Widow and the Wanted

The wind slips through the burned-out loft and sends a fresh scatter of ash into the yard.

Boone sees my face and reads enough of the arithmetic there. “Well,” he says, “you’re the one with a bee in your bonnet. Say it plain.”

I keep my eyes on the broken roof.

“In this weather, by horse, it’s a hard two days to Fort Gibson. Longer if the river crossings are bad, which they will be.”

Lula folds her arms tight across herself. “But it can be done.”

Boone glances at the dead man, half covered now by kicked snow, then back at the ruined cabin. “I reckon this miserable old shack has done all she’s gonna do for us.”

I look at the place where we slept last night. At the black mouth of the window. It already looks less like a refuge than the husk of one.

Lula lifts her chin. Soot has streaked one side of her face. Her eyes are red from heat and ash, but steady. She rests her palm on the remains of an exterior wall with a pensive reverence that reaches into my chest and tugs. I follow. Setting my palm against a log. For a moment it all floods back. The relief of shelter and safety. The heat of the hearth. The arguments. The whiskey and guitar.

Our eyes meet, Lula and I, just long enough to feel each other’s grief.

“Then we go,” I say.

For a moment none of us moves.

We only stand there in the trampled snow, staring at the wreck of the cabin while the last threads of smoke unwind into the winter air. Then Boone turns for the horses, Lula for the scattered supplies, and I stay where I am one second longer, looking at the burned shell of the place and understanding with sudden clarity that whatever small life we had managed to build here is gone.

Chapter 25

Boone

Blankets and hides, food and drink, a valise stuffed with herbs, and two stowaways under the wagon cover. There’s bounty money enough to turn every head from here to Fort Gibson at the sight of a white man and an Indian man traveling together, so I ride ahead alone and let the wagon come behind.

I hear little besides the wind, the leather creaking, and Miss Rakko breathing hard in the traces. The ground’s brittle with frost, rutted where wheels cut it before the last freeze, and every jolt of that little wagon sounds like something fixing to come apart.

Cold gets through my coat, through my gloves, through the seams of me. The kind that reminds you the world is cruel. For the first stretch, I suffer their muffled voices carrying on about who knows what, giggling and hooting and canoodling to spite me. I hit one little rut in the road and now Okee hangs at the wagon’s edge, supervising my driving from under the canvas.

“Do not hurry on bad ground,” he says.

I spit tobacco into the frozen grass as we roll on easy. “Feels sound enough where I’m sitting. You mind the wagon, and I’ll mind the road.”

My eyes sting from the cold. Damn Alfred Collins. We’d be within reach of a fire by now if we’d gone west. But no. Not with the likes of me riding along.

Blasted son of a bitch.

“You ride as if you have forgotten you’re carrying more than just a horse and saddle.”

“You know,” I call over my shoulder, “either one of us could’ve been the one out here freezing our stones off.”

“We flipped on it,” Okee shouts from under the cover. “Fair and square.”

“Ain’t nothing fair or square about freezing out here while you complain from back there. Mind the cargo and hold your tongue.”

A muffled giggle comes out from under the canvas, sending a rush of piss and vinegar through me. “Ain’t no reason a lady can’t be riding to Fort Gibson neither. Maybe you ought to be out here, little general.”

Lula’s round face appears over Okee’s shoulder. “I’d be halfway down the Mississippi if not for you two. You know what you’ve done? The fix you’ve got me in?”

The pay for that blasted job don’t seem near enough now. She ain’t wrong. But God Almighty, how long is she going to keep laying that card down?

“Then shoot me,” I call back. “Be a sight better than listening to the two of you while I wait for my balls to freeze off.”

Miss Rakko drops her head and keeps on, hooves striking the frozen trail with a dull, stubborn clomp. Timber holds us in on both sides in places, black and bare against the sun, and where the land opens I can see the winter grass pressed flat and pale under a skin of ice. We haven’t been out a full day and already the country looks big enough to swallow us.